Having spent an already sleep-deprived night awake failing to complete an assignment that fortunately had not been due after a week of midterms and a nasty cold. Still, I wanted to gather educational materials to bring to the event. I ordered a tea. I tried to sift out exactly what I wanted to bring. Should I stick to broad outlines and philosophical background? Should I create a list of worthwhile resources with commentary? Should I be more specific and concentrate on the history of a particular industry? Perhaps the media? I ordered a refill and sat down again. Maybe I should instead focus on statistics relevant to the everyday quality of life of those likely to be present. Another refill, and I end up in a series of conversations. After all, somebody was wrong about Orwell.
Time was thin, and I was evidently beyond salvaging through my usual method of caffeine-binging. I went to grab a beer and a small nap on the back porch of a nearby bar before heading downtown, staying awake once there with the help of a glass of wine, and finally walking to Krutch Park. I had come alone, so to pass the time I involved myself in the conversation of a few nearby academic types. But I did not have to wait long: the crowd soon converged around a camera: local news outlets interviewed a few of the attendees. One was a mother of three and a veteran. On a sidewalk bordering the park, a Slutwalk passed to applause.
We did not have a permit, but we were allowed in the parks and on the sidewalks. Megaphones were not allowed. The police were very professional, and I heard not even a rumor of any difficulty. By dark, they might have ceased paying any attention, even though hundreds of protesters were still present. One protester said, half-questioningly, that they have left. I think she was right.
They had come for many reasons. Some like me had come out of a mixture of solidarity and loneliness resulting from alienation in political life, but usually, they were sufferers. They are burdened by debt. They are upset by recent insults in the form of new fees. They feel everyday the effects of unaccountable corporate power, serviced by a compliant if not complicit State. They dislike militarism. They hate corruption. I did not hear anything of party politics. To my surprise, I did not even hear complaints of betrayal by Obama. Perhaps others heard differently or had like me never felt Hope™, but in general, people here have the same grievances that I have heard from all over this strange country. I saw a few Ron Paul signs and one person ostentatiously reading an Ayn Rand novel, but I did not see any heated debates. Mostly, it was about coming together.
Throughout the evening, small groups broke off to march on the sidewalks downtown. The city was quite busy with events for the "First Friday Art Walk," and so many heard our slogans.
"We. Are. The ninety-nine percent!"
"Hey hey. Ho ho. Corporate greed has got to go!"
"Banks got bailed out. We got sold out."
Though I had been over-enthusiastic early in the day and had managed to finish off my already weak voice before hearing it, the most deliciously militant:
"No justice, no peace. Tear down Wall Street!"
Most looked on with curiosity or indifference, but those who reacted were usually positive. Two women applauded on a street corner as we passed. An older gentleman gave us an incomparably energetic two-thumbs-up. Small groups threw up peace signs, and I was happy to return kindly gestures which did not involve my oppressed vocal chords. Not to say there were no rolled eyes, as I saw a few from the more affluent patrons of downtown restaurants. But apart from one obligatory "join the military" and one much less obligatory body-check of a marcher in front of me by some Polo-ridden creep, reactions were generous.
I was very happy with the turnout. I am bad at crowd-counting, but it was consistently 200-300 for a few hours, and possibly spiked at 500. As groups went on independent marches, it was very difficult to estimate. An assembly meeting was scheduled for 1:00pm the following day (today), and a small group stayed in the park for a vigil. Weary from the week and from marching with a backpack, I left to finally sleep.
Other reactions
Knoxville Yankee
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Busy, busy, busy
Bokononism has its attractions. I have several long posts sitting in the edit folder, awaiting my attendance. But for reasons of schoolwork and scholarly completeness, these will have to wait a little longer.
In the meantime, The Nation has again asked me why I bother reading. The uck starts here. The author, Melissa Harris-Perry, `responds' to `criticisms' here, naming in particular Joan Walsh's response at Salon.
The thesis? White liberal disapproval of Obama is indicative of a racial double-standard. The purported evidence? A relatively higher white disapproval of Obama, as extremely precisely measured against the enormous and extremely appropriate data set of `Bill Clinton':
Before bothering with detail-work, let's turn to how Harris-Perry categorized the criticisms:
And no, Harris-Perry mentions nothing about the fact that Clinton presided over a boom while Obama has (corruptly) presided over a recessions, and nothing about the effect of the Right's obsession with Clinton's sex life. I leave those to Joan Walsh. On another note: nothing about their records on civil liberties was mentioned, where the continuities between Bush and Obama are inescapable. Despite many promises otherwise. Oh yeah, there's that whole promises thing.
I see no need to build on Walsh with boring details. There's only this, under (3):
Although I may have managed to exclude myself from the discussion at this point, I am still quite happy drop hints for the benefit of Harris-Perry: progressive disapproval of Obama might just have something to do with his fucking policies. Are white civil libertarians more deeply racist than other white liberals, or was their early alienation a symptom of something else? Say, Obama's continuation of Bush policies, his escalating of the war against whistle-blowers, and his defense of extra-judicial killings (i.e. murder)? Does neo-Keynesian disapproval of Obama have more to do with his economic policy, or with his race?
Apart from the reaction we all expect when `racist' is tossed around - especially when lazily - might the Left be more upset by the fact that some of Obama's defenders are making his color the issue, instead of the criticisms?
Yet I am told that Obama's reelection will be a litmus test of the racial sentiments of white liberals.
Please, my dear Republican readers, nominate Ron Paul. I don't really like him. I live in Tennessee, so my socialist vote does not matter. But I want to vote for something.
In the meantime, The Nation has again asked me why I bother reading. The uck starts here. The author, Melissa Harris-Perry, `responds' to `criticisms' here, naming in particular Joan Walsh's response at Salon.
The thesis? White liberal disapproval of Obama is indicative of a racial double-standard. The purported evidence? A relatively higher white disapproval of Obama, as extremely precisely measured against the enormous and extremely appropriate data set of `Bill Clinton':
"These comparisons are neither an attack on the Clinton administration nor an apology for the Obama administration. They are comparisons of two centrist Democratic presidents who faced hostile Republican majorities in the second half of their first terms, forcing a number of political compromises. One president is white. The other is black."
Before bothering with detail-work, let's turn to how Harris-Perry categorized the criticisms:
- Prove it!
- I have black friends.
- Who made you an expert?
And no, Harris-Perry mentions nothing about the fact that Clinton presided over a boom while Obama has (corruptly) presided over a recessions, and nothing about the effect of the Right's obsession with Clinton's sex life. I leave those to Joan Walsh. On another note: nothing about their records on civil liberties was mentioned, where the continuities between Bush and Obama are inescapable. Despite many promises otherwise. Oh yeah, there's that whole promises thing.
I see no need to build on Walsh with boring details. There's only this, under (3):
"Further, I am grateful to live in a time when white Americans are furious about anyone suggesting that they are racist. I much prefer to live in a country and at a moment where the idea of being racist is distasteful rather than commonplace. In many ways the angry reaction about even the suggestion of racial bias is a kind of racial progress."
Again, I'm probably not a member of the target audience, due to issues of age and general contempt. That proviso provisioned, I'm entirely comfortable with being told I harbor racist sentiments. Well no doubt! I was raised in a petty, very marshmallow city in East Tennessee.
Although I may have managed to exclude myself from the discussion at this point, I am still quite happy drop hints for the benefit of Harris-Perry: progressive disapproval of Obama might just have something to do with his fucking policies. Are white civil libertarians more deeply racist than other white liberals, or was their early alienation a symptom of something else? Say, Obama's continuation of Bush policies, his escalating of the war against whistle-blowers, and his defense of extra-judicial killings (i.e. murder)? Does neo-Keynesian disapproval of Obama have more to do with his economic policy, or with his race?
Apart from the reaction we all expect when `racist' is tossed around - especially when lazily - might the Left be more upset by the fact that some of Obama's defenders are making his color the issue, instead of the criticisms?
Yet I am told that Obama's reelection will be a litmus test of the racial sentiments of white liberals.
