“It was their everyday duty.” –Primo Levi, on Nazi brutality

I recently read the morning paper. I shouldn’t have done that. I also recently read Survival in Auschwitz, by Primo Levi. I shouldn’t have done that either, but for different reasons: it demanded too much grief and asked too many questions. Less recently, I went to a public meeting about a new pet-coke plant that Consolidated Energy wants to put next-to-the-refinery-next-to-the-freeway-next-to-the-asthmatic’s-worst-nightmare. I also shouldn’t have done that, and not just because it involved fighting odious big business practices, but because I never feel as lonely as I do in political meetings where everyone agrees with me.

There is a connection between the shouldn’ts, but that will have to wait.

This time there were about 500 hundred people who agreed with me. They had brought signs and their kids, and also their kids covered in signs that said things like: “Don’t make me breathe dirty air.” The Department of Environmental Quality was leading the meeting, and a sad-looking man behind a microphone was trying to assure people that, not to worry, the coke plant wouldn’t exceed DEQ standards and that - even though pet-coke was the dirtiest residue of the fuel extraction process, and even though it would be shipped across the country in open-air train cars, and even though the area surrounding the refinery already was three times the limit of normal air quality levels, and even though the citizens wouldn’t even get the power that was generated, and even though we did not need another power plant, and even though the world was rife with alternatives - he was bound and obligated to approve it. The man was summarily booed, and by people who had never said boo in their lives before: booed by women with acrylic nails and tiffany heart bracelets next to a man with coveralls and a trucker hat, also booing.

People lined up for public comment, and they were very informed. A tan, blonde mom stood up and rattled off a history of pm2 levels in the region; a man with a thick accent compared EPA reports with reports done by Consolidated Energy. The acronyms came past and furious: GHGs, PM 10s, PPMs, and CO2s.

Then came the asthma crusaders, who talked about lungs, lungs and more lungs. The take-home was this: You give my kid asthma and I will actually kill you.

I appreciated the attendance, the educated responses, the tragic stories of unnecessary illness. But I felt listless and remote from the whole.

First, I had been reading, as I said, too much Primo Levi and, as I did not say, Kafka. I was filled with the goodly fear of bureaucracy, but also an understanding of it. This man, like most of the perpetrators of great evil and unimaginable stupidity, was simply doing his everyday duty. I felt terribly sorry for him. I couldn’t help but see him going home when it was all over, taking off his tie, his kid saying: how did it go? And both the kid and the dad being embarrassed and ashamed because they knew exactly how it had gone, that 500 people hated the dad - not as dad, but as head of the DEQ. And I felt terribly sorry for him because he was up there speaking nonsense that he probably did not believe because it was his everyday duty, because the limits of his job did not allow for imagination or the act of being a human.

I saw in the room the failure of democracy under the banner of the same: a room full of ‘free’ citizens who were not truly free to change anything confronted a ‘regulator’ who, in the name of the law, had to do something idiotic. It was an exercise, a horse running at full gallop inside an equestrian park, with people in the stands betting against themselves.

But nobody was ready to admit that; they insisted on persisting in the delusion that evil acts flowed from evil actions, and that their voice could make the difference but probably wouldn’t - that the failure to change anything would be an anomaly, not a feature, of the civic process. So they yelled at the microphone man, shouting about PM 2.5s, and the man listened and nodded and tried to be friendly but knew he would permit the plant in one or two weeks.

Finally a man stood up and got it right. He said, “Look, we appreciate you fielding our shouts, but I think the problem is this: You are the head of the DEQ. As such, you feel compelled to approve a plant if it falls within the parameters of your regulations. We are citizens, and as such, we want your moral imagination; we are free to say that just because something is legal doesn’t mean you should do it. So we are at odds. But I am telling you to not permit that plant. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, we are better than it.”

I clapped for the first time that night, mainly because my opinion of evil has changed dramatically over the years. I now believe political evil is the result of two things: people doing their everyday duty in a bureaucratic society. If you can make everyone’s jobs small enough that they cannot act outside of them without endangering their job, you have succeeded at making an evil world out of the well-intentioned material of humanity.

The battle that night was not about whether this DEQ man was evil, or even whether Consolidated Energy was. I learned that from Primo Levi, too. If you want to profit from great evil, create a world where everything shows up as a prisoners dilemma: a world in which a person could do good things that would lead to the best results, but - knowing that if she does the right thing and others don’t, her good actions will lead to worse results and she will pay personally for it - does bad things that lead to the worst outcomes instead. So Consolidated Energy is not necessarily evil; it is caught in an outdated, repugnant energy industry that persists precisely because everyone assumes that no one will be altruistic at once, thereby damning individual attempts at reform. The head of the DEQ is also in a dilemma, although his is more the dilemma of bureaucracy than of the prisoner. His job goes only so far as the limits of a regulation, and so he is making everything worse in the attempt to uphold a law that was designed to make things better. Since the law cannot spell out every aberration and he cannot act outside of it, he defaults on the side of industry when faced with a company that would not violate the law but would violate a just world.

And that is the slow, creeping stupidity of a bureaucratic democracy: in saying only the things it can say and doing only what it can do, it cannot say or prevent the basic truth: that we are killing ourselves, that it is already too late, that we will be terribly, terribly sorry someday very soon if we have not forgotten how.

Bureaucracy is too small a space for a human, and fighting it with words of science and sickness is not enough, mostly because no one has ever really been convinced by science. They have been convinced by a story. And that is the reason for the first Primo Levi quote, and why I said I shouldn’t have read the paper this morning, or heeded Primo Levi, or gone to the meeting: because every time I do, I am struck by the smallness of our political language.

Reading a story about what Auschwitz was like was far more unbearable, more starkly compelling, than any statistic or report or could ever be. It was compelling precisely because it required me to ask myself the question: How can I sit here while this story is someone’s reality? Scientific and legal language, on the other hand, while vastly important in deciding how to best respond, is woefully inadequate for motivating people to care, to stop, to change their minds.

Levi said that if the concentration camps had lasted any longer, there would have grown up a foul, blackened language to reflect the reality that happened there. The ideas I heard at the power plant meeting that night, and the words of pundits and politicos and most journalists, are a reflection of the reality of bureaucracy, and they fill the silence created by the death of the medium most dangerous in a democracy: the story.

