Duh… Terrorism is an ‘ism’

The entry for “terrorisme” in the 1989 Encyclopaedia Universalis begins: “To terrorize does not mean to ‘terrify,’ to ‘strike with fear,’ but following [the nineteenth centurty lexicographer] Littré ‘to establish terrorism, the rule of terror.” (my translation) This usage of the word originated in the revolutionary government of France, specifically a period between September 1793 and July 1794 when the entire government was subsumed under the Committee for Public Safety, lead by Maximilien Robespierre, and thousands of people were put to death by Guillotin’s beheading machine. This explains why the French still think of terrorism primary as government through arbitrary violence and state-sanctioned murder perpetrated on its own citizens. What we have come to call in English ‘terrorism,’ with its international and domestic (but unsanctioned) sub-divisions, is apparently unrelated, a false cognate.

When we reserve the term ‘terrorism’ for institutional violence directed at domestic enemies, the actions of contemporary bombers and guerrillas appear to fit within the category of crimes. Indeed, even in the contemporary context there are good arguments for describing militant zealots and suicide bombers as criminals, guilty of crimes against humanity, or acts of genocide. It is not clear what the notion of ‘terror’ adds to our understanding of their aims and purposes, save that, like all crime, we fear becoming its victim.

This redescription does not even preclude waging the ‘war’ on terrorism that the US administration coined following the 9/11 attacks: the so-called terrorists of Al-Quaeda are simply war criminals, part of ad hoc and non-territorial militaries who have attacked without a formal declaration of war. In either case (war or crime), we need not have invented new categories like ‘enemy combatant’ or ‘terrorism.’

I usually point to G.W.F. Hegel to justify this alternative typology, since his reading of the French Revoluton is so crucial for me. Using the events of that revolution to critique the work of Jean-Jacques Rouuseau, he perfectly sums up the theoretical conflict that we would come to apply to the Nazis and the Soviets. Terror, for Hegel, was explicitly the weapon of the victorious faction. That is, it was intended to designate an instrument of the state in its claim to represent the general will, based on its failure to do so perfectly. Fear of death, which has been the absolute master from the first encounter between individuals resulted in physical conflict to determine superiority, is not the same as terror in Hegel’s use.

Terror is the specific fear of death by state sanction for opposing the will of the people in thought or action. It is a kind of subservience to the claim of universality that threatens to cause the individual to allow herself to be enslaved in body and mind. In practice, Terror is the result of fatal forms of punishment used injudiciously but in a juridical mode, rather than the gratuitous and random acts of deadly violence unleashed by factions with no state support at all.

On Hegel’s account, it is difficult to see why a suicide bomber would be called a terrorist, except perhaps that they espouse a cause. A politically motivated hijacker is no more than a criminal who, by his methods, denies the very notion of law or universal rule. Without state legitimacy, it cannot live up to the real fearfulness of a power that kills out of suspicion of intention rather than as punishment for an action. The very indiscriminateness of modern-day terrorist fatalities denies this possibility. Much closer to Hegel’s definition of terror would be the fear of being singled out as a potential politically motivated criminal; this fear of suspicion and accusation carries all the significant signs of terror.

Another sort of connection can be made between state-sanction and terrorism, both as a definitional matter and in practice. The myth of an outlaw billionaire mastermind, our current model for Osama bin Laden, corresponds best with the absurd arch-enemies that confront James Bond. Frankly, it is quite impossible to be a billionaire, or even a millionaire, without governmental support. Not only must those millions be issued as currency by nation-states and stored in banks, but they must be amassed with the assistance of political power and against the possibility of taxation or regulation. The weapons and training needed to commit acts of terrorism are only available at the behest, or through the willful ignorance, of nation-states and international regulatory bodies. In the case of al-Quaeda, both bin Ladin’s initial fortune and his subsequent support can be traced to two nations, militaries, and covert espionage agencies: the USA and Saudi Arabia.

