Saturday, April 9, 2022

The Obsolescence of Nostalgia

As the crow flies, it is around 200 kilometers from Michilimakinac, where Kandiaronk's Wyandot people settled in 1671, when he was around twenty years old, to Tehkummah on Manitoulin Island where Isabel Paterson was born 215 years later. 

It gets even cozier because the Wyandot had been displaced from the south shore of Georgian Bay by the Iroquois Five Nations, who around the same time also displaced the Oddawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi people from Manitoulin Island. The latter three tribes formed the Council of Three Fires, which also relocated to Michilimakinac and formed alliances with the Wyandot and other tribes.

One of the threads that I am weaving derives from David Graeber's and David Wengrow's account of how Kandiaronk's (or Kondiaronk's) criticisms of European customs became the basis for the Enlightenment critique, which was subsequently blunted by Turgot's theory of four evolutionary stages of society and Rousseau's ambivalent recuperation of the Noble Savage. Graeber and Wengrow got their argument from Ronald Meek's 1971 account. 

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne, commonly known as Turgot maintained in his 1750 lecture that there were four economic stages of society: hunter-gatherers, pastoral, agriculture and finally commercial society. Nearly 200 year later, Isabel Paterson described the "only four general ways by which human beings can exist" as the following:

(1) The savage society, or "snatch economy," of wandering hunters who live by the bounty of nature, on what they can kill or pick up.

(2) The pastoral nomad society, wandering herdsmen who live in the main off their tame animals.

(3) The agricultural society, in which men have learned to get most of their living from cultivated crops.

(4) The industrial economy, ranging all the way from handicrafts to high-speed, high-energy motor machine production; and requiring a general exchange system.

By 1948, the four-stages myth had become canon. It was also amplified by social Darwinism as practiced by Herbert Spencer and his American disciple, William Graham Sumner. Sumner's doctoral student, Thorstein Veblen, adopted Sumner's perspective of social evolution but jettisoned the laissez-faire component of his teachings. 

Paterson may or may not have read Sumner but she was friends with Stuart Chase, a follower of Veblen and a casual associate of the Technocracy movement inspired by Veblen. It would have been easy for her to reverse engineer Sumner's position by fusing laissez-faire economic doctrine to Chase's and Veblen's social evolutionary perspective. Technocracy without the altruism.

As so often happens, my something-completely-different dive down the Ayn Rand/Isobel Paterson rabbit hole has started to converge chronologically and thematically with my previous progressive/planned obsolescence thread featuring Herbert Marcuse, Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, Christine and J. George Frederick, et al.

Marcuse adopted his persistent (albeit analytically shallow) obsession with planned obsolescence from Vance Packard, whose inspiration was... Stuart Chase's The Tragedy of Waste. While Paterson's and Ayn Rand's individualist vision was grounded in nostalgia for a mythical 19th century American heroic inventor/businessman type, Marcuse's hopes for liberation dwelt on a resigned anti-nostalgia for the mythical 19th century class-conscious revolutionary proletariat. 

While Paterson and Rand were idolizing mythical productivist heroes, actual businessmen and women like the Fredericks, Paul Mazur, and Edward Bernays were laying the foundation of a consumer society. They saw the barrier to economic dynamism as insufficient demand, not excessive government.

I was unable to find any commentary on Rand by Marcuse. Rand, however, had a few choice words for Marcuse:

When every girder of capitalism had been undercut, when it had been transformed into a crumbling mixed economy—i.e., a state of civil war among pressure groups fighting politely for the legalized privilege of using physical force—the road was cleared for a philosopher who scrapped the politeness and the legality, making explicit what had been implicit: Herbert Marcuse, the avowed enemy of reason and freedom, the advocate of dictatorship, of mystic "insight," of retrogression to savagery, of universal enslavement, of rule by brute force. 

Note the "retrogression to savagery" trope -- the ghost of Turgot. In a sense, Marcuse and Rand were looking glass images of each other, each trapped in their adjacent funhouse mazes of obsolescence and nostalgia, a trope handed down from Turgot to Spencer to Sumner to Veblen... and Chase... and Packard.