I believe what people wanted to say at that meeting was: “Look at our sky in the winter! No human can be happy here.” or, “What about this specific bird that I know how to spot and that I love?” or, “Why are we strapped in to this insanity? Why so willful about our own destruction?” or, “Here is my idea for a truly beautiful city, one I would like to live in.” Instead, they spoke in the dry dialect of PM 10s and Latinate lung conditions. I am not saying that the things they said were unimportant, I am saying that the things they didn’t say were much more so. Somewhere in the myopia you realize that what you could never talk about was real suffering, what you could never ask for was beauty, and what you could not confess was the human insistence on self-destruction. What I am saying is that if Primo Levi had gotten to testify about the Holocaust, he would have had to cut out the things that made it one.

And that is why the newspapers are just as bad. I read them until I have to put them aside, or tear them in half and in half again, because, in their plodding adherence to the laws of reporting, they slump into the deadly bias of nationalism, they admit no real suffering and suggest the smartness of cruelty.

Of course Levi has words for that, too. He says:

“Then for the first time we become aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man.”

And he says:

“The need to tell our story to ‘the rest’, to make ‘the rest’ participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character if an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs.”

Now I am not, for example, a Palestinian, and I have never been bombed or trapped or truly hungry, but I hope it’s not presumptuous to believe that if I were, my desire to have my story told right would be as strong sometimes as my desire for food, shelter or safety. But modern political discourse, modern newspaper reporting, out of both everyday duty and the confines of bureaucracy, denies these same people - and millions of others - a story that would demand our fairness, our compassion. And the world goes on, and with it, the needless, unnecessary, stupid violence.

This seems obvious to me, reading the paper. I think it seems obvious to others. What our political discourse lacks is the permission, the obligation to use words that talk about the demolition of a man. But that is also, to paraphrase a friend paraphrasing William James, the live wire amidst all the dead ones, the thing that could spark a conscience back to life. But we relegate the live wires to art, or religion, and hope that will be enough. It isn’t.

One of the best articles I have read was by Chris Hedges during the elections. He was describing why he was voting for Nader, but that is not the point. The point is that he relentlessly described the war zones he had seen as a reporter, and concluded that the story of suffering, perpetually forgotten by the media and what passes for politics, ought to be the language of true democracy:

“. . . I can’t join the practical. I spent two decades of my life witnessing the suffering of those on the receiving end of American power. I have stood over the rows of bodies, including women and children, butchered by Ronald Reagan’s Contra forces in Nicaragua. I have inspected the mutilated corpses dumped in pits outside San Salvador by the death squads. I have crouched in a concrete hovel as American-made F-16 fighter jets, piloted by Israelis, dropped 500- and 1,000-pound iron-fragmentation bombs on Gaza City.

I can’t join the practical because I do not see myself exclusively as an American.  The narrow, provincial and national lines that divide cultures and races blurred and evaporated during the years I spent in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Balkans. I built friendships around a shared morality, not a common language, religion, history or tradition. I cannot support any candidate who does not call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to Israeli abuse of Palestinians. We have no moral or legal right to debate the terms of the occupation. And we will recover our sanity as a nation only when our troops have left Iraq and our president flies to Baghdad, kneels before a monument to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi war dead and asks for forgiveness. 

War, with all its euphemisms about surges and the escalation of troops and collateral damage, is not an abstraction to me. I am haunted by hundreds of memories of violence and trauma. I have abandoned, because I no longer cover these conflicts, many I care about. They live in Gaza, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Beirut, Kabul and Tehran. They cannot vote in our election. They will, however, bear the consequences of our decision. Some, if the wars continue, may be injured or killed. The quest for justice is not about being practical. It is required by the bonds we share. They would do no less for me.”

That is the closest thing to real reporting-the report of human experience-that I have seen in a long time. It uses the whole human language, the words of religion, ethics, friendship, urgency. Present is the very real possibility that we could destroy everything that makes us human. Missing is an analysis of how ‘smart’ the surge is or isn’t, how effectively so-and-so’s campaign has been at creating the right image of it, sheets of statistics on how many have died and when. What Hedges wrote was simply a story that demanded a human reader. It was a live wire between the happening of a great suffering and the cold, partitioned heart of a democracy in bureaucratic arrest. For Hedges, a war does not end when a certain withdrawal strategy is implemented. It ends when people who have almost nothing left get their story back through the expansive language of the politics of friendship.

The newspapers and televisions are full these days with talk about fundamentalism, and democracy as the antidote. Everyone has their theory on it, so here’s mine: ‘fundamentalism’ is a hatred that builds when your story is never properly told. And the so-called democracy we live in is hardly the antidote: it is precisely our unswerving belief in ‘freedoms’ of the press, speech and assembly that keep us from seeing how little we are pressing, how stunted our speech is, and how seldom we actually assemble.

If we are talking about hope these days, I’ve got a worthy object for it: that the words we think will be the words we say, that we will not leave people and places storyless. If moral imagination is the only thing that the citizens have, we should not sell it to talk like the powerful; we should be powerful by talking like ourselves. That is the kind of politics that could stop a holocaust, whatever its changing form.

As I traveled around on my Nader speaking tour this last month, I stayed with a dozen different friends. Every friend I visited wanted to have the same conversation. They were scared because they had entered the adult world of real jobs, real budget concerns, and real time constraints. They were worried that they would never find out what they really wanted to do, or, if they did find out, that they could never make it happen. They were worried that the restrictions and unimaginativeness and sheer drudgery of most organizations would suck their soul and keep them from being the person they wanted to be. They admitted they had a hard time standing up to the structures and managers of the status quo to demand what they really needed or what people in general really needed. They fretted that they were becoming slaves of a paycheck mentality, and that they were giving up their old ideals to be ‘practical’.