In a very real sense, then, the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01 were state-supported, and the ‘rule of terror’ instituted came with the implicit sanction of at least one nation-state: Saudi Arabia. Just as Robespierre, who was convicted and put to death on the guillotine using the same spurious rules he had instituted, did not know exactly what targets would be chosen by the terroristes, but merely gave them the justification that led to his own execution, my claim is not that either the US or Saudi governments expected the most recent attacks. However, part of my argument is that the reasonable expectations of bureaucracies fall far short of those occurrences for which they ought to be seen as the cause. Providing the tools, motivation, and financing for the murder of innocents is a necessary (and perhaps even sufficient) condition for those murders: it is a cause, and not an insignificant or approximate one.

Now, if Hegel’s typology separates criminals from state-actors, and domestic state-actors from international ones, such that all acts of violence must be understood as either crime, state-terror, or warfare, what is the value in this new amalgamation that drives the so-called ‘war’ on ‘terror’? Why move from clear distinctions to murky ambiguities? The answer, I believe, is that we have systematically participated in an error in judgment. By telling ourselves we are fighting terrorism, when in fact we’re waging war, we’ve created a confused set of expectations and restrictions. Basically, we don’t know what we are doing.

It’s that simple: we wage war as if we are enforcing the law; we fight for freedom from mortality and danger, against organizations that do nothing to restrict our liberty, and we savor the irrational fear that notorious masterminds and fanatical bogeymen may be out to get us. In so doing, we separate ourselves from the thoughtful work that past generations have left us to deal with these problems: piracy and the hostis humanitis, suspicion of increasing our own state’s powers for interminable emergencies, and the racial/religious intolerances that only bolster our own sense of righteousness. If the context were Protestants v. Catholics, or whites v. blacks, we’d know that these techniques don’t work. For some reason, we think that this time, for this conflict, we’ve managed to discover an exception.

For the antidisestablishmentarian in each of us

So, if the last post was all vitriol and false hope, today I want to focus on options. Specifically, what’s possible today that was unimaginable a century ago?

1. Communes without communal bathrooms.

Look, the real problem with communism is that half of the population are slobs. Yet the appeal of the commune is the community, the group of folks living and work together, making their own culture primary, raising their children in that culture, and generally having a ball with their isolationism. Basically, you figure out who you like and exclude everybody else. This’d be perfect if it weren’t for the fact that somebody’s got to do the dishes, clean the toilets, and take out the trash. In cyberspace, the strictly delineated individual predominates, and it becomes possible to manage your own space while simultaneously belonging to a community. Of course, these are tenuous, fractious, anemic communities: there’s no flesh-and-blood connection, so everything’s a bit removed. But these are communities predicated on solidarities much more basic than the network of relationships based in proximity. Common interests, common beliefs, and common lifestyles can form coalitions and blocs. We’ll never be a social movement, but at least we know where to go to find a sympathetic ear, a provocative conversation, or a good game of chess.

2. We can eavesdrop on our enemies.

Look, we’re not going to get anything done out here in cyberland. But making friends that are worth meeting in real life, making plans that are worth executing in real life, and finding solidarities that would never have grown up in real life are not bad approximations of getting things done. Moreover, the honesty of millions of lonely bloggers means that, more than ever, we can finally get a look into the psyches of our enemies. What’s it like to be a fundamentalist? Check out his livejournal. How about a racist? They’ve got a web ring. Wanna know what makes child molesters tick? They’re anonymous, but they’re out there. What’s the Republican party planning for 2006? Well, if you’ll check out their listserv, you’ll see….

Most progressives don’t like to do this sort of research, because these are not necessarily the most pleasant heads to get inside of. But believe me, conservatives are doing it: they get a vicarious thrill and a sense of superiority out of reading about our tawdry lifestyles and loose mores. What they learn affirms their positions and gives them plenty of ammo, so it’s probably about time for us start playing the same game.

