Draft

Draft of an article that's been bouncing around in my head. No one reads this, but here it is, anyway.

This is overly long, and more importantly, not done.

The Long Lead-In:

When one lives in a society that works, especially if it works fairly well, it is not just tempting to think of the current state of your society as some eternal ideal at the apex of development towards which all other societies are still moving, but almost necessary. No society is, after all, capable of criticizing itself; the foundations of any culture will invariably be the foundations of the forms of criticism it employs. If you accept the principles of thought, the “facts,” that such a system of criticism is built on, then you have also largely accepted the society you attempting to critique. Chomsky calls this basic idea “false dissent,” although he was speaking more of America’s habit of having political debates about only the most superficial levels of politics. Marxist dialectics is an example of an attempt to get around this problem, and while still a powerful form of analysis, its pragmatic employment has proven somewhat irksome.

So when citizens of the United States look at their society, and compare it to the rest of the world (as I write this, France is having nation-wide riots over the equality of their Muslim citizens), they can, perhaps, not be blamed for seeing their society as the ideal the rest of the world is still moving towards. Indeed, even the disaster of the second Bush presidency is self-correcting, as the administration’s power is being reduced through scandal and realization to what it would have been in the first term without 9-11. Our society does have an inherent flexibility that does give it a certain amount of resilience. Of course history does not move along a straight line: there are many major shifts in our culture which could have gone in a completely different direction, and many other possible shifts that never happened for one reason or another (while the surge of enthusiasm for Communism in the 1930s led to Communist parties that still exist in many European states, in the United States no Communist party with real power ever developed despite the party that did exist having over 1 million members in the 1930s). Most, if not all, of any culture is largely the result of arbitrary selections of what is important and what is not (arbitrary in the sense that the actual selection is based upon chaotically complex intermingling influences), and the incidental nature of history. The wispiness for the basis of any culture goes deep, as far down as a person’s own materialistic-metaphysical tensions allows it. Regardless of the resilience of any culture, the arbitrary roots that it stands upon eventually will crumble as that culture continues to morph and manifests more and more contradictions with its roots. When a society, a system of government and economics, seems to be working for a majority of people, the idea of it imploding can seem impossible, or even dangerous. It is, I think, important to remember that the only eternal thing in the world is change; countless successful societies in the past have declared themselves eternal, perfect, an Ultimate Being’s order brought to earth, and they have all perished. In fact, most of the highly civilized cultures of the past had a short lifespan. Classical Athens lasted 50 years; Rome as the Roman Empire really only lasted for 500 years, at most, and most of that time was spent dealing with civil wars, uprisings, with brief periods of calm “civilization” between them; Medieval Europe, the feudal hierarchy imposed by God Himself, lasted perhaps a 300 or 400 years (depending on when you consider it to have begun and ended, this can be stretched out to a solid millennia). The reason is that there is no perfect society because there is no absolutes regarding humanity; in the very nature of being social creatures, humans modify the very basis of how they think.

Still, these are not things that one can keep in mind constantly: we have lives to live, jobs that need doing, errands that need running, dishes that need washing. In order to achieve some kind of basic operational status in the a world that changes enough in ways that we are required to deal with everyday, a certain amount of assumptions about the way things “just are” is almost necessary. Althusser thought this when he said that ideologies are a fundamental form of human thought, despite the problems and dogmatic lunacy they so often lead to. In constantly questioning everything, one reduces oneself to a state that has been called existential paralysis. A system of thought that allows some kind of simultaneous existence of wide breadth criticism and functionality may be possible, but I don’t think anyone has come up with it as of yet. The key is to know when it is prudent to question something deeply, and when it is not. It will never been convenient to push one’s analysis as deep as possible, but not doing so when dealing with a situation of importance leads to the kind of critical mistakes that can lead to all sorts of undesirable results.

The Meat:

The principle of freedom that we have in the United States is one of enough importance that it requires as deep of an analysis as we can give it. This is especially true when the range of American freedom’s affects are expanded, say by thinking that they should be imposed (or granted, as some would argue) on another nation, another culture, another people to make them “better.” The shortcomings of the society in the Middle East are certainly many, but that is true of any society, including our own. Once a society moves beyond the theoretical and into the material (regardless of whether it came about organically or was manufactured and plunked down), people are going to use that material basis of what actually is to form a new set of theories about what could be. A society cannot exist without its problems becoming apparent to those who live within it. When one society looks at another foreign society closely, the appearance of failings becomes even more explicit, although for slightly different reasons: the standard components of everyday life, the staples, are simply not there, and as so many of these seem to be essential to a happy life the super-societal observer cannot imagine how anyone in that society could possibly be happy. An excellent example of this is Cold War era Soviet Russia; to the average American not only were the flaws the average Russian was well aware of obvious, but countless differences between the two cultures seemed like flaws: no television! no microwave meals! no cheap gas! no big houses! no manicured lawns! no middle class! no chance for moving up in the world! no over-abundance of food! Someone outside Soviet and American Cold War cultures might, would probably be inclined, to take the middle ground and see unnecessary American excesses and Soviet asceticism.

When a contemporary American looks at the Middle East, the immediate reaction can be very similar. While Muslim cultures do have shortcomings I might consider close to objective – treatment of women, free speech, lack of tolerance for any lifestyle outside the norm – that is a subjective opinion and more importantly, there is no reason to think that forcing a conversation to something closer to American culture will solve these problems.

One key part of understanding why granting another culture American style freedoms will not rid their society of the problems which an American-cultured perspective sees is understanding what American freedom is. The United States of America, to reduce it massively, is an Enlightenment experiment. Remaining with our vein of oversimplifying, we can call the Enlightenment an intellectual and artistic movement which followed the theory that humans were fundamentally rational and that rationality, as a universal, could be used to solve all the world’s problems. At the time, this was in contrast with the older, although still present, idea that there was some kind of eternal, divine, order to which humans were supposed to be subject and take their appropriate place in (this notion has hardly died in contemporary America: people who rail on about the loss of “family values” generally assume that a very recent manifestation of the family, the American nuclear family, is an eternal order of how every family “should be”). The implications of humans being fundamentally rational beings is that anyone is capable of taking part in creating and modifying their government, culture, and society; ideas that lie at the foundation of modern liberal democracies, including freedom of speech and religion. However, the Enlightenment was not the result of some particularly sharp people happening upon a Truth of humanity; even dreaded common sense tells us that people are not fundamentally rational (and no matter how you consider those two amorphous ideas, rationality and common sense, that statement is damned to be a Uroboros). The Enlightenment offered a particular way of looking at humanity in response to the history of Europe, and while I agree that it was a superior to the dominate perspective that preceded it, as a philosophy it has been discarded in favor or newer ideas that build on the Enlightenment’s failures and strengths. To put it another way, the Enlightenment was, as are most things, a product of history and most importantly, the particular history of Europe. The ideas that the Enlightenment offered took root precisely because they offered a partial solution to long-standing problems and tensions in Europe. They took root in the United States because its founders were European and subscribed to Enlightenment philosophies, and the population was, by and large, European as well. In both cases it was a historical context that allowed those ideas, those new principles, to seep into the culture and really stick. Despite the Enlightenment’s claim to have uncovered a universal truth of all humans in all times, they merely reified an abstract notion, rationality, and viewed humanity in a new way. The ramifications of this new worldview were generally good, but the idea itself is no more eternal than the philosophical movement that spawned it. The evolution of culture and ideas within that culture affect each other as they change, in lines and loops of effectively infinite complexity, but both are always rooted in the history of that particular culture.