In short, they realized that they were becoming the people they said they would never be, and they realized that this transformation did not occur overnight. Adulthood was waging a much more subtle assault on their ideals than they had imagined. They admitted that they thought their moments of defiance would be just that-moments of principle against egregious or unethical requests made by sinister bosses with ominous agendas. Instead, they acknowledged that losing your soul was a very mundane process-that they were losing it in a thousand miniscule concessions, not to overtly unethical propositions, but to generally nice people who were operating in organizations that were supposed to be doing good. It was the nature of the organization, not some sinister plot against them, that was doing the real damage. It was not they were selling themselves to the devil; it was that they were part of generally well-intentioned institutions that asked them to concede certain ideals for the sake of reality, efficiency, or pragmatism. That, or the organization was separate enough from the rest of their lives-myopic enough in its own intentions-that it simply ignored or encroached on their other goals and dreams.

It wasn’t that these people were becoming bad people. It was more that they were professionalizing their dreams, learning to do good in the narrow grooves allotted to them. But what these people wanted was not just to do narrow good, but to be inventive, creative, and collaborative-to connect their goodness with the goodness of others to solve problems in new and holistic ways. That is what they felt that they were losing: the prospect of true creativity, imagination, and collaboration with other minds.

It pained me to hear such creative and powerful people tell me that they felt dull and powerless. It pained me to hear that they were ready to resign themselves to something less than they were capable of offering. I understood the fear, but also felt like I was witnessing a great abdication. I realized that this slow, agonized process of concession was how adulthood happened-how it locked itself in.

But as I listened more and more, I realized several things. First, I became more and more convinced that the reason people forfeit their best selves is not because they are unethical or incapable, but because they are operating alone in anonymous systems that rob them incrementally of their genius. Second, I realized that there were a lot of people who felt lonely and anxious. These realizations might sound dreary, but they are actually the inverses of great possibilities. If it is the structure of organizations, and not malice or lack of principle, that makes them oppressive and unimaginative, then changing the structure of those organizations can free people to become what they already are: happy, thoughtful, ethical and inventive humans. And if there are so many people who feel this way-and if changing the structures is basically an issue of getting enough people to do something different-then the lonely people can band together to create a great change. It isn’t just that enough people working together can change a bad structure; it is also that each person possesses talents and skills that-when combined with others’-can get more work done than one person alone, which makes otherwise unpleasant work joyful and which leaves time for people to do the things they most want to do.

The problem is not that people are not creative and ethical; the problem is that people feel isolated and powerless. Bringing those people together allows them to express their hopes to each other, combine their skills, and develop a new philosophy of living that they can defend together. They do not have to feel like they are a small, defeatable voice asking for outrageous things from bosses who will surely reject them; they can know that they are part of an indomitable group of like-minded people who support their demands and make them possible.

I learned another thing as I traveled from city to city. I learned that I feel burdened by a palpable despair for the world’s problems, and that it builds and builds until I don’t know what to do with it. The despair is potent because there are so many things that demand lament in the world; it becomes more potent when I realize that most of the problems cannot be solved by individuals, or, at least, by individuals going through the traditional methods of changing things. I realized that politics as it stands is not enough. Top-down politics can only provide for justice and restraint: it can feed people and keep them from harming each other (hopefully), but it can’t transform people and places. What I want, and what I feel most people want, is the politics of mercy and joy-a bottom-up revolution of people who speak the language of beauty and emotion and whose intent it is to make gorgeous, color-drenched, garden-crowded cities of happy, sharing people.

And so I have decided: It is time to remember that we are powerful together. It is time to stop deferring our best selves because we happen to not speak in a language that the old powers recognize. If we come together and work really hard, we can have the lives we want. We can combine our skills and efforts so that we have the time, support, and resources to usher in the world we want. We do not have to become the people we promised we wouldn’t. We can change the whole operation, the whole structure, so that we are free to bless the world. Because deep inside our souls are saying what Waylon Jennings said: “We just couldn’t do things the way they were set up.”

I am sure I will be mistaken here by people who will think that I mean a Church or a specific religion or even a belief in a particular God. I do not. What I mean by ‘religion’ is that rupture, that impulse, that demands to be universalized but cannot be codified-that contains within it both the radical prescription for equality and the moment-to-moment-ness of mercy. And by religion I also mean the requirement that someone believe in something more than can be codified, something more than the infinitization of their preference. Because the desire to codify allegiance and infinitize preference is exactly the sinister impulse that produces a State. The opposite-the demand to universalize the subjective by extenuating its circumstances-is the impulse of religion. It is precisely by believing in something more than ourselves that we allow a demand that is larger than our own preferences to be placed on us. Just as the State functions to guard against a too-rapid assimilation of any preference, a God works against and finesses one’s belief in the self-evidence of his preferences.

But to return to the question of Jesus and its political relevance, I must say that it was not enough to simply admire him. One had to believe in him. And I think that still holds, if not in the particular (we do not have to believe in Jesus per se) than in the general sense: first, that we must be transformed rather than convinced by an idea to be powerful and second, that we must see a difference between the idea and ourselves. That gap between ourselves and our ideas is what is powerful about believing in something rather than respecting something. Respect can easily bend toward respecting anything that already accords with our preference. Believing in something other than ourselves requires us to reckon with the difference between what we would like to be true and what is stated as true. Sometimes the former truth will win out, sometimes the latter. That is not necessarily important. What was important-what was true-was the process of reckoning the gap, not the content of the conclusion. A State allows people to line up with ideas that they respect and creates partisanship, gulfs between people that are irreconcilable because they admit no gaps. Religion requires each person to radically examine both the alterity of another person and the possibility of radical similarity (that the same impulses, motives and trials that mold us mold others, too) that allows for union amidst difference. It also requires that we allow every person her archeology-that we try to discover the manifold reasons someone became the person that they are, with the opinions that they have.