Please, my dear Republican readers, nominate Ron Paul. I don't really like him. I live in Tennessee, so my socialist vote does not matter. But I want to vote for something.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
What is coercion? (Part 1)
Very often, I hear that in a free market system, all transactions are mutually beneficial and non-coercive more or less by definition, as all participants increase their utility in the transaction. Whether highly regarded theorists of markets say such things, I do not know. If so, it would surprise me, as it is immediately obvious that such a definition is unsatisfactory.
Let's take a paradigm instance of coercion, say Tom is cornered in a quiet alley with a gun to his head and a demand for his wallet in his ears. Understandably, Tom surrenders his wallet, as he values his life more highly than the contents of his wallet. Both participants, the mugger and Tom, have gotten what they wanted from the transaction: the mugger got the wallet, and Tom got to live. If you like, you can spell out the inequalities of their utility functions which capture this entirely rational transaction.
Clearly, defining coercion with respect to any particular transaction is inadequate. Rather, Tom's net utility is of interest, as the circumstance of his being put in that dilemma presumably constitutes a lose/lose choice, say, in the sense that both outcomes (presumably) have negative utility. But it also seems that `coercion', normally employed, also applies to `forced choices' that have positive utility, albeit utility less than that which might have been possible in `unforced' circumstances. But this idea captures virtually any system of incentives, and the entire operation of the market becomes a system of coercion. A laborer attracted by a higher salary to a less enjoyable occupation is also being coerced. A company which makes donations to charity for tax reductions is being coerced. In almost any circumstance, one might imagine a more preferable possibility. So, something more restrictive than `circumstances forcing a net loss in utility as compared to other possibilities' is needed, if the concept is to be at all useful. But it gets even worse: if I force a person to do what she already wanted to do, is that not also coercion? As Hitchens described a similar experience in Cuba in Hitch-22: "A cat may stay contentedly in one spot for hours at a time, but detain it in that spot by grasping its tail and it will tear out its own tail by the roots." (Note: I tested this on my cat. It didn't work, but then, my cat is not a representative cat.) So the prospects for a conceptually adequate restriction of net utility reduction are most not good as well.
The next step fails to be obvious, which is probably why the concept was usually treated as a primitive until recently. Though I often rail against coercion, I have treated it more-or-less as such as well. Perhaps this is OK, since many concepts are not susceptible to precise analysis, especially the value-laden ones. Yet, I really need a workable concept, since it is often difficult to explain to right-libertarians why I feel that their ideal is more coercive than a left-libertarian one, other advantages aside and ignoring my strongly held - and I think strongly evidenced - suspicion that a right-libertarian society is deeply unstable and will collapse into forms of obvious tyranny. But for this to be formalized, coercion needs to be susceptible to some form of measure, so that the `coerciveness' of differing outcomes may be contrasted. What we need, then, is something analytically similar to what we need for spelling out guidelines which define particular ethical systems, i.e. an extension of this account which also measures properties of events in addition to their probabilities and utilities, and a way of relating each of the quantities now in question. In other words, to formalize a goal like `minimize coercion', we need a rule ascribing utilities to decisions with `degree of coercion' as an input. Further, as we need to evaluate differing circumstances simultaneously to speak of things like `net coercion', the account should be extended to sequences of decisions, instead of focusing on a particular action.
Clearly, such an extended formalism could accommodate a lot of other ideas, like `maximize the general happiness'. I'm fleshing out the details, and with this motivation in place, I'll put up a post soon. But first, I want to briefly survey other accounts of coercion, so that we might see how they could be analyzed in practice.
Let's take a paradigm instance of coercion, say Tom is cornered in a quiet alley with a gun to his head and a demand for his wallet in his ears. Understandably, Tom surrenders his wallet, as he values his life more highly than the contents of his wallet. Both participants, the mugger and Tom, have gotten what they wanted from the transaction: the mugger got the wallet, and Tom got to live. If you like, you can spell out the inequalities of their utility functions which capture this entirely rational transaction.
Clearly, defining coercion with respect to any particular transaction is inadequate. Rather, Tom's net utility is of interest, as the circumstance of his being put in that dilemma presumably constitutes a lose/lose choice, say, in the sense that both outcomes (presumably) have negative utility. But it also seems that `coercion', normally employed, also applies to `forced choices' that have positive utility, albeit utility less than that which might have been possible in `unforced' circumstances. But this idea captures virtually any system of incentives, and the entire operation of the market becomes a system of coercion. A laborer attracted by a higher salary to a less enjoyable occupation is also being coerced. A company which makes donations to charity for tax reductions is being coerced. In almost any circumstance, one might imagine a more preferable possibility. So, something more restrictive than `circumstances forcing a net loss in utility as compared to other possibilities' is needed, if the concept is to be at all useful. But it gets even worse: if I force a person to do what she already wanted to do, is that not also coercion? As Hitchens described a similar experience in Cuba in Hitch-22: "A cat may stay contentedly in one spot for hours at a time, but detain it in that spot by grasping its tail and it will tear out its own tail by the roots." (Note: I tested this on my cat. It didn't work, but then, my cat is not a representative cat.) So the prospects for a conceptually adequate restriction of net utility reduction are most not good as well.
The next step fails to be obvious, which is probably why the concept was usually treated as a primitive until recently. Though I often rail against coercion, I have treated it more-or-less as such as well. Perhaps this is OK, since many concepts are not susceptible to precise analysis, especially the value-laden ones. Yet, I really need a workable concept, since it is often difficult to explain to right-libertarians why I feel that their ideal is more coercive than a left-libertarian one, other advantages aside and ignoring my strongly held - and I think strongly evidenced - suspicion that a right-libertarian society is deeply unstable and will collapse into forms of obvious tyranny. But for this to be formalized, coercion needs to be susceptible to some form of measure, so that the `coerciveness' of differing outcomes may be contrasted. What we need, then, is something analytically similar to what we need for spelling out guidelines which define particular ethical systems, i.e. an extension of this account which also measures properties of events in addition to their probabilities and utilities, and a way of relating each of the quantities now in question. In other words, to formalize a goal like `minimize coercion', we need a rule ascribing utilities to decisions with `degree of coercion' as an input. Further, as we need to evaluate differing circumstances simultaneously to speak of things like `net coercion', the account should be extended to sequences of decisions, instead of focusing on a particular action.
Clearly, such an extended formalism could accommodate a lot of other ideas, like `maximize the general happiness'. I'm fleshing out the details, and with this motivation in place, I'll put up a post soon. But first, I want to briefly survey other accounts of coercion, so that we might see how they could be analyzed in practice.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Labor Day Weekend
The United States has an unusually violent labor history. Granted, there was everywhere resistance to basic workers' rights from the industrial classes and their representatives in governments. Finding themselves assailed by a class, the workers felt themselves a class, and one at war. Communism emerged in response to the foment; in the Communist Manifesto, the story is one of struggle for basic rights, rights against the interests of the owners and their complacent governments: "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." This quote could be updated by replacing "the whole bourgeoisie" with "a subset of concentrated bourgeois power," keeping the rest.
European labor had some advantages. There was a history of feudal privileges, and their loss was immediately felt:
In the United States, there were no feudal privileges. Until the 20th century, there was room for expansion into the frontier which allowed for the continuation of agriculture. As related in Sinclair's The Jungle, the industrial jobs were filled by increasingly desperate immigrants, imported by cynical promises. Further, much of the country had been run on slave labor, and the nation still inherits those divisions. Less memorably, the other half ran on industrial wage-slavery, which used to be regarded as an evil comparable to chattel-slavery. And so despite the United States being one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced, capitalist society and having some of the worst abuses against labor, there was less organization than in Europe.
And the reaction against any labor organization that emerged was swift and brutal. Industries created private armies to break strikes and destroy organization by any means. A severe example is the Pullman strike, but the strike-breakers failed:
I wonder if any commemorative tributes to Debs will air on Monday. Last Labor Day, there was a grand total of four mentions of "Eugene V. Debs" in English publications, according to Lexis Nexis. All were in passing and in small editorials, and only one appeared in a major outlet (the Washington Post). Variations on searching his name do not generate new results.