The function of the four-stages myth was to deny the critique of social hierarchy. The illusion of a "progressive" stage theory leads back into the maze it is trying to escape from.

Is there a way out of that maze? I think there is -- at least intellectually. The way out -- and forward -- involves revisiting the "second storey" under historical materialism that Georg Simmel constructed and re-examining Marx's scaffolding for the Grundrisse that he dismantled in the published volume one of Capital. It seems to me that there is a way to contend with the gap between objective culture and subjective culture, collectively

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Marcuse and Rand were looking glass images of each other, each trapped in their adjacent funhouse mazes of obsolescence and nostalgia, a trope handed down from Turgot to Spencer to Sumner to Veblen... and Chase... and Packard....

[ Remarkably important and simply brilliant. ]

Anonymous said...

Is there a way out of that maze? I think there is -- at least intellectually. The way out -- and forward -- involves revisiting the "second storey" under historical materialism that Georg Simmel constructed and re-examining Marx's scaffolding for the Grundrisse that he dismantled in the published volume one of Capital. It seems to me that there is a way to contend with the gap between objective culture and subjective culture, collectively.

[ Perfect, perfect; and there you have "socialism with Chinese characteristics" as President Xi has carefully described and explained. ]

Anonymous said...

When possible, please set down a preferred reading from Simmel.

Sandwichman said...

Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, last chapter, section 2 "The Concept of Culture"

Anonymous said...

https://www.eddiejackson.net/web_documents/Philosophy%20of%20Money.pdf

1907

Simmel, The Philosophy of Money

"The Concept of Culture"

[ Starting now. ]

Anonymous said...

The concept of culture 

If we define culture as the refinement, as the intellectualized forms of life, the accomplishment of mental and practical labour, then we place these values in a context in which they do not automatically belong by virtue of their own objective significance. They become manifestations of culture to us in as much as we interpret them as intensified displays of natural vitality and potential, intensified beyond the level of development, fullness and differentiation that would be achieved by their mere nature. A natural energy or allusion, which is necessary only in order that it may be surpassed by actual development, forms the presupposition for the concept of culture. From the standpoint of culture, the values of life are civilized nature; they do not have here the isolated significance that is measured from above, as it were, by the ideals of happiness, intelligence and beauty....

-- Georg Simmel

Anonymous said...

Simmel is simply terrific...

Calgacus said...

For Marcuse on Rand: from Herbert Marcuse and the Student Revolts of 1968: An Unpublished Lecture
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/herbert-marcuse-student-revolts-of-1968-ucsd-lecture


[Asked if he would support suppressing any other system of philosophy, such as Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, Marcuse replied:] No. I like, as you know, philosophy very much. I know of no philosophy today which would be a real danger to the existing system or to the change of the existing system in the direction of a better one. I make it perfectly clear that the concept of repressive tolerance has absolutely nothing to do with any censorship of art, literature, music, philosophy or whatever it may be. That is absolutely excluded. I only speak about the withdrawal of tolerance from those movements which have demonstrated their aggressive and destructive character.

Astonishing though for the author of Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory to say that he knew of no dangerous philosophy. Hegel himself knew perfectly well and said many, many times that he was an anarchist throwing bombs under the existing order. That's what philosophy . . . speculative philosophy does.

I think you're too hard on Chase and Marcuse. They might not have been always right, but they were serious and their ideas were much saner than Rand's and more than nostalgia - not that there's anything wrong with that.

There are a lot of things I'm nostalgic about - and think it is a first task of anyone sane to rebuild. Anti-nostalgia-ism for better times of progressive triumph is a tool that the right has skillfully used, especially recently. They do not stick solely to nostalgia pictures of the good old days of right-wing ascendancy.

Veblen thought well of Chase. Chase has an amusing "My Dinner with Thorstein" preface in one of his books.

Sandwichman said...

Thank you, Calgacus! Now to track down Jeremy Popkin to see if he has a verbatim transcript of the question. I have to confess sympathy for Veblen and some of his followers, especially Leacock, Dahlberg and Chase. That doesn't exempt them from rigorous criticism.