And this is my final point-one that will chastise me more than anyone else. I believe that most of the time the political conversation is the wrong conversation, and disagreement-the battles in the so-called marketplace of ideas-is the wrong method. It is the wrong method because it does not ask for the other person’s archeology but argues, instead, against their most recent belief as if a flat sentence could accurately stand in for a complex human. It is the wrong conversation because it believes that facts and arguments change peoples’ minds, and it allows people to assume that their motives are somehow different than other people’s motives. I have thought of this often as I have listened to the fights over Prop 8, and felt that most of us were having the wrong conversation-not, mind you, that the conversations weren’t vital and emotionally necessary to the people making them, but that by pretending the issue was a political issue rather than a human issue both sides made arguments that were completely inaccessible and foreign to the other. I believe that the religious impulse is the desire to discover another person’s archeology so that you can speak in the language that their experiences happened in. I also believe that religion recognizes (and this is where I condemn myself) that history is psychological, not structural. The consequences of history might be structural: they might be bigoted, racist, sexist, imperialist. But religion says that the chances are high that the motives of history are psychological-that they arise from needs that are common to everyone that we distort with insecurities that are common to everyone. Religion requires that we see our own hypocrisy in every bad act, and that we forgive it-not because it is foreign and repulsive to us, but because it is so familiar, because we were there inside it somewhere. Religion requires that we see history as a thousand-million acts of human frailty and alienation that we try, sometimes horribly, to overcome. And so religion must speak differently about justice than politics because it knows that speaking in structural terms is to already misunderstand the human. That is why religion’s response to suffering is guttural: it grieves for the perpetrator and the victim in the same sorrowful sigh.

Religion must confront structural injustices. That was Bonhoeffer’s point. But it must also achieve real peace by wreaking a transformation in every single individual. And this transformation will produce a person who radical knowledge of her own capacity for sin allows her to forgive other sinners without leaving the side of their victims. That was John Thomas’ point.

So what does this all have to do with Elizabeth’s post? What does it have to do with religion being of use or the tension between bottom-up and top-down politics?

Everything.

John Thomas and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were both essentially wondering if religion was, by its nature, necessarily complicit in the structural horrors of the modern world. For example, they might wonder if religion, with its emphasis on radical forgiveness, demands that we forgive-and thereby indirectly endorse-structural crimes? But they were also wondering if religion, by its nature, was capable of solving for that cruelty in ways that politics could not. Thomas’ suggestions about how we can reclaim religion to solve for structural violence in the world might seem laughable to other people. Reclaim our imaginative power? Revive the true meaning of the Eucharist? Many would find these solutions to be delusional and beside the point. They would argue that we must do something more than just that-that we need to demand real justice politically.

So far, my response has been an essay on politics, particularly the way that we have misunderstood politics and reduced it to consensus democracy. Now I want to focus on religion. Specifically, I want to decide whether or not religion is uniquely capable of doing what the State cannot-namely, to usher in and universalize the politics of beauty, joy, and mercy.

Any self-respecting liberal is already well-trained in the appropriate response to religion. It is dangerous, they will say. It can’t be trusted. It is the agent of oppression. It should be separated from the State.

Let’s forget, momentarily, that these criticisms are myopic and hypocritical-that they fundamentally miss the fact that the State is a religion that requires faith, that initiates members, that converts and that does real violence. Let’s forget, too, that their epistemological criticism is wrong, too, and that they have forgotten that there is paradox (and, consequently, faith) at the bottom of all knowledge systems.

What we should not forget is that these people have fundamentally misunderstood the purpose and role of the State-particularly its limitations. The State, as we have discussed, is entirely incapable of ushering in its own logical ‘rights’ revolutions because ‘rights’ are radically unassimilable, subjective claims that cannot originate or be adequately accommodated by a government. The State cannot legislate extenuating circumstance, but the politics of beauty, joy, and mercy is the politics of the extenuating circumstance. The demands for ‘rights’ are actually deeply religious demands. I use the word ‘religion’ broadly to mean the feelings that are based on sacredness, subjectivity, and a non-consensus-based ethic. (The word anarchism could also apply, and does, except I believe that any anarchism that is not rooted in the deeply religious principle of mercy and humility will itself become a State.) A subjective demand originates in an experience of radical emotion or alterity, and it speaks in the language of that happening. It does not speak about money or statistics or codes; it speaks the language of radical equality and effulgence-in the language of what we already are and what we live for. The State can eventually accommodate this impulse into its operations, provided that it gut the ‘happening’ out of it and replace it with legalese. But even when it does that, it cannot ensure rights or freedoms. The only thing that can ensure that is if people continue to radically experience that happening and speak in its merciful language. Rights are only as good as the continual transformation of individuals who then believe in them-whose daily reawakening to that belief keeps the rights strong and real.

Thinking of all this has caused me to revise my notion of Jesus. Once again, the Left comes ready with its accolades: They do not believe in Jesus, but admire him as a radical. They see him as a revolutionary who could have toppled the State.

But I have begun to wonder if there isn’t some necessary reason that Jesus couldn’t have come as a revolutionary in a traditional sense-if there is something inherent in true revolution that makes it utterly different from the State. Reading about Jesus’ life, it is obvious that he did not come to call for any uniform code, but the abolishment of one. His demands on people and his reactions changed with every person because each person was radically singular and each situation demanded a different response. That is why in some stories he bellows against the rich like an organ but, in other moments, allows a woman to buy and ‘waste’ expensive oils on worshipping him. In the former instances, he knew the people were selfish and must become radically unselfish, and so he demanded their money. In the latter circumstance, he knew the woman needed an object of reverence and allowed her a moment of extravagance-of beauty. He was not the grim enforcer of a bland, State communism, but a prophet of an expansive communalism-of people in extenuating circumstances communing with each other.

Jesus’ demands could never have been codified because they were radically singular, mercurial and situational. He knew that making a State that demanded change from people would not guarantee that change but would, rather, ruin it. It would enforce outward obedience, but it would not radically transform a person. But he must also have know that there were other limitations. He must have known that the State, qua State, cannot speak in the language of effulgence and mercy and remain a State. That revolution would have to come from the bottom up, in a series of individual acts that together overpowered the State entirely-a series of voluntary acts of kindness and cooperation and radical recognitions of equality that would eventually render the State useless, non-existent.

But any person who has confronted real suffering feels the obligation not to just personally end it, but to universally end it. The desire to end suffering does not show up in the langue of compromise but in the language of a radical equality that exists before and despite all evidence to the contrary. And that is why Katy and Wilberforce were not human ‘rights’ advocates, but, rather, unassimilable revolutionaries demanding a radical equality that outstripped the language of rights with its attendant freedoms ‘to’ and ‘from.’ In the language of radical equality, there is no freedom ‘from’ the radical obligation to end suffering and hierarchy; the freedom to recognize suffering is simultaneously the obligation to end it.