"Socialism OR Socialist" gets 246 results. But few of these are from related articles, even fewer of which are from the US, and even fewer in high-impact publications. Almost all the US results are sloganistic throwaways against socialism, especially the implicit type: the prosecution of or defense against the charges of socialism lobbed at Obama, which is a favorite American pastime. The even remotely positive mentions of labor/socialist contributions here are as follows: a letter to the Digital Journal, a brief editorial mention in the Las Vegas Review-Journal (with some historical inaccuracies), and a more satisfying interview by Joan Walsh at Salon on the failure of the New Left to integrate labor.
Well, that's our closet socialist press at work. I very much doubt we'll see any careful tributes.
European labor had some advantages. There was a history of feudal privileges, and their loss was immediately felt:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.The new extremes of oppression incited opposing feeling even in the powerful classes. Despite the many slanders they flung at the socialists, the Catholic Church recognized the cruelties of the system, and spoke against them. Other churches, especially when state sponsored, tended to be even more complacent, and would preach complacency and resignation to the classes. But there were admirable exceptions.
In the United States, there were no feudal privileges. Until the 20th century, there was room for expansion into the frontier which allowed for the continuation of agriculture. As related in Sinclair's The Jungle, the industrial jobs were filled by increasingly desperate immigrants, imported by cynical promises. Further, much of the country had been run on slave labor, and the nation still inherits those divisions. Less memorably, the other half ran on industrial wage-slavery, which used to be regarded as an evil comparable to chattel-slavery. And so despite the United States being one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced, capitalist society and having some of the worst abuses against labor, there was less organization than in Europe.
And the reaction against any labor organization that emerged was swift and brutal. Industries created private armies to break strikes and destroy organization by any means. A severe example is the Pullman strike, but the strike-breakers failed:
Next followed the final shock—the Pullman strike—and the American Railway Union again won, clear and complete. The combined corporations were paralized and helpless. At this juncture there were delivered, from wholly unexpected quarters, a swift succession of blows that blinded me for an instant and then opened wide my eyes—and in the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class struggle was revealed. This was my first practical lesson in Socialism, though wholly unaware that it was called by that name.That was Eugene V. Debs, the most important figure in American socialism. The US socialist movement, always small but very often successful, traces back to this strike. So too does Labor Day.
An army of detectives, thugs and murderers were equipped with badge and beer and bludgeon and turned loos; old hulks of cars were fired; the alarm bells tolled; the people were terrified; the most startling rumors were set afloat; the press volleyed and thundered, and over all the wires sped the news that Chicago’s white throat was in the clutch of a red mod; injunctions flew thick and fast, arrests followed, and our office and headquarters, the heart of the strike, was sacked, torn out and nailed up by the “lawful’ authorities of the federal government; and when in company with my loyal comrades I found myself in Cook county jail at Chicago with the whole press screaming conspiracy, treason and murder, and by some fateful coincidence I was given the cell occupied just previous to his execution by the assassin of Mayor Carter Harrison, Sr., overlooking the spot, a few feet distant, where anarchists were hanged a few years before, I had another exceedingly practical and impressive lesson in Socialism.
I wonder if any commemorative tributes to Debs will air on Monday. Last Labor Day, there was a grand total of four mentions of "Eugene V. Debs" in English publications, according to Lexis Nexis. All were in passing and in small editorials, and only one appeared in a major outlet (the Washington Post). Variations on searching his name do not generate new results.
"Socialism OR Socialist" gets 246 results. But few of these are from related articles, even fewer of which are from the US, and even fewer in high-impact publications. Almost all the US results are sloganistic throwaways against socialism, especially the implicit type: the prosecution of or defense against the charges of socialism lobbed at Obama, which is a favorite American pastime. The even remotely positive mentions of labor/socialist contributions here are as follows: a letter to the Digital Journal, a brief editorial mention in the Las Vegas Review-Journal (with some historical inaccuracies), and a more satisfying interview by Joan Walsh at Salon on the failure of the New Left to integrate labor.
Well, that's our closet socialist press at work. I very much doubt we'll see any careful tributes.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
The Emancipatory Potential of Atheism
[This is addressed to miscellaneous leftist critics of atheism.]
The crime of Thomas Paine was not that he doubted scripture; it was that he doubted it in front of a popular audience. Only recently has he been rehabilitated in American political life as a revolutionary hero; only with the aid of secularist activism - particularly that of Robert G. Ingersoll - has his principled courage been resurrected from a tomb of historical slanders.
In recent history - and, I think, the bulk of distant history - the primary attitude of controlling elites with respect to religion has been in the crudest sense utilitarian. Eisenhower exemplifies this attitude in many oft-cited quotations.
"Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what that faith is."
His underlying attitude is in fact shared by Paine - not an atheist - and other `deistic' figures of the enlightenment: the equality of man is necessarily grounded in God, or at least, belief in God. But like Eisenhower, most pursue this thread further than Paine. Atheism may be tolerated, so long as it presents itself quietly and in academic or otherwise elite contexts. It is this longstanding attitude that modern atheism has struggled against and struggles against. I repeat for emphasis: the primary enemy of modern atheists is not religion, but a `religion of religion' or `belief in belief', which is held as holy writ even amongst the secular. Atheists have had some success in this direction; young as I am and in the Southeastern US though I might be, I have seen definite changes.
I do not maintain the untenable: atheism is no guarantor of liberty and welfare, nor is it a sufficient condition for humanitarian care and action. It would be otiose to cite examples here. Nor do I maintain that religious belief precludes humanitarian action. Again, it would be pointless to rattle off cases. I also do not hold that atheists as a group frequently make the most of their advantages. I will not list specifics. I would not dare propose that only atheists be admitted in a progressive party, nor would I propose any internal, rationalist purges of the faithful.
What I do maintain is the emancipatory potential of atheism. Many religions have a similar emancipatory potential, but there are limits and risks. Rather and as always, the decisive question you must ask yourself is this: what is true? Ask yourself carefully; your religious confederates may do the same.
Is exclusive salvation true? Are people divided into the Hell-bound and Heaven-hopeful? Suppose that were the case; do you maintain it has no effect on a utilitarian calculation of action? What if you convince your religious counterparts that religion will diminish or dissolve after the revolution? What does this mean? Should I list more difficulties?
No, I do not suspect that you regard these questions as essential, and regard yourself as fair-minded and priority-focused in disregarding them. But what this masks is a profound contempt for the critical faculties of your fellows, an essential condescension for those `private beliefs', those which you judge false and irrational, and which raise fundamental inconsistencies in the ethics of their actions.
To not see religion - yes, even the watery kind - as a fundamental category is to not understand it. To not be an atheist that is also focused and philosophical, well-read and comprehending, is to cling to inconsistency. Seeing brothers and sisters suffer, a religious person, in compassion and intelligence, may seek to systematically banish as much as she may the pains of her neighbors. In all likelihood, she will be content to treat doctrinal inconsistencies and complications as `mysteries', and ignore them.
And she will raise her children to be religious because she thinks it will make them good. And one day, her or her children will see the paradox, and the internal struggle is as follows: the logic of atheism, or of revival? Revivalism will persist for the foreseeable future, even if a socialist revolution were realized.
What I hold as a minimum is that comfort in an ignorance of religion is necessarily opposed to the principled bettering of society. Today, atheists and the religious are alike content to share this ignorance, yet this is a perverse extension of viewing religious belief as private and subjective - where this is even true. It is not enough to be an atheist; first and foremost, one must be a rationalist and a lover of truth. That we as secular people, hardly a few generations distant from blasphemy laws, forget our tenuous status shocks my conscience.
If you do not wish to distribute polemics against religion as part of your propaganda, I will not be bothered. But the mantra of `privacy' is not enough. Air your opinions as individuals, and if consensus is not to be had, seek the outlines of your disagreements. You do not in being honest have to split the party on religiously sectarian lines. If by airing your opinions about religion you manage to cause a split, ask yourself what the problem really was.