3. Text is good.

If video killed radio, and the internet manages to trump both without losing out to Second Life, The Sims, and World of Warcraft, we could be in for a resurgent literate age. Literacy is the best possible skill: reading and writing are symmetric, anonymous, and linear. Rhetoric loses more often to logic in the written word than anywhere else. Intelligence and wit are victorious, sensibility and tolerance win the day.

Compared to a world ruled by sound-bites, beauty, false controversy, and the advertiser’s “What I tell you thirty times is true,” the world ruled by the printed word is a reasonable, free, and relatively just. Display the words on computer monitors, hyperlink them and gussy them up with some cool fonts, and you just increasr their power.

4. Islam is going to shake things up.

I’m of two minds on Islam, most of the time. The only culture to resist usury remains embroiled in gender roles and dress codes. They don’t drink, but they relate to the written word as if it were carved out by Allah himself. The tradition of divine untranslatability is a bit scary: it means God speaks Arabic. The Christians (with the help of their own Lutheran rebels) talked the Jews into giving up on the whole divine language thing, which is good. If God only talks the way my forefathers did, there’s a tendency towards a false sense of theological entitlement. If God can speak any language, however, what she’s saying can’t be exclusive.

Anyway, the West needs to figure out how to incorporate Islam, and Muslims are increasingly learning how to live with us. We’ve reached a detente with the Chinese, conquered the Japanese, and driven the Southeast Asians into financial ruin. But the Arab diaspora is situated in the middle of everything that’s interesting about the world: the oil, the money, and most of the world’s remaining undeveloped resort spots. Come what may, I want to spend my fiftieth wedding anniversary in Egypt, so it had better be safe and cosmopolitan, and they’d better be taking Visa. What that means is that we’re going to have to be speaking the same language politically and financially. (I’m happy to learn Arabic in my dotage; just don’t make fun of my accent!) And that can’t just be a one-way transfer; we’re going to have to spend some time working on the lingua franca, the esperanto, that will make the interface between Occident and Orient viable.

5. Engineers are this century’s vanguard of the revolution.

I dunno what the killer-app will be, but I read so many cyberpunk novels as a teenager that my faith in technology’s disruptive powers is unshakeable. Somewhere along the line, somebody’s going to develop a killer political app: some combination of social-networking, cheap gizmos, and hipster cachet that busts the political sphere open. All I can say for sure is that it’s not flash-mobs, and it’s not $100 laptops. But maybe it’ll be a pill that turns your epidermis a lovely mocha color and destroys the last vestiges of racism. Maybe it’ll be a matter-printer that allows anybody to turn junk atoms into Versace watches indistinguishable from the originals, which will destroy the still invasive sense of class. High-yield soy bean seeds, nootropics that poor kids can take to learn Latin and calculus, lie detector TiVos that catch candidates in the act, mass-produced bullet-proof underwear to de-weaponize law enforcement (imagine if Diallo had survived: “I told them to stop firing. Thanks to Fruit of the Loom, they’ll be hearing from my lawyer!”), RFID employment credentials so that the US will recognize its immigrant population instead of criminalizing them.

Of course, the list of troubling state-tech that will make us less free is lot less fantastic: GPS cell phones, face recognition, less-than-lethal chemical weaponry (Gay Gas, anyone?), Amber alerts, terrorist gene testing, content-with-the-status-quo drugs, rigged electronic polling booths, subliminal advertising, and superior air power are all already leading us down to primrose path to self-confinement and democratic authoritarianism. All I can say, is: “Where the danger grows, there also lies the saving power.”

When did it all change?