What I am wondering, essentially, is how we can politically accommodate the subjective. I am wondering, specifically, if we can have a politics of what we live for rather than merely a politics of what we are trying to protect against. Right now we say that we can’t-that the subjective, by definition of being subjective, is dangerous because it cannot find a common language that could be fairly applied to everyone, and consequently should stay quietly in the domain of the personal and not stray into public discourse. But what we forget when we say such things is that the subjective impulse is the universalizing impulse. It is easy to talk of justice without moving anyone. That is because talk of justice uses a language that, by virtue of being common to everyone, is not very compelling. This language is almost always the language of law, statistics and money. But anyone who has heard a person inveigh against war, say, by talking about how much it costs or how many people have been injured know that this is a fundamentally unpersuasive way to speak. It will enrage people who are already enraged and do nothing to people who aren’t. This is precisely because money, statistics, and law are not the language that things actually happen in. They are diversions; they are the ways we attempt to objectify experiences that were deeply subjective. The subjective experience is what compelled us to care in the first place, and what would compel others to care. The whole apparatus of law is the objective extension of our subjective impulse toward mercy. We objectify the subjective because we are afraid to impose our subjective experiences-which could, we worry, be just preferences-on people who might not agree. But when we objectify these experiences to make them fair, we make them common but uncompelling, and we conflate real politics-the politics of beauty, joy, and mercy-with the politics of justice.

I’ll give an example. I loathe urban sprawl, subdivisions and big box stores. I loathe them for many reasons, but the most basic is that I think they are ugly. Since I was very small, the sight of a sprawling, nameless city made my soul cry out. This was not the result of methodical thinking, or even, at first, the result of knowing how much water they required or how many species they destroyed. I simply felt a rupture in my heart, an incontrovertible ‘this is wrong’-or, more specifically, ‘this is ugly’. I have struggled with these feelings for obvious reasons. I was worried that what I found to be ‘ugly’ was just a temperamental preference-a taste-that would be wrong to impose on others. How would I feel, I reasoned, if a person who loved cookie-cutter houses made a law demanding me to build a house according to their preferences? Clearly, I would find that repulsive but, since the whole thing would boil down to preference, I would be unable to argue with the person and the matter would be decided by whoever was most powerful. I didn’t want that. And so I spent years trying to discover an objective grounds for what I already hated. I read book after book about the economic costs of sprawl, the water it required and the quantifiable pollution it produced. I read about how little Target paid its workers and how that affected taxes that people paid to support welfare. I learned and learned until one day, Wal-Mart announced it was going to build in my neighborhood. I couldn’t stand for that! So I organized a group to fight it. And we did. But the basic problem nagged at me: How could I stand up and say what I actually meant-that big box stores were ugly, in their looks and in their treatment of others, and that that is why I didn’t want one in my city. How could I say that what I actually wanted was not to lower taxes or preserve property values but to repaint the city in bright colors, curve the straight lines, and grow gardens on all the rooftops? Because that is what I wanted. I was an artist trapped in a democracy, a wailing pastor trapped in a courtroom. I wanted beauty and mercy in a government that allowed only law and justice.

So we had a big meeting to convince people to vote against the Wal-Mart. I made, of all insulting things, a PowerPoint (my concession to the Way Things Are). This PowerPoint was the average of all my feelings: I included facts about property values and tax codes and zoning laws, but I started with information on sweatshops, sprawl, and pollution. In the middle of talking about the latter, I put up a picture that showed two Chinese people riding bikes out of a black cloud of smog outside a Wal-Mart factory. On the other half of the screen was a picture of Chinese teenagers working in a sweatshop producing thousands of cheap toys. I was talking about sweatshop abuses and environmental violence when a woman raised her hand: “Can’t we get to the point?” she said. Horrified, I told her that yes, we could get to the point if she would kindly tell me what she thought the point was. “You know,” she said, “How our properties will be affected and how much traffic will increase.” And then: “This stuff is nice and all, but it is never going to convince the City Council.”

I have not been able to stop thinking of this experience. I felt devastated. How was it that we could not talk about ugliness and cruelty in politics? How had those been excised out of the political discourse, and why had we agreed to sell our robust ethics for a technocracy? And why was a technocracy-the constricted language of traffic and property values-the only acceptable kind of government? Simply by virtue of being common to everyone?

I was struggling with these thoughts precisely because I realized that democracy, by depending on a common language and placing consensus above even ethics (since its ultimate ethic is consensus)-must ultimately be reduced to a technocracy, where its moral claims are legislated so long in the language of the common that they lose the moral power that democracy was supposed to safeguard. I was wondering if the politics of beauty was impossible just as I knew that for me it was not a choice but a demand made on my soul.

The problem for Katy, Wilberforce and me, then, is that our desire to universalize mercy compels us to universalize that mercy via the apparatus of the State. And that is problematic because the State, dependent on Classical restraint, rules, and uniformity (aka, justice) is capable of universalizing our requests precisely by being that structure that could not possibly accommodate them.

 What Katy, Wilberforce and I want is to universalize our preferences into what democracy calls ‘rights’, which should obviously throw some suspicion on the concept of rights itself. We have been trained to thing that rights are either objectively deducible or self-evident when, in fact, they are neither. A right is not objectively self-evident. What we mean when we say ‘right’ is that it was actually only self-evident to one person-a person who felt some rupture in her being that made an incontrovertible demand on her. That demand itself, precisely by being deeply subjective, demanded to be universalized, and that person’s success at universalizing that deeply subjective demand became what we call a right. If that is true, self-evidence is not a ‘logic’ in the traditional sense but a ‘logic’ in the necessary, subjective sense. A ‘right’ simply means universalizing a preference so that people are not free to go back and argue beyond the starting point. Very few people now, for example, would want to have a conversation about whether or not Blacks are equal to Whites, but that is not because their equality is any more certain or logically self-evident than it was before. It was simply that enough people felt a radical subjective rupture that required them to fight for Black equality, and that this fight-a fight that fought against and threatened consensus democracy in its radical demands-convinced enough other people to experience the same radical subjective rupture that the ‘right’ became collectively inevitable. It became a ‘right,’ in other words, which means nothing but this: that we decided to stop acknowledging that it was actually a preference by drawing a line-the line of ‘rights’-that could keep us from re-entering a dangerously subjective conversation. And we should remember this. A right is actually an aberration in democracy that we misguidedly laud as the logical expression of democracy itself.