The crime of Thomas Paine was not that he doubted scripture; it was that he doubted it in front of a popular audience. Only recently has he been rehabilitated in American political life as a revolutionary hero; only with the aid of secularist activism - particularly that of Robert G. Ingersoll - has his principled courage been resurrected from a tomb of historical slanders.
In recent history - and, I think, the bulk of distant history - the primary attitude of controlling elites with respect to religion has been in the crudest sense utilitarian. Eisenhower exemplifies this attitude in many oft-cited quotations.
"Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what that faith is."
His underlying attitude is in fact shared by Paine - not an atheist - and other `deistic' figures of the enlightenment: the equality of man is necessarily grounded in God, or at least, belief in God. But like Eisenhower, most pursue this thread further than Paine. Atheism may be tolerated, so long as it presents itself quietly and in academic or otherwise elite contexts. It is this longstanding attitude that modern atheism has struggled against and struggles against. I repeat for emphasis: the primary enemy of modern atheists is not religion, but a `religion of religion' or `belief in belief', which is held as holy writ even amongst the secular. Atheists have had some success in this direction; young as I am and in the Southeastern US though I might be, I have seen definite changes.
I do not maintain the untenable: atheism is no guarantor of liberty and welfare, nor is it a sufficient condition for humanitarian care and action. It would be otiose to cite examples here. Nor do I maintain that religious belief precludes humanitarian action. Again, it would be pointless to rattle off cases. I also do not hold that atheists as a group frequently make the most of their advantages. I will not list specifics. I would not dare propose that only atheists be admitted in a progressive party, nor would I propose any internal, rationalist purges of the faithful.
What I do maintain is the emancipatory potential of atheism. Many religions have a similar emancipatory potential, but there are limits and risks. Rather and as always, the decisive question you must ask yourself is this: what is true? Ask yourself carefully; your religious confederates may do the same.
Is exclusive salvation true? Are people divided into the Hell-bound and Heaven-hopeful? Suppose that were the case; do you maintain it has no effect on a utilitarian calculation of action? What if you convince your religious counterparts that religion will diminish or dissolve after the revolution? What does this mean? Should I list more difficulties?
No, I do not suspect that you regard these questions as essential, and regard yourself as fair-minded and priority-focused in disregarding them. But what this masks is a profound contempt for the critical faculties of your fellows, an essential condescension for those `private beliefs', those which you judge false and irrational, and which raise fundamental inconsistencies in the ethics of their actions.
To not see religion - yes, even the watery kind - as a fundamental category is to not understand it. To not be an atheist that is also focused and philosophical, well-read and comprehending, is to cling to inconsistency. Seeing brothers and sisters suffer, a religious person, in compassion and intelligence, may seek to systematically banish as much as she may the pains of her neighbors. In all likelihood, she will be content to treat doctrinal inconsistencies and complications as `mysteries', and ignore them.
And she will raise her children to be religious because she thinks it will make them good. And one day, her or her children will see the paradox, and the internal struggle is as follows: the logic of atheism, or of revival? Revivalism will persist for the foreseeable future, even if a socialist revolution were realized.
What I hold as a minimum is that comfort in an ignorance of religion is necessarily opposed to the principled bettering of society. Today, atheists and the religious are alike content to share this ignorance, yet this is a perverse extension of viewing religious belief as private and subjective - where this is even true. It is not enough to be an atheist; first and foremost, one must be a rationalist and a lover of truth. That we as secular people, hardly a few generations distant from blasphemy laws, forget our tenuous status shocks my conscience.
If you do not wish to distribute polemics against religion as part of your propaganda, I will not be bothered. But the mantra of `privacy' is not enough. Air your opinions as individuals, and if consensus is not to be had, seek the outlines of your disagreements. You do not in being honest have to split the party on religiously sectarian lines. If by airing your opinions about religion you manage to cause a split, ask yourself what the problem really was.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Commonplaces 3
I've noticed that Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, has been showing up frequently in my newsfeeds as of late. As I have found it almost unavoidably helpful in explaining current trends, I am glad to reread it.
Take the latter link, from Matt Taibbi, on the abandonment of the public option a few years ago:
This is mostly how propaganda and advertising function. Largely without our being aware, our choices are probabilistically yet strongly constrained by the features of our environment. By structuring media institutions in certain ways, governments and the powerful classes can shape public opinion, little to no outright censorship required. This idea is not original to Chomsky and Herman. Rather, it is a staple of the left-rationalist tradition exemplified by Russell, Orwell, and other giants. Take Orwell's preface to Animal Farm:
Take the second link in this post:
For the above reasons, I think of the Chomsky/Herman propaganda model as an instance of the Russell/Orwell insights. And they do their job very well. Yes, it was published in 1988 and media have changed a lot since then, but it still remains quite powerful.1
What is the propaganda model? The idea is that media function as a filter which serves the interests of a narrow elite. This is not a conspiracy theory, as has been alleged*, and as I will discuss later. Rather, Manufacturing Consent establishes that ideological filtering exists, and it outlines how this filter functions.
Before entering into details, try to imagine some of the ways in which filtering may take place. The common sense examples which come to mind are the exact subject of Manufacturing Consent: conflicts of interest introduced by ownership - see Fox's coverage of the News of The World hacking scandal - and by advertisers. Access journalism is another example. If I recall correctly, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was explicitly promised softball interviews in e-mails from journalists in exchange for exclusive access after his weird adventure in 2009. But this need not be so crude as the underlying understanding is quite obvious: if you really are a hard interviewer, you'll have more trouble getting the golden interviews. This process is supplemented by intentional leaks. Another constraint is social: journalists are showered with too many awards, developing a `working relationship' with those who they cover as they do so. And those juicy, high-level leaks? Usually, those merely reflect the quibbles of the powerful. The interplay here is very conscious and very obvious. A similar relationship is constructed by embedding journalists with troops. If the unit you are covering, which is full of nice guys who have protected you, commits an atrocity, do you report it?
Another idea of interest is concision, as explained in this excerpt of a horrifyingly campy documentary about Chomsky and Manufacturing Consent:
We can keep listing major flaws in media. The tendency toward sensationalism is a perfect example, and I think it is a problem prior to media itself. Russell points out some of the reasons for this tendency in The Need for Political Scepticism (1923) in the context of political parties:
Sensationalism is fleeting by nature. Topics are interchangeable, so big topics tend to be unchangeable. The 24-hour news cycle helps: cable media are always looking to turn the pettiest issue into all-day coverage. So Anthony Weiner quickly replaces Libya and drone attacks in the news, and once the dust settles a wholly new topic has emerged. Even if substantial, critical coverage of power in the mainstream press rears its ugly head - and occasionally it does - it is quickly obscured by something less threatening. Wars, unlike Paris Hilton, do not make good fodder for the sort of sustained media campaign required to overcome an establishment consensus. Sensationalism also has the effect of selecting for public speakers who tend to say silly, dishonest, and divisive things. Are you a socially and fiscally economic conservative embarrassed by Bachmann? Why do you think that the camera loves her? Are you a left-leaning fellow who doesn't like to be associated with Michael Moore or Al Sharpton? With sensationalism, a looser tongue catches more coverage. A person born for the modern camera is devoid of humility; he speaks as much as possible, perhaps occasionally interrupting the stream of slogans with an absurd statement or bit of sharp rhetoric to generate attention.
Along with the aforementioned biases produced by pecuniary interest, cost-of-production is another major factor. I read somewhere, though I fail to recall the source, an article on the increasing reliance on opinion columns to attract readers. This is because the `mere smoke of opinion' - I found this gem of Thoreau's via Bill Moyers - is cheap to produce. There's no shortage of volunteers for the task. In-depth reportage is difficult to come by. Where factual reportage is undertaken, it is in the interest of the media to reduce the cost as much as is possible. In the internet age, this might be the regurgitation of internet stories, but advertisements designed to look like news (video news releases) also serve, as do the cheapest sources - handily provided by officials. The publicly subsidized story is cheaper to tell, after all. Journalists are actually instructed to prefer such official sources.
