a duty to not vote

I have a very pragmatic friend, or, rather, a friend who’s very pragmatic in conversations with me. I’ll make a statement, he’ll disaffectedly ask me to back it up. As infuriating as it is to be tongue-tied (and oh-so-easily), I try to encourage this relationship. In a world where, everyday, I find myself surrounded by nonsense, it’s imperative that I’m called on to define what sense is. It’s imperative that I have some sort of definition to stand on.

When I said I couldn’t vote for Obama in 2012, he asked me why. “Because I don’t believe in him”; or, “because he didn’t do what he said he would do”. Because I don’t want him to be the president. Ever the pragmatic one, he asks me what good that would  do. Isn’t there a duty to choose the best candidate, or at least the lesser of presented evils?

And I immediately heard the call to maximize utility.

I haven’t quite wrapped my head around it, and I surely haven’t tested it enough to champion it in the streets. But I get a bit skeptical when consequentialism is used to justify action. I can’t really get around consequentialism as anything other than retrospective — this produced the most good. When it’s used prescriptively, something seems off. To say that this will produce the most good, in practice, tends to rest on a great many assumptions.

What I managed to say, in my fumbling, was that there is a degree of legitimacy conveyed by a vote. My vote speaks to whom I want for the job, not whom I want for the job ”given these circumstances”. I reject the legitimacy of the system, and I certainly don’t want to surrender my vote of legitimacy to what is simply the lesser of two evils.

Am I wrong to find that outrageous? Have I merely found a way to rhetoricize an otherwise boring evaluation? Is there really nothing more to this? Or, rather, should there really be nothing more to this?

In truth, I’m only halfway attacking the issue with this charge. If, existentially, you find not choosing to be preferable, there must be an issue with the choices offered. There must be an issue with the process of offering the choices. I think that’s pretty apparent; saying there’s an “issue” with modern politics is a pretty safe statement. Identifying the issues is harder. Fixing them seems to be pretty much out of the picture right now (partially why I’ve been skeptical of things like Occupy <something>).

What I managed to say, in my fumbling, was that I refused to legitimize the choices that were presented. I refused to honor the process behind them. It’s like the part where the villain asks the hero to choose who lives and who dies — it’s not really the hero that’s choosing; he’s just as captive as his wife and children.

I’m not letting my vote be held hostage. Step one.

people who annoy you

I was thinking about what the word “racism” has come to mean to me. There’s the naive racism — “skinnism” or “colorism” or maybe “shade-ism”… some -ism like that — but there’s this advanced (and I use that word unironically, I think) form that allows people like my dad to call someone a nigger, and then follow it up with the apology that “white people can also be niggers”.

(Side note: I actually believed that until a few years ago. The best I can figure is that my dad thinks “niggard” and “nigger” were somehow synonymous… but “niggard” doesn’t mean “ignorant”… so there’s that. And he also thinks the KKK originally lynched white people… so there’s that.)

There’s a grouping, the existence of which baffles me intellectually. Rationally. I can’t understand how it came to be, even as I see it being upheld. There was a good novel I read some years ago highlighting the struggle between classism and racism in America around the time of the Civil War. It was my introduction to the suggestion that racism was (and continues to be) manufactured as a way to downplay classist grievances; in short, “you might be poor, I might be rich… but we’re both white, so we’re on the same side”.

But if “nigger” refers not to skin color but predominantly to… I don’t know—education? contribution to society? ability to not live off of welfare?, then there’s something to be said about the way the two concepts have come to be tied together. It’s almost as if (it is, I suppose) racism has become so latent, the need to be allied with the upper-class (the self-sufficient, perhaps?) has become so ingrained, that the two concepts have merged.

At the heart of the matter, it’s an us vs. them thing. The question is how the lines have been drawn. How do 80 year old white men living on Medicare and Social Security payments attack other people for doing something similar? Do you have to be 80 years old, or do you have to be white?

I think the soon-to-be-rich explanation works well. I think our society cultivates a dream of attainable wealth and sets us off down a yellow brick road of platitudes. A precious few of us make it to the promised land, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s a fucking gauntlet from start to “finish”. And yet, so often the need to deny that arises; so often, we blame everything but the game itself. The government and the niggers (however that word gets used) are somehow keeping us down. We take pride in what little we do have and we lie to ourselves about how fragile that existence is. We see taxes as “the government” taking “my money” to give to someone else, someone who is somehow less deserving even though we don’t know who they are.

Because if someone can make it to Oz in this world, then why can’t I? What does that say about me? In a smaller setting, we get a new perspective: “She was obviously promoted because she slept the boss; she didn’t earn it.” Those who got ahead were either lucky (think lottery winners) or cheaters (oh my god, Becky). But I’m following the rules… so wherever I am in life is where everyone should be (oh, Sartre!). Maybe God has a plan for me.

Or maybe I’m being cheated.

An ending.

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with wit the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

And we’re back to Galt’s Gulch — no real answers, just a scathing view of what we have for now.

pro patria

It is not just that we live too much by a variety and multiplicity of fragmented concepts; it is that these are used at one and the same time to express rival and incompatible social ideals and policies and to furnish us with a pluralist political rhetoric whose function is to conceal the depth of our conflicts.