(But I also believe that Politics-the top-down institution-is necessary. We cannot simply say that politics should be the sum of our subjective demands. Institutional politics acts a ballast that the subjective person must resist in order to universalize demands, and the act of resistance produces and finesses the real revolution. So yes, the State is a protection against the ‘wrong’ subjective demands, but that protection is not -as we want to say-the point itself. The State is a frustrater of rights, not the guarantor of them. That is, ironically, its value. But any time we begin to believe that the State is actually capable of granting rights, we have missed the revolution.)

First, I have been agonizing about what I a politics of mercy would look like. I have spent months in the belly of the political beast (Washington, DC) working on a political campaign-albeit, a very atypical political campaign-and I have seen again and again the limits of top-down politics.

I remember being in a rhetoric class a few years ago, discussing the differences between Romanticism and Classicism. We were talking about Classicism and its effects on the structures and values of America’s political system. (In case you haven’t read your Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lately, a Classical worldview is one of order and limits, uniformity and law. A Romantic worldview is one marked by subjectivity, irrationality, sublimity and erratic emotion-all things we can’t codify.)

We were in the middle of discussing how these temperaments have influenced politics when it occurred to me: Classicism is the politics of limitation and restraint; it keeps people free from others’ excesses so that everyone can pursue what is actually important to them-the Romantic acts of creativity, love and meaning. Classical, top-down politics is not an end in itself, then, but a structure that tries to prevent one person from gaining so much power that they keep others from pursuing their real aspirations. Classical politics is the answer to this question: What if we are trying to live in harmony but one person abuses the general trust and expectations of living in a group? Classical politics attempts to restrain individual excess to allow for the individual extravagance of love and art. Romantic politics, on the other hand, is what we live for. It is the point itself. It is the freedom to create-beauty, meaning, trust, etc. It cannot be codified because it is the politics of the extenuating circumstance, where every person is singular and deserves a singular reaction.

I am having a difficult time lately, because I work for a presidential candidate who is, for me, the paragon of what is best in top-down politics: justice, righteous indignation, and the desire for equality. But working for a political campaign has also led me to despair over the limits of Classical politics.

Elizabeth: 

Thank you, Joe, for spreading the mental wealth with your free psychological diagnosis of my personality.

You might have found the answers to a lot of the (condescending) questions in your comments if you had bothered to read this blog before asking them. I have supplemented all of my arguments with at least a dozen articles by respected journalists and have provided countless ‘facts’ (put in quotations to prevent you from going apoplectic) about Obama’s advisers and their political pasts, his campaign contributions, his own stated political goals (from his website and his mouth), and Wall Street’s take on his candidacy. But, as is almost always the case with Obama supporters, you have responded with shrill attacks on my character and mental state rather than with counterfacts.

And so I will ask you. Did Barack Obama select Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff or did he not? And is it or isn’t it easy to look of Emmanuel’s positions and actions on NAFTA, welfare and war? And are those actions overhelmingly pro-NAFTA, pro-big-business, and pro-war, or are they not?

Or we could talk about Joe Biden. Has he or hasn’t he consistently legislated in favor of credit card companies? Was he or wasn’t he for the war? And on and on.

Or Barack Obama. Is he or isn’t he getting out of the war in Iraq? Has he or hasn’t he said he supported a border wall? Did he or didn’t he reject single payer healthcare?

These facts are not hard to corroborate, but you (and many others like you) utterly refuse to address them, preferring instead to deal in Freudian analyses about how my desire for people to be safe and respected is some misdirected mother complex or an English education gone horribly wrong.

If you had read my blog, you would know that I do not believe a president has much power. He is (or ought to be) a very limited political person. That is precisely why I always insist that a presidential election serves the same purpose as the medieval festivals that always cropped up whenever the poor started grumbling — festivals that allowed them to blow off steam and then return more subserviently to the same oppressive structures the next day. That is also why I did not take a break after the elections but have spent every day since drafting concrete plans for november5.org, organizing, as you suggested, thousands of artists and citizens to put pressure on Obama and Congress.

In every speech I gave on my speaking tour, I stressed that the president’s powers were limited. As such, I believe that the president’s main role is to set the rhetorical tone of the country. Before you bombard me with a thousand links to Barack Obama’s ‘inspiring’ speeches, let me interject. I am not talking about making grandiose statements on unity and hope. When I talk of setting the rhetorical tone, I mean that it is the president’s job to dispell harmful myths, take responsibility for wrongs, articulate new and just ideas, identify the roots of problems, make corresponding critiques, and — above all — to use one’s power to speak for victims who have no voice in the media, the political process, or the political philosophies that dominate the current discourse. As we are well aware, George Bush used this power of rhetoric to plunge us into a destructive fear that in turn led to actual and horrifying legislation. I believe that the reverse is also true: that the President could use words that demanded more from people –  that led to a wave of peaceful legislation.

This is where you jump in and tell me how Obama has done just that: that he has inspired people to be  unified and good and will usher in legislative peace. I don’t doubt that he has this effect on people, and I am glad for whatever good comes of it.

But my entire point — and my point since my first political post on my other blog months ago — is that I cannot support Obama because he does not take on the philosophies of suffering that safeguard the neoliberal kingdom. When asked about free trade, Obama does not condemn it as a system of exploitation based fundamentally on a disparty of wealth; he says he is for free trade and praises this philosophically-ensconsed greed as if it were the best we could do for the world. Nowhere is there a lament for the workers who suffer to make our clothes (cue Viper on the glories of globalization) or a MLK-esque reminder that human rights are universal, not nation-specific – indeed, that the nation-state is a myth that makes us forget this. When asked about immigration, Obama does not bother to explain that corporations have always depended on an illegal class of exploitable labor (that they then cunningly vilify to keep them illegal) to survive. Nor does he talk about the hypocrisy inherent when immigrants who stole land from rightful owners criticize new immigrants who steal nothing from them. But most importantly, Barack Obama does not use his voice to counteract the million-million epithets that these people have had to endure at the behest of our invisible hand and our smugly jingoistic sense of superiority; nowhere does he remind us of the most obvious and basic fact: that an immigrant is a father or mother who has been thrust into economic despair (most likely by us) and who come here only to lift their children out of that despair. When we talk of war, Obama does not explode the bloody notions of eye-for-eye Statism. He strategically criticizes specific wars as mistakes; he makes the distinction between “smart” and “dumb” ones, but he refuses the brave idea that we could stop going to war at all. But his beautiful “inspiring” words cajole and lull us until we forget what is at stake–until we forget that our buzzed sense of unity actually excludes millions of the voiceless, whether they are such because of the misfortune of poverty or the greater misfortune of not being an American.