One might also notice that despite there being a tremendous number of outlets, big conglomerates own most of the media by impact. In particular, there is a set of outlets, called `agenda-setting', which sets the line of the day. It is not coincidental that thousands of papers across America manage to focus on roughly the same topics everyday. What is important is what is printed by major outlets, especially The Washington Post and The New York Times. As they represent the `established left', their function is also in boundary-setting: this is as `left' as `serious people' can be. With the rightward lurching of American politics, I wonder if this description is still accurate: Keynesianism a la Krugman has very little political capital, though it has some media representation. True, there have been stingy stimulus measures, but Keynesians have consistently objected to them as inadequate. But this area is in flux at the moment, and I imagine that eventually the Keynesians will eventually recover much of their former influence.
So before getting into the details of the propaganda model, I think we should already feel motivated to change the institution of media. I must admit that it plays to my prejudices, but I think these prejudices to be sound on inspection. I further think that they are obvious truths. Many of the complaints I have suggested are quite common. It is therefore interesting that the media, which purport to serve the public interest and to concern themselves primarily with informing and educating the electorate, have not taken fundamental measures to address these complaints so as to actually serve their stated purposes. Perhaps their function is not the high-minded, democratic one they imagine it to be. Maybe something else is in the way, some structural feature which well-intentioned individual journalists cannot overcome, something unresponsive to popular pressure and interests. To understand this is to move past the mostly accurate but woefully trite and incomplete criticisms of the Jon Stewart variety.
*Page citations which follow, unless otherwise noted, are from the linked edition of Manufacturing Consent.*
A propaganda model of the media may be described as a power interest-oriented filtering process which is inherent to the structure of the media. Therefore we should expect a successful model to not require or rely on conspiracy theories in explaining common media behaviors; the workings of and evidence for such a model should be public knowledge.
Let's first look at the former item, the `internal logic' demanded by Bolkestein. Chomsky and Herman answer this with institutional analysis, which as employed is the conjunction of a description of the media and the expectation that the actors appearing in that description tend to act in their perceived interests and in the manner that they are educated to act, consciously and not. As Chomsky puts it to Andrew Marr: "[the agenda-setting media e.g. the New York Times] are big corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations. Now the question is: what picture of the world would a rational person expect to come out of this structure?"
Something should be said about what we should not expect as well. Given the propaganda model, we might expect that the elite healthcare debate would have been broader than it has turned out to be. Cheap healthcare as provided by a public option or universal system e.g. single payer are well-within the spectrum of elite interest. And since such systems are cheaper and would help to contain the rising cost of healthcare, they should lie within the spectrum of business interest. The fact that the system is unsustainable should be still more of a spur. Yet that is the actual story: insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and the financial sector dominate the lobbies and keep the system private, but some opening is provided by the fact that companies like GM suffer under our system. And that opening is fairly recent, despite decades of popular concern. The restriction of what little opening there is, as lamented by Taibbi, also follows the model: overwhelmingly, commentators fell in line with the two parties as lines were drawn.
Now what is it that we expect given the model? The important evidence is comparative: qualitatively similar events should receive differing coverage if elite interests diverge. For example, victims of enemy regimes are `worthy', while victims of friendly regimes are `unworthy'. Focusing on one aspect of the coverage, to the exclusion of the other, would fail to contrast the propaganda model against the conventional view that the media are the faithful servants of the popular good.
A `worthy victim' is Jerzy Popieluszko, a Solidarity leader in Poland (p.42). His murder by Polish secret police was carefully and extensively reported, reporting accompanied by cries for justice, particularly at the highest levels of governance (pp.42-3). To contrast, Archbishop Romero was an `unworthy victim'. Coverage was relatively sparse; his murder was attributed to `extreme' right-wing forces - not the U.S.-supported government which was actually responsible; his legacy was misrepresented; responsibility for his death was not to be found at high levels (pp.48-59). `Legitimate elections' are those which get the `right' result, such as El Salvador (1982), where turnout was forced and voting was supervised by military forces. `Meaningless elections' are those which get the `wrong' result, such as the relatively free election of the Sandanistas in Nicaragua (1984). The former are triumphs of young democracy, whereas the latter are unfortunate shams which would be anti-democratic to respect. High voter turnout, proof of legitimacy in the former, is a hollow number in the latter, and possible coercion becomes a bigger concern (pp.121-3). In the case of the Nicaraguan election, we have also a case of likely case of false leaking: on election night, a story broke claiming that a freighter of MIGs was bound for Nicaragua. Correction invited no retrospection (p.137). The fourth chapter seems strange to me: I am too young to remember any `KGB-Bulgarian' plot about the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. There are allegations by ex-CIA after the publication of Manufacturing Consent, namely Melvin A. Goodman and Harold Ford, that pressure was placed on the CIA to claim that the assassination was ordered or insinuated by the KGB (p.xxvii). But even without this revelation, the allegations of a KGB plot are bizarre on their face. This case is clear-cut, but it feels out of place.2 The retrospective on media involvement in the Vietnam war is more important. I think all adult Americans have heard it:
Chomsky and Herman do not claim that the filtering is perfect and admit that on occasion, something of substance gets through (p.306). But the way in which it gets through is important. A recent example would be the 2005 revelation of the NSA wiretapping/SWIFT monitoring programs by the New York Times, a leak which was withheld by NYT for a year for excellent NYT reasons: Bush asked them not to publish it. And this is no outlier; it is the product of a sentiment which has become more explicit with the arrival of Wikileaks - an actual oppositional organization working for transparency - where `responsible journalism' means uncritical deference to the suggestions and demands of officials. The ongoing media reaction to Wikileaks is propaganda model par excellence.
What about the canonical example of disputatious, truth-to-power journalism, Watergate?
Other objections are addressed throughout the book, and the major ones - apart from those concerning new technology - were all anticipated in 1988. A precis of the arguments and their refutations is provided by Herman's retrospective, which again was published in 2003. But it might have been published today:
*Note: I cannot find the full Chomsky-Bolkestein debate, try as I have.
1. The linked edition has a lengthy introduction dating from 2002, which addresses the effects of the internet, among other things. Edward S. Herman wrote a retrospective in 2003, available here.
2. A brief overview: In claiming that the pope's would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, was a hired hand of the Bulgarians of the KGB, the reported motive was as follows: "the preeminent motive in the assassination attempt was a Soviet desire to weaken NATO, to be accomplished by implicating a Turk in the assassination of the pope" (p.146). After seventeen months in an Italian prison, Agca, the would-be assassin of Turkist Fascist beliefs - a member of the rightest `Gray Wolves', confessed to the desired account. The fact that Agca is a nationalist was treated as proof that the KGB are clever at covering their tracks (p.147). The facts that Agca had threatened to kill the pope in 1979 (p.148), that he was a committed Fascist (p.148), that the KGB plot failed to take care of Agca after the attempt (p.147), that Agca's travel through Bulgaria was standard Gray Wolf procedure due to ease of secrecy (p.149), that he had acquired the weapon through convoluted right-wing networks free from KGB-Bulgarian oversight (p.149), and that the KGB-Bulgarian conspirators managed to be - as bad conspiracy theories tend to require - a strange mixture of competent and incompetent were ignored.
3. In this article, Chomsky makes a passing comment which doesn't fly: "1984 is so popular because it's trivial and it attacks our enemies. If Orwell had dealt with a different problem-- ourselves--his book wouldn't have been so popular. In fact, it probably wouldn't have been published." And it does not fly for the same comparative reasons employed in his propaganda model: the now-gone vogue of Burnham's The Managerial Revolution is one example, and more closely still, Huxley's assault on consumerism in Brave New World is strangely popular and similarly instructed in our schools. The reception of 1984, along with Orwell's other works and Orwell as a person, also undermines this casual explanation. Few other writers come in for so much unjust maligning, particularly from the established left but even within the dissident left. Chomsky is as far as I know an exception in admiring Orwell. (The right, on the other hand, simply reworks Orwell as a neoconservative and praises him as such.)