MacIntyre goes on to posit that legislation now codifies our differences rather than our similarities, highlighting the deep conflicts within our society. A bandage rather than a medicine—this is the degree to which we have to be saved from each other.

What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.

Contemporary “politics”, in turn, spurs contemporary “patriotism”, and the heart of both matters is left to atrophy.

When however the relationship of government to the moral community is put in question both by the changed nature of government and the lack of moral consensus in the society, it becomes difficult any longer to have any clear, simple and teachable conception of patriotism. Loyalty to my country, to my community—which remains unalterably a central virtue—becomes detached from obedience to the government which happens to rule me.

I quickly became a proponent for a substantiated form of several concepts used (or misused, per MacIntyre’s argument) today—virtue, honor, politics, etc. Yet, I never considered “patriotism”, perhaps because it’s always gone along with nationalism. But once you define politics as a morally central topic, once you build a state around that concept, even nationalism becomes laudable.

And so, for the first time in my life, I realize how badly I want to be patriotic.

I had a thought today. It came out in big words and I was very proud of myself. I’m not sure if there’s anything behind it, but fuck it—I’ll bank on it and I’m sure someone will contradict me soon enough.

Individualist societies substitute pluralistic subjectivity for objective authority.

The obvious implication would things like science vs. religion, where so many people “feel something” that there must be truth to it—don’t bother building a case from actual facts; objectivity isn’t the only requisite for truth.

Of course, that might be the very facet of contemporary individualism I hate most.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged_(film)#Critical_response

Unironic that “conservative press” reviews read like quotes from Rand’s antagonistic populists?

Speaking of changing the rules…

Hungary’s Constitutional Revolution

More worrisome than where the US currently is; currently less worrisome than where we’re heading.

it’s only a “dictatorship” before they change the rules…

(title sounded cool; post is unrelated)

Sitting at my car dealership, asymptotically approaching the end of After Virtue, I found a way to separate the concepts of egalitarianism qua meritocracy and egalitarianism qua individualism. (MacIntyre uses “qua” a lot.)

So, my anti-democratic thoughts have been resolved—this is very comforting to me. It’s like being “anti-capitalist”—I’m not against capitalism qua definition so much as capitalism qua “seriously, how do you not see where this is going?”.

I feel like it’s splitting hairs in some semantic sense, but I think there’s an awful lot at stake on some basic interpretations (which translate into implicit assumptions of other viewpoints). It’s… an attempt to resolve as much relativism as possible, sort of, in one light; but, to me, it’s what makes relativism seem (asymptotically) inane.

In 9th grade “ELPS”, we were given the US naturalization test (or… well, something like that). And it occurred me that, firstly, I really had no understanding of what it means to become a (American) citizen; secondly, that if these questions were so important, why did they strike me as so esoteric? I don’t resent the education I had received so much as the society where this kind of juxtaposition—that I had been walking around with all these “rights” and in such complete civic ignorance, just because of where I was born—is allowed to exist. Is allowed to be so blatant and open.

And is regarded as a freedom.

And I’m not saying that American children need to pass the naturalization test; I’m saying, on a much larger scale, there is a civic inequality that is not being addressed. Historically, it’s been things like land, money, and family that determined civic power. And, I daresay ideally, democracy has the power to erase those metrics.

But, of course, if things like land, money, and family makes one popular, then… y’know, there’s always that metric. It’s misleading to think that all voices have equal weight, when a handful of voices can speak for so many and tell so many others what to say. I don’t oppose the ideals of democracy (in that everyone’s voice counts) any more than I oppose the ideals of capitalism (in that perfect markets can exist with perfect information… asymptotically…). I do oppose what it’s come to mean in the connotation of the vernacular.

Historically, there’s a transition from the divine right of kings to liberal individualism—from a corrupted and decadent central authority to the consideration of the authority of each individual. Now, I argue that we’re similarly faced with the corupted and decadent authority of each individual. And in this corrupted decadence (last time, sorry), what seems so very lacking is a sense of non-relativistic… well, morality. A lack of vigilance, to be vague: what the kings began to take for granted was given to the individual… to be, in time, taken for granted.

MacIntyre views egalitarianism arising from institutions such as the military and trade guilds, it’s fairly apparent from such examples that there’s a common theme from these that is missing from the civic community, some sort of hierarchy arising from the de facto telos of the entire community. Where egalitarianism might have once been used as a basis for meritocracy, the concept has been sort of hijacked by (at least, the contemporary interpretation of) individualism. And in a drive for this individualistic egalitarianism, we made things like civic power a desert rather than a responsibility.

With capitalism qua vernacular (I’m so not using “qua” correctly…), you can’t really remove money as a de facto metric—even with a more ideal democracy/timocracy, you’d still wind up with political bosses. But, in some way, I feel like that’s definitively a step in the right direction: it’s a lot more (I’m gonna use the word…) honest. And, I guess, transparent (my usual talking point). Stop pretending we all have equal voices—make it something to work for, and let’s see who’s able to “afford” it. And then we can deal with that little problem.

Because when you realize it’s really not the government you wanted, that is revolutionary. That is what it takes to be a citizen.