Barack Obama similarly does not dispell dangerous myths. He capitalizes on them. If he stood up in a debate and questioned the American dream — if he criticized it as a hopelessly archaic and hopelessly self-centered philosophy at the heart of our environmental/economic crises and our exclusive trade philosophies –I would not only respect him, I would think he was doing his job as a presidential candidate. After all, that is exactly why I support DEMOCRATS like Kucinich and Gravel with no reservations whatsoever. But Obama does not. He says he admires Reagan’s policies. He spouts the American dream in a candied dialogue that is no less sinister for the absence of McCain’s iconic American Dreamer, Joe the Plumber.

As for the dangerous myth of realpolitik, of nation-statism and the utterly accepted violence of balancing (read: overbalancing) power, Obama is equally silent. He scales it back like we like him to, choosing George H.W. Bush as his foreign policy ideal rather than George W, but his foreign policy rhetoric is essentially the same: he bandies the word terrorism around with the same ideological caprice, supports the overall motivation for and execution of the war in Iraq, and–after a few ceremonial nods to diplomacy — leaves untouched the whole idea that we must live a Hobbesian nightmare on a national level in order to live our pastoral ideals on a personal level.

To remove any vestiges of confusion I will state my point for the hundredth time: I want a president who will speak to the suffering of the voiceless by criticizing the philosophies that allow us to legitimize our greed, superiority, and violence. Ralph Nader does that, and so I support him. Obama does not, and so I do not.

Apparently, this makes me a racist. Beyond being confusing (I will refrain from re-asking why it is racist to demand that someone fairly characterize the plight of Palestinians, Iraqis, immigrants, sweatshop workers, poor farmers, and resistance movements in South America), I will merely suggest that if I need Black intellectuals on my side to make me legitimate, I would prefer to take my cue from the reporters at the Black Agenda Report, who have tirelessly and actually advocated for Black causes and who have been intensely critical of Obama’s campaign throughout the elections. You can read their excellent and most recent take on the elections here.

Or, if it is still possible for a white person to make an acceptable critique in this ‘historical moment,’ you could read John Pilger’s recent analysis here (please do read it).

And thank you for your education suggestions, Joe, but I have already taken post-colonial literature classes. That is why I am acutely concerned with the voiceless many that have no clout or narrative at all in our political discourse — people like the immigrants who die in the desert, or the victims of CIA-backed death squads all over the globe, or the millions of other people who have been the unhappy recipients of our sugar-coated neoliberal violence. I am sorry that a few abstract phrases cannot fill that narrative void, and I am sorry if I do not believe that an amorphous and vague hope will get people to make (and then correct) the connections between our political philosohies and the real violence they sponsor. My post-colonial literature classes have also helped me to make the comments I made above: they have made me aware of the ways that the white power structure will continue to exert its power even as it turns the forms of power over to its ‘enemies’. Your criticism of me as a white person speaking for Blacks falls into the same camp as those who howl against racial epithets but not not care about structural racism. Instead of asking why I would dare to speak for Blacks, why not ask why white Wall Street magnates are speaking for Obama? That seems to be the more important criticism. And besides, I have traveled around the whole country talking to Black communities. At each stop, I told them how uncomfortable it was for me to act as a killjoy for their excitement — how uncomfortable I was about speaking to them. But I also said that my goal was to be honest about the facts as I saw them BECAUSE I respected them. We had lots of good conversations, in which most of them openly admitted that they did not feel Obama stood for them. But even if they hadn’t, why is it my job as a white person to stop making criticisms of racist systems? I never said that election night was not meaningful to Black people or that I couldn’t understand why it would be; I said that my allegiances were not to hype but to actual equality. And I would never doubt the power of a narrative. I believe that if Obama ends up becoming the president that people want him to be, it will be largely because of this powerful narrative we have told ourselves. But does that bar me from pointing out that I think the narrative is not based on fact? It shouldn’t.

None of this is fundamentalist. This is empathy for human suffering that rejects the philosophies that say I must condone it. It is not an opinion I have recently developed. It is the way I have always felt. Ever since I was very little, I remember turning on the television and wondering what all these suited people were talking about. It didn’t mean anything to me because I felt they were missing the point. I still feel that way. The only difference now is that I know that there are actually politicians who are willing to speak in a way that gets to the point, and that out of relief and respect and a real sense of hope I must vote for those people.

If you asked me, I would tell you how much I have personally agonized over the subtleties in this election. I have written at least fifty single spaced pages in my journal about it, and I have spent hours arguing with people on my own campaign about the issues. Just yesterday I had a long conversation with a co-worker about George Bush’s motivations and whether religious people have an obligation to forgive him.

It is not that I am unwilling to be subtle. It is that I am angry that I must constantly defend a minority idea against a smug, self-assured majority that tells me that my ideas do not even count, which does not do much to encourage subtle conversation. If you are so concerned about inequality and exclusion and histories of oppression, you might take some time to understand how third parties feel about elections, or how people who vote for third parties feel about a person who finally represents THEM. But third parties, apparently, are not worth our empathy and do not get their historical moments. Instead, they are asked by the very people who have slandered and dismissed them for months to buck up and act excited when the person they don’t want to win, wins.

Joe,

The final triumph of a white corporate power structure is to get a minority face to front for the continued racism of the white corporate power structure. The powerful know that the image of equality–the face of it–will have such a powerful affect on people that they won’t even think to ask about real equality.

Real solidarity means solidarity with the disenfranchised (racially and economically) no matter what. This includes solidarity against an aesthetic equality that has no basis in the real political economy. Real solidarity is not narrow, it is expansive. It’s echo chamber is the echo chamber of history. If it is purist, it is purist in only one thing: it will not abide the suffering of the weak at the hands of the powerful.