Take the latter link, from Matt Taibbi, on the abandonment of the public option a few years ago:
There are some days when it almost seems like the national press is making a conscious effort to prove Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent gospel. If the national commercial media really did exist solely to perpetuate the attitudes of the political elite, and to create phony debates around unthreatening policy poles, endlessly pitting a conservative/reactionary status quo against an “acceptable” position of dissent — if that thesis were the absolute truth, then you’d see just what we’re seeing now in the coverage of the health care debate.I like to think in Bayesian terms where I can. One of the remarkable things about Bayesian learning is that it can take place; we somehow formulate a few important hypotheses and focus on them, a process which has a formal, information-theoretic description. Naturally, even unconsciously, we acquire information which leads us to be confident in hypotheses before rigorous confirmation. It sometimes goes well, as with Einstein, and it sometimes goes badly, as with conspiratorial thinking.
This is mostly how propaganda and advertising function. Largely without our being aware, our choices are probabilistically yet strongly constrained by the features of our environment. By structuring media institutions in certain ways, governments and the powerful classes can shape public opinion, little to no outright censorship required. This idea is not original to Chomsky and Herman. Rather, it is a staple of the left-rationalist tradition exemplified by Russell, Orwell, and other giants. Take Orwell's preface to Animal Farm:
Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian 'co-ordination' that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news - things which on their own merits would get the big headlines - being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.I would go so far as to say that Chomsky's chief accomplishment in political writing has been in performing a rigorous, modern application of the ideas of Orwell and Russell. Since reading many of Orwell's essays and Russell's works, especially Free Thought and Official Propaganda, Justice in War-Time, and Political Ideals, I would even say that he is sloppy not to properly attribute these ideas more regularly.
Take the second link in this post:
The real argument about free speech lies elsewhere. It’s not just whether you get a platform, but how big yours is compared with other people’s. Free speech means little, though not nothing, if the opportunities for influencing opinion open to some – such as billionaire non-citizens domiciled in business class – makes those of others nanometrically small. The issue is not only that moguls like Murdoch and Berlusconi make clear to editors what it’s politic to print, that the titles are used as commercial platforms to hawk other products, and that these media safeguard their power by a code of omertà that buries news of their own felonies. It’s also that, as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman pointed out long ago, the attempt to reach the ‘demographic’ sought by the advertisers who form the media’s staple revenue base means that content – including ‘news’ – is skewed towards the bland, upscale, aspirational. They engineer the public they purport to reflect.The notes about what `free speech' must really be to be free appeared about 65 years before `long ago' in Russell's Free Thought and Official Propaganda. The manufacture of audiences by mere presentation of material has been understood for at least as long. Chomsky and Herman deserve credit for explicating a model which describes and captures these notions, but I wish Russell and Orwell received more love. For all their (mis)citation, I still suspect that they are rarely read.
For the above reasons, I think of the Chomsky/Herman propaganda model as an instance of the Russell/Orwell insights. And they do their job very well. Yes, it was published in 1988 and media have changed a lot since then, but it still remains quite powerful.1
What is the propaganda model? The idea is that media function as a filter which serves the interests of a narrow elite. This is not a conspiracy theory, as has been alleged*, and as I will discuss later. Rather, Manufacturing Consent establishes that ideological filtering exists, and it outlines how this filter functions.
Before entering into details, try to imagine some of the ways in which filtering may take place. The common sense examples which come to mind are the exact subject of Manufacturing Consent: conflicts of interest introduced by ownership - see Fox's coverage of the News of The World hacking scandal - and by advertisers. Access journalism is another example. If I recall correctly, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was explicitly promised softball interviews in e-mails from journalists in exchange for exclusive access after his weird adventure in 2009. But this need not be so crude as the underlying understanding is quite obvious: if you really are a hard interviewer, you'll have more trouble getting the golden interviews. This process is supplemented by intentional leaks. Another constraint is social: journalists are showered with too many awards, developing a `working relationship' with those who they cover as they do so. And those juicy, high-level leaks? Usually, those merely reflect the quibbles of the powerful. The interplay here is very conscious and very obvious. A similar relationship is constructed by embedding journalists with troops. If the unit you are covering, which is full of nice guys who have protected you, commits an atrocity, do you report it?
Another idea of interest is concision, as explained in this excerpt of a horrifyingly campy documentary about Chomsky and Manufacturing Consent:
Suppose I get up on Nightline, say given, you know whatever it is, two minutes, and I say Gaddafi is a terrorist, Khomeini is a murderer, you know etc. etc. Uh, the Russians, you know, invaded Afghanistan, uh, all this sort of stuff. I don't need any evidence; everybody just nods. On the other hand, suppose you say something that just isn't regurgitating conventional pieties. Suppose you say something that's the least bit unexpected or controversial. [...] Well you know people will quite reasonably expect to know what you mean. Why did you say that? I've never heard that before. Uh, if you said that, you better have a reason. You know, better have some evidence. And in fact, you better have a lot of evidence, because that's a pretty startling comment. Uh, you can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision. You know that's the genius of this structural constraint. [Rough transcription and emphasis mine.]This is made even more severe by another example which comes to mind and comes in for much popular abuse: the moronic `two sides' format of presentation adopted for any issue deemed to be controversial. Those issues approach for such `objective presentation' are also selected in accordance with propagandistic interests. Issues which should not be partisan, like `anthropogenic global warming exists', become automatically so. And if someone has a decent case to make, their time is further limited by the bleating moron on the other side of the screen. This format allows discreditable, dishonest notions free air time whenever it serves the correct interests. "We're not giving free propaganda time to corporations; we're merely presenting `the issue'." Note also where obligatory air-time is in fact obligatory; socialist-bashing requires no `other side' for the purposes of `balance'. Basic scientific facts like evolution, on the other hand...
We can keep listing major flaws in media. The tendency toward sensationalism is a perfect example, and I think it is a problem prior to media itself. Russell points out some of the reasons for this tendency in The Need for Political Scepticism (1923) in the context of political parties:
Wherever party politics exist, the appeal of a politician is primarily to a section, while his opponents appeal to an opposite section. His success depends upon turning his section into a majority. A measure which appeals to all sections equally will presumably be common ground between the parties, and will therefore be useless to the party politician. Consequently he concentrates attention upon those measures which are disliked by the section which forms the nucleus of his opponents' supporters.So the focus of the American left on Michelle Bachmann and the focus of Michelle Bachmann on banning same-sex marriage make perfect sense. Media will tend to focus on issues which are divisive and do little to upset the balance of power. (So things everybody hates are not seriously addressed, expect perhaps with vague slogans.) Roe v. Wade, evolution, religious fanaticism, and gay marriage are ever-serviceable. I say this not to trivialize these issues, but to point out that their primary utility, up to the media, is ratings-generating controversy, while their primary utility, up to politicians, is in functioning according to electoral interest in the manner described by Russell. I think that many bloggers who traffic in such topics understand what they can do for ratings.
Sensationalism is fleeting by nature. Topics are interchangeable, so big topics tend to be unchangeable. The 24-hour news cycle helps: cable media are always looking to turn the pettiest issue into all-day coverage. So Anthony Weiner quickly replaces Libya and drone attacks in the news, and once the dust settles a wholly new topic has emerged. Even if substantial, critical coverage of power in the mainstream press rears its ugly head - and occasionally it does - it is quickly obscured by something less threatening. Wars, unlike Paris Hilton, do not make good fodder for the sort of sustained media campaign required to overcome an establishment consensus. Sensationalism also has the effect of selecting for public speakers who tend to say silly, dishonest, and divisive things. Are you a socially and fiscally economic conservative embarrassed by Bachmann? Why do you think that the camera loves her? Are you a left-leaning fellow who doesn't like to be associated with Michael Moore or Al Sharpton? With sensationalism, a looser tongue catches more coverage. A person born for the modern camera is devoid of humility; he speaks as much as possible, perhaps occasionally interrupting the stream of slogans with an absurd statement or bit of sharp rhetoric to generate attention.