Anonymous said...

Astonishing though for the author of Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory to say that he knew of no dangerous philosophy. Hegel himself knew perfectly well and said many, many times that he was an anarchist throwing bombs under the existing order. That's what philosophy . . . speculative philosophy does....

[ Terrific passage. ]

Anonymous said...

Sorry for leaving off the name, this passage was of course from Calgacus:

Astonishing though for the author of Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory to say that he knew of no dangerous philosophy. Hegel himself knew perfectly well and said many, many times that he was an anarchist throwing bombs under the existing order. That's what philosophy . . . speculative philosophy does....

Sandwichman said...

Marcuse's position on tolerance was ambiguous, inconsistent, and incoherent. In "Repressive Tolerance" he as much as admitted so.

Marcuse did indeed make a statement that seemed to propose exactly that: "Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left." The problem with taking the proposition literally, however, is that on the very first page of his essay, Marcuse had already dismissed it with the acknowledgement that, "no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into practice." The proposition, he added, was intended "to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does."

To bring his argument up to date, he would say that if a mob of communists had stormed Congress on January 6, there would have been a bloodbath. Anyone who doesn't understand that is an ignoramus. In the current society, "tolerance" is uneven and skewed heavily to the right and against the left. It hardly requires a 7000-word essay to "open the mental space."

His reply to the question is not entirely consistent with his essay, either. In his essay, he was referring a government power. In his reply, he appears to refer to a situation in which students protest or disrupt pro-war activities, such as military recruitment on campus. He contrasts that with disruption of Adorno's lecture on aesthetics. Does this imply that a Futurist harangue on the aesthetics of war should be tolerated because it is on aesthetics or banned because it is pro-war?

I suspect that Marcuse's star status, in part, fed on precisely this muddle. The student left -- the New Left -- was itself an expression of ideological muddle. Not exclusively, of course. American culture and politics was and is a muddle. The right is even more of a muddle. One cannot climb out of a sewer smelling like a rose.

Students objected to their compulsory complicity with the social injustices that enabled their immense privileges. They took those privileges for granted, or wanted to be able to.

In fact, though, their complicity was not compulsory. They were free to drop out; they were even free to "turn on, tune in and drop out"!

In the U.S., a large part of the perceived compulsion for males came from the student deferment to the draft. The dirty secret is that men didn't have to register for the draft, apply for deferments, and take the deferment qualification exam. They could defy the law. Most didn't.

This gives a new meaning to "repressive tolerance." By grudgingly tolerating the war, the draft, and the middle class higher-education deferment system, students participated in their own repression.

Anonymous said...

Marcuse's position on tolerance was ambiguous, inconsistent, and incoherent. In "Repressive Tolerance" he as much as admitted so....

-- Sandwichman

[ Perfect explanatory analysis. I am so grateful. ]

Anonymous said...

For Sandwichman:

https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/368/368lewistable.pdf

1954

Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour
By W. Arthur Lewis

This essay is written in the classical tradition, making the classical assumption, and asking the classical question. The classics, from Smith to Marx, all assumed, or argued, that an unlimited supply of labour was available at subsistence wages. They then enquired how production grows through time. They found the answer in capital accumulation, which they explained in terms of their analysis of the distribution of income. Classical systems thus determined simultaneously income distribution and income growth, with the relative prices of commodities as a minor by-product.

Interest in prices and in income distribution survived into the neo-classical era, but labour ceased to be unlimited in supply, and the formal model of economic analysis was no longer expected to explain the expansion of the system through time. These changes of assumption and of interest served well enough in the European parts of the world, where labour was indeed limited in supply, and where for the next half century it looked as if economic expansion could indeed be assumed to be automatic. On the other hand over the greater part of Asia labour is unlimited in supply, and economic expansion certainly cannot be taken for granted. Asia’s problems, however, attracted very few economists during the neo-classical era (even the Asian economists themselves absorbed the assumptions and preoccupations of European economics) and hardly any progress has been made for nearly a century with the kind of economics which would throw light upon the problems. of countries with surplus populations....