I do not believe Blacks won on November 4th, and so I will not rejoice. I believe the corporate power structure won. It won in several different ways. It won by manipulating racial despair for its own gain. It convinced millions of people, black and white, that they were witnessing a revolution. From all the available evidence, however, they were not. Whether you choose to look at advisers, contributors, or Obama’s own stated goals and policies, the disenfranchised were not getting the People’s President. You want me to say that they were, and rejoice alongside you. But I cannot and do not believe that, and so I won’t.

I believe that November 4th was an unprecedented triumph for brand democracy, a politics that trades the actuality of equality and revolution for its images. It is not surprising, then, that the architects of brand revolution used the ultimate political aesthetic–a cosmetic Blackness–to cover the advance of a structural and economic racism.

But the final victory is even more insidious. With the ascendancy of the first Black men to the presidency, the corporatists can now silence their critics by calling them racists. By putting a Black man between themselves and their crimes, they have virtually ensured themselves immunity from critique and breathed new life into a racist system that might otherwise have imploded.

It is a victory we should know well: take a country in crisis; whip them into an angry frenzy; cunningly divide the structural (economic) problem from the political solution and offer a highly-visible aesthetic antidote that in no way threatens the powers that be. We saw this in South Africa, when the corporatists used highly-visible political freedoms for Blacks to distract people from a continued policy of less-visible but devastating economic racism. And what was the result? A politically “free” South Africa that, for minorities, is no more free than before.

But we don’t want to learn from history.

When Ralph Nader appeared on Fox News, he used the phrase ‘Uncle Tom’. This is seen as a racist term. In fact, the term is used to criticize the white power structure. It is used pejoratively precisely because it sees Black subservience to a white power structure as deplorable and traitorous to Blacks as a whole. To quote from the Wikipedia definition, it is a term “used to describe black people whose political views or allegiances are considered by their critics as detrimental to blacks as a group.” The point of using the phrase is to criticize those whose opportunisim has led them to abandon their solidarity with the disenfranchised. In other words, it means exactly what Nader was suggesting, which was this: that Barack Obama has opportunistically allied himself with a largely white corpocracy at the expense of solidarity with the Blacks he has consistently claimed to represent and understand. The fact that this duplicity occurs under the banner of “unity,” “post-racialism,” and a “historical Black candidacy” is no accident. Those are the tools used by the powerful to distract the people from what they are losing.

All this should be obvious, unless you have come to believe that we have conquered structual racism and now need only to fight the battle against racial epithets. Americans’ response to Obama’s candidacy, along with their subsequent responses to Nader’s comments, indicates the depth of their delusion. They are willing to flay Nader relentlessy for making a racist statement, but they rejoice in the streets in the name of a Black candidate who–according to his own stated policies–will make people of color miserable all over the globe. All this, and you have the audacity to tell me that it is my job to drop my fight and join with you in happy delusion–that I must be racist or condescending or purist or something worse if I cannot abandon my principles to worship an image.

I am sorry. My thoughts are with Iraqis who will wake up tomorrow to more bombs. My thoughts are with Afghanis who will see an escalated war and more bloody wedding parties. My thoughts are with Palestinians who will see more walls and less food. My thoughts are with Mexican farmers who will starve for NAFTA’s sake. My thoughts are with the species that suffer when we drill them from their homes. My thoughts are with the thousands of people who will get sick and die because they can’t afford healthcare, and with the immigrants who do our work and receive only our slanders. If you can give me a reason for my thoughts to be elsewhere, let me know. Until then, I will not look away.

As for the Black community who supports Obama, I can only quote Malcom X: “You don’t stab a man in the back nine inches and pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.” Or I could quote Martin Luther King, despite his posterity: “A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies… A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’ …The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

People always thought Malcom X went to far. Now we praise him. But what we don’t remember is that many people thought King had gone too far. They asked him to stop pushing it, to stop taking his critiques to their natural frontiers. They asked him to settle down and work with more moderate groups. But he wouldn’t. And that’s exactly why I admire him and exactly why I don’t admire Barack Obama. (I am sure you will say Obama is against wars. But Obama, in his own words, is only against “dumb” wars. Martin Luther King had the courage to say that all wars are stupid, and to connect war with a deeper economic imperialism. If Obama did these things, I would be with you in the streets. But he does not.)

I don’t pretend to know more about Black people than they know about themselves. But I will speak up when I think that any group’s despair is being manipulated so that the powerful can continue to harm, and that is precisely what I think is happening. I am not suggesting that Black people are not capable of thinking hard about their vote. I am suggesting that any self-identified group, particularly if they have suffered a good deal, is in danger of confusing that history of suffering with the intoxication of great change. I say this as a Mormon who sat and watched as droves of “my people” voted for a Mormon candidate who directly threatened the peaceful principles of their religion.

I would say that I believe we will look back in sorrow and regret on this election. The reality, however, is we won’t. Barack Obama will probably succeed at getting us to slide center a bit. He will not correct gross wrongs, or question the fundamental sociopathology of the modern nation-state. He will simply get us back to the pre-Bush years, in which our excesses were tidily contained in the philosophies that justified them and most people were politically bovine and satisfied. I am sure that most will look back on Obama’s presidency as a great success, a second Camelot of Kennedy-esque proportions. But that is no comfort to me precisely because I fear that the majority of people–political commentators and philosophers above all–are comfortable with an astounding degree of violence and terror. The problem with Bush was that he pushed the natural terror of the State out of invisibility–which it depends on–and into the light. If we can push it back so we do not have to see it, most of us will move on. And Barack Obama will help us do that. But I will not move on, and I hope other won’t either. I hope they won’t move on because there are millions of unvoiced others who, as direct recipients of the “acceptable” violence of the nation-state, will not have the luxury of that choice.

We have entered a catatonic kumbaya–the prayer of the deluded that is deaf to the howls of the excluded.

I leave with an image from election night. On a lighted street, crowds of screaming people banged pots and pans, hugged and kissed each other, and shouted: Everything is different! In the corner of the same street, seven black men slept on cardboard in front of a glassy store, pulling ratty blankets over their ears to avoid the noise.

Watch it before you vote.