Along with the aforementioned biases produced by pecuniary interest, cost-of-production is another major factor. I read somewhere, though I fail to recall the source, an article on the increasing reliance on opinion columns to attract readers. This is because the `mere smoke of opinion' - I found this gem of Thoreau's via Bill Moyers - is cheap to produce. There's no shortage of volunteers for the task. In-depth reportage is difficult to come by. Where factual reportage is undertaken, it is in the interest of the media to reduce the cost as much as is possible. In the internet age, this might be the regurgitation of internet stories, but advertisements designed to look like news (video news releases) also serve, as do the cheapest sources - handily provided by officials. The publicly subsidized story is cheaper to tell, after all. Journalists are actually instructed to prefer such official sources.
One might also notice that despite there being a tremendous number of outlets, big conglomerates own most of the media by impact. In particular, there is a set of outlets, called `agenda-setting', which sets the line of the day. It is not coincidental that thousands of papers across America manage to focus on roughly the same topics everyday. What is important is what is printed by major outlets, especially The Washington Post and The New York Times. As they represent the `established left', their function is also in boundary-setting: this is as `left' as `serious people' can be. With the rightward lurching of American politics, I wonder if this description is still accurate: Keynesianism a la Krugman has very little political capital, though it has some media representation. True, there have been stingy stimulus measures, but Keynesians have consistently objected to them as inadequate. But this area is in flux at the moment, and I imagine that eventually the Keynesians will eventually recover much of their former influence.
So before getting into the details of the propaganda model, I think we should already feel motivated to change the institution of media. I must admit that it plays to my prejudices, but I think these prejudices to be sound on inspection. I further think that they are obvious truths. Many of the complaints I have suggested are quite common. It is therefore interesting that the media, which purport to serve the public interest and to concern themselves primarily with informing and educating the electorate, have not taken fundamental measures to address these complaints so as to actually serve their stated purposes. Perhaps their function is not the high-minded, democratic one they imagine it to be. Maybe something else is in the way, some structural feature which well-intentioned individual journalists cannot overcome, something unresponsive to popular pressure and interests. To understand this is to move past the mostly accurate but woefully trite and incomplete criticisms of the Jon Stewart variety.
*Page citations which follow, unless otherwise noted, are from the linked edition of Manufacturing Consent.*
A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are about to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news ``filters,'' fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass-media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and ``experts'' funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) ``flak'' as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) ``anticommunism'' as a national religion and control mechanism. (p.2)(5) may require some updating. Anticommunism and antisocialism are still national religions, but the key `other' these days are terrorists, very broadly conceived. Less `othery', market platitudes almost border on religious incantation, as do myths about our founding fathers.
A propaganda model of the media may be described as a power interest-oriented filtering process which is inherent to the structure of the media. Therefore we should expect a successful model to not require or rely on conspiracy theories in explaining common media behaviors; the workings of and evidence for such a model should be public knowledge.
Let's first look at the former item, the `internal logic' demanded by Bolkestein. Chomsky and Herman answer this with institutional analysis, which as employed is the conjunction of a description of the media and the expectation that the actors appearing in that description tend to act in their perceived interests and in the manner that they are educated to act, consciously and not. As Chomsky puts it to Andrew Marr: "[the agenda-setting media e.g. the New York Times] are big corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations. Now the question is: what picture of the world would a rational person expect to come out of this structure?"
Something should be said about what we should not expect as well. Given the propaganda model, we might expect that the elite healthcare debate would have been broader than it has turned out to be. Cheap healthcare as provided by a public option or universal system e.g. single payer are well-within the spectrum of elite interest. And since such systems are cheaper and would help to contain the rising cost of healthcare, they should lie within the spectrum of business interest. The fact that the system is unsustainable should be still more of a spur. Yet that is the actual story: insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, and the financial sector dominate the lobbies and keep the system private, but some opening is provided by the fact that companies like GM suffer under our system. And that opening is fairly recent, despite decades of popular concern. The restriction of what little opening there is, as lamented by Taibbi, also follows the model: overwhelmingly, commentators fell in line with the two parties as lines were drawn.
Now what is it that we expect given the model? The important evidence is comparative: qualitatively similar events should receive differing coverage if elite interests diverge. For example, victims of enemy regimes are `worthy', while victims of friendly regimes are `unworthy'. Focusing on one aspect of the coverage, to the exclusion of the other, would fail to contrast the propaganda model against the conventional view that the media are the faithful servants of the popular good.
In sum, a propaganda approach to media coverage suggests a systematic and highly political dichotomization in news coverage based on serviceability to important domestic power interests. This should be observable in dichotomized choices of story and in the volume and quality of coverage. (p.35)These examples comprise the bulk of the book, the notes, and the citations. By chapter, they are (2) worthy and unworthy victims; (3) legitimizing versus meaningless elections; (4) the KGB-Bulgarian plot to kill the Pope/market disinformation; (5) Vietnam; and (6) Laos and Cambodia.
A `worthy victim' is Jerzy Popieluszko, a Solidarity leader in Poland (p.42). His murder by Polish secret police was carefully and extensively reported, reporting accompanied by cries for justice, particularly at the highest levels of governance (pp.42-3). To contrast, Archbishop Romero was an `unworthy victim'. Coverage was relatively sparse; his murder was attributed to `extreme' right-wing forces - not the U.S.-supported government which was actually responsible; his legacy was misrepresented; responsibility for his death was not to be found at high levels (pp.48-59). `Legitimate elections' are those which get the `right' result, such as El Salvador (1982), where turnout was forced and voting was supervised by military forces. `Meaningless elections' are those which get the `wrong' result, such as the relatively free election of the Sandanistas in Nicaragua (1984). The former are triumphs of young democracy, whereas the latter are unfortunate shams which would be anti-democratic to respect. High voter turnout, proof of legitimacy in the former, is a hollow number in the latter, and possible coercion becomes a bigger concern (pp.121-3). In the case of the Nicaraguan election, we have also a case of likely case of false leaking: on election night, a story broke claiming that a freighter of MIGs was bound for Nicaragua. Correction invited no retrospection (p.137). The fourth chapter seems strange to me: I am too young to remember any `KGB-Bulgarian' plot about the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. There are allegations by ex-CIA after the publication of Manufacturing Consent, namely Melvin A. Goodman and Harold Ford, that pressure was placed on the CIA to claim that the assassination was ordered or insinuated by the KGB (p.xxvii). But even without this revelation, the allegations of a KGB plot are bizarre on their face. This case is clear-cut, but it feels out of place.2 The retrospective on media involvement in the Vietnam war is more important. I think all adult Americans have heard it:
``For the first time in history," Robert Elegant writes, "the outcome of a war was determined not in the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all, on the television screen," leading to the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. The belief that the media, particularly television, were responsible for U.S. government failures is widely expressed. (p.170)Interestingly, the debate takes place over whether or not the media are unpatriotic, or merely `unmindful' (p.171), just as debates over Vietnam center over tactics. That the US mission was a catastrophic and immoral invasion of a small country seeking self-determination naturally does not emerge. At worst, Vietnam is a mistake, tragic but well-intended (pp.172-3). That's the nature of the post-Vietnam debate. I hope I need not explain how the media covered the war as it unfolded.3
Chomsky and Herman do not claim that the filtering is perfect and admit that on occasion, something of substance gets through (p.306). But the way in which it gets through is important. A recent example would be the 2005 revelation of the NSA wiretapping/SWIFT monitoring programs by the New York Times, a leak which was withheld by NYT for a year for excellent NYT reasons: Bush asked them not to publish it. And this is no outlier; it is the product of a sentiment which has become more explicit with the arrival of Wikileaks - an actual oppositional organization working for transparency - where `responsible journalism' means uncritical deference to the suggestions and demands of officials. The ongoing media reaction to Wikileaks is propaganda model par excellence.
What about the canonical example of disputatious, truth-to-power journalism, Watergate?
History has been kind enough to contrive for us a ``controlled experiment'' to determine just what was at stake during the Watergate period, when the confrontational stance of the media reached its peak. The answer is clear and precise: powerful groups are capable of defending themselves, not surprisingly; and by media standards, it is a scandal when their position and rights are threatened. By contrast, as long as illegalities and violations of democratic substance are confined to marginal groups or distant victims of U.S. military attack, or result in a diffused cost imposed on the general population, media opposition is muted or absent altogether. (p.300)
The major scandal of Watergate as portrayed in the mainstream press was that the Nixon administration sent a collection of petty criminals to break into the Democratic party headquarters, for reasons that remain obscure. The Democratic party represents powerful domestic interests, solidly based in the business community. Nixon's action is therefore a scandal. The Socialist Workers party, a legal political party, represents no powerful interests. Therefore, there was no scandal when it was revealed, just as passions over Watergate reached their zenith, that the FBI had been disrupting its activities by illegal break-ins and other measures for a decade, a violation of democratic principle far more extensive and serious than anything charged during the Watergate hearings. What is more, these actions of the national political police were only one element of government programs extending over many administrations to deter independent political action, stir up violence in the ghettos, and undermine the popular movements that were beginning to engage sectors of the generally marginalized public in the arena of decision-making. These covert and illegal programs were revealed in court cases and elsewhere during the Watergate period, but they never entered the congressional proceedings and received only limited media attention. Even the complicity of the FBI in the police assassination of a Black Panther organizer in Chicago was not a scandal, in marked contrast to Nixon's ``enemies list,'' which identified powerful people who were denigrated in private but suffered no consequences. (pp.299-300)The coverage of Watergate, as compared with COINTELPRO, is a perfect example of the model in action. The press may be adversarial in pursuing corruption which hurts elites and publicizing sleaze stories and still function well-within the boundaries of the model; in fact, this is often what the model predicts.
Other objections are addressed throughout the book, and the major ones - apart from those concerning new technology - were all anticipated in 1988. A precis of the arguments and their refutations is provided by Herman's retrospective, which again was published in 2003. But it might have been published today:
In the health insurance controversy of 1992-1993, the media's refusal to take the single-payer option seriously, despite apparent widespread public support and the effectiveness of the system in Canada, served well the interests of the insurance and medical service complex (Canham-Clyne 1994). The uncritical media reporting and commentary on the alleged urgency of fiscal restraint and a balanced budget in the years 1992-1996 fit well the business community's desire to reduce the social budget and weaken regulation. The applicability of the propaganda model in these and other cases, including the 'drug wars,' seems clear (Chomsky 1991: 114-21).I think this is more than enough said. Now you too can enjoy watching reasonable opinions and proposals die under neglect and dismissal and watch this story be told how it should be, as tragic, as told by the alternative press you now read because you're tired of cable.
*Note: I cannot find the full Chomsky-Bolkestein debate, try as I have.
1. The linked edition has a lengthy introduction dating from 2002, which addresses the effects of the internet, among other things. Edward S. Herman wrote a retrospective in 2003, available here.
2. A brief overview: In claiming that the pope's would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, was a hired hand of the Bulgarians of the KGB, the reported motive was as follows: "the preeminent motive in the assassination attempt was a Soviet desire to weaken NATO, to be accomplished by implicating a Turk in the assassination of the pope" (p.146). After seventeen months in an Italian prison, Agca, the would-be assassin of Turkist Fascist beliefs - a member of the rightest `Gray Wolves', confessed to the desired account. The fact that Agca is a nationalist was treated as proof that the KGB are clever at covering their tracks (p.147). The facts that Agca had threatened to kill the pope in 1979 (p.148), that he was a committed Fascist (p.148), that the KGB plot failed to take care of Agca after the attempt (p.147), that Agca's travel through Bulgaria was standard Gray Wolf procedure due to ease of secrecy (p.149), that he had acquired the weapon through convoluted right-wing networks free from KGB-Bulgarian oversight (p.149), and that the KGB-Bulgarian conspirators managed to be - as bad conspiracy theories tend to require - a strange mixture of competent and incompetent were ignored.
The trial in Rome was awkward for the Western media, as Agca quickly declared himself to be Jesus and, more important, failed to produce any supportive evidence backing up his claims of Bulgarian involvement. The diligent and extensive court investigation found numerous Gray Wolves linked to Agca in the period just up to his assassination attempt, but no witness to his (allegedly) numerous meetings with Bulgarians in Rome, no money, no car, and, in the end, no conviction. (p.166)There is also evidence of pressuring during Agca's prison term (pp.164-6).
3. In this article, Chomsky makes a passing comment which doesn't fly: "1984 is so popular because it's trivial and it attacks our enemies. If Orwell had dealt with a different problem-- ourselves--his book wouldn't have been so popular. In fact, it probably wouldn't have been published." And it does not fly for the same comparative reasons employed in his propaganda model: the now-gone vogue of Burnham's The Managerial Revolution is one example, and more closely still, Huxley's assault on consumerism in Brave New World is strangely popular and similarly instructed in our schools. The reception of 1984, along with Orwell's other works and Orwell as a person, also undermines this casual explanation. Few other writers come in for so much unjust maligning, particularly from the established left but even within the dissident left. Chomsky is as far as I know an exception in admiring Orwell. (The right, on the other hand, simply reworks Orwell as a neoconservative and praises him as such.)
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
The Worst President Ever?
Via Ed Brayton, I came across a post by Thomas Ricks which argues that JFK was the worst president of the 20th century. He makes a great case, though the Cuban Missile crisis is enough to make me sympathetic. In Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens puts it as follows:
Whether or the lead-up and content of this crisis - as flanked by that whole Vietnam thing - make Kennedy `the worst', he certainly has his hat placed well within the ring. For the 20th century, I would also nominate Wilson, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton - especially Wilson and Reagan. For this century, I cannot yet decide whether or not Obama will turn out to be better than Bush. (For the issues most important to me, they are extremely similar.) There are only two options for the 18th century as well, but the signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts suggests Adams. It's difficult to make a judgement on the 19th century: should we pick the worst as regards slavery, dooming us to a future civil war? The one who was most genocidal with respect to the Native Americans? What about the corruptions of the Gilded age?
Here I don't know enough for any strong opinion. Millard Filmore is up there, along with Ulysses S. Grant.
I would say that Lincoln is overrated, but he's nowhere near the worst. Unfortunately, people tend to think highly of Wilson, Kennedy, and Reagan. And boy are those some doozies. As far as justified favorites, FDR is a good choice. Teddy Roosevelt is very mixed bag, so I tend to think him overrated as well. But, like Lincoln, he is at least better than most.
It's more difficult to think of underrated presidents. This might be my cynical side, but perhaps it's more important to deflate inflated reputations than inflate deflated ones.
My encounter with all this liberating knowledge and inquisitive atmosphere [at Cambridge] was very nearly over before it had begun. In my very first term, in October 1962, President Kennedy went to the brink, as the saying invariably goes, over Cuba. I shall never forget where I was standing and what I was doing on the day he nearly killed me. (p.65)If I interpret correctly, this event would result in the political Hitchens we know today (p.66). Thanks to Kennedy, you and I have Vasili Arkhipov to thank for the existence of civilization.
Whether or the lead-up and content of this crisis - as flanked by that whole Vietnam thing - make Kennedy `the worst', he certainly has his hat placed well within the ring. For the 20th century, I would also nominate Wilson, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton - especially Wilson and Reagan. For this century, I cannot yet decide whether or not Obama will turn out to be better than Bush. (For the issues most important to me, they are extremely similar.) There are only two options for the 18th century as well, but the signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts suggests Adams. It's difficult to make a judgement on the 19th century: should we pick the worst as regards slavery, dooming us to a future civil war? The one who was most genocidal with respect to the Native Americans? What about the corruptions of the Gilded age?
Here I don't know enough for any strong opinion. Millard Filmore is up there, along with Ulysses S. Grant.
I would say that Lincoln is overrated, but he's nowhere near the worst. Unfortunately, people tend to think highly of Wilson, Kennedy, and Reagan. And boy are those some doozies. As far as justified favorites, FDR is a good choice. Teddy Roosevelt is very mixed bag, so I tend to think him overrated as well. But, like Lincoln, he is at least better than most.
It's more difficult to think of underrated presidents. This might be my cynical side, but perhaps it's more important to deflate inflated reputations than inflate deflated ones.
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