Look, I’m not one for golden-age narratives. However, it has become increasingly clear to me that things are fucked in a manner unique to this place and time. Of course, there are all new possibilities, novel reasons to hope, that come out of this unique dilemma. But it also seems as if some of the old stand-by solutions are gone. So, without further ado:

1. Revolution ain’t what it used to be.

As somebody or other once said, “You can’t start a revolution in a country without cobblestones. What’ll you throw at the cops?” Though it’s a constant refrain with me, this will be the first time (though not the last) that I’ll say it in this space: we can no longer imagine an old-school regime change in most of the developing or developed world. I don’t care how many riots you incite, how many molotov cocktails you throw, it won’t happen here, or in most of the other places that count as power centers. Perhaps in shoddy third-world countries they’ll throw a cocktail party that looks like a revolution, and invite the journalists and the humanitarians, the political paparazzi and the bankers. But in all likelihood, even in those out-of-the-way places, the so-called revolt will have been predicted by intelligence agents (i.e. spies) and either supported or quashed by the US/Europe. What we’ll watch on our televisions and net-casts, what will be blogged, videoed, op-edited, TiVo’d, celebrated, villified, and ignored, will be a media event: a teleplay with the narrative boiler-plate already written.

Perhaps you’re holding out for an Iranian student insurrection? Fuggedabodit. If it happens, it’ll turn out the major players were trained at the School of the Americas. A viable third party in the US? Nope: it’s all spoilers and flame-outs from here to the horizon. Oh! I know: Chinese democracy? Ha! More like feudal capitalism, with the world’s first-ever state-run open-market.

What’s happened to this place we call home? Where did all the options go? It was technology that did them in: railroads, radios, telephones and televisions.

2. The Internet won’t save representative democracies from their dwindling legitimacy.

If the most cited complaint in a century of American letters is that politics isn’t fun anymore, then the most popular solution in the past twenty years has been the internet. Yet I’ve got to ask: where are our electronic town halls? Why is computerized voting still the biggest boondoggle since the days of Gangs of New York? Why doesn’t my White House answer my e-mail?

Moveon.org and the DFA (and probably twice as many Republican groups) want you to believe that these innovative technologies will change the parties. They want us to think that their little polls and daily talking points mean that we’re closer to the process, that we’ve finally recovered the agrarian democracy that Jefferson championed, only without the slaves and the sunrise wake-up calls.

However, we still live in a society of wolves and sheep, and most of us remain sheep, though all too aware of that fact. This is the worst position for a democracy to be in: if Aristotle is right, it’s the exact opposite of the ideal. Rather than a hard-working society where we’re too busy to realize that the few (the aristoi) are running things, we’ve all got plenty of leisure time (though increasinly less) and a deep-seated sense of alienation from our government.

Frankly, there’s nothing we can do about this. The whole shebang is too darned big. It doesn’t matter what techniques and media you use to aggregate preferences for decision-making: there’s just the one federal government, and every time it scratches, a few million of us citizen-fleas feel slighted. There’s not room for us all to see eye-to-eye, anymore; there hasn’t been for the whole 20th century. Instead, we’ve got the mass-media. First it was syndicated newspapers, then radio, then movies and television, all doing the same thing. We can’t see each other, but we can all listen to the same music and watch the same soap-operas. We all get the same advertisements, and we all drink the same colas.

Meanwhile, the producers of these things consolidate and consolidate. They create monopolies and cartels, and then they merge with each other, until there’s just the two soft drink/sports shoe/media conglomerates. Niche marketing doesn’t mean an end to this asymmetry: it just means that the same companies finally know enough about us that they can drop mass-production without losing market-share or profitability. Nowhere is this fantasy less true than with the political parties. They may have figured out how to retail their message to consumers, but they’re not about to give up the spoils of the two-party system, nor are they willing to seriously broaden the policy debates. If I sound like I’m channeling Noam Chomsky, it’s because he’s right. No point in re-inventing the wheel.

The reason the good ol’ info superhighway won’t make a difference is simple: there aren’t any paving stones here, either. Nothing happens here. The scale of action remains too small: we can do all sorts of things on the local level, get all sorts of support. But we’ve got no mechanism for getting things done that we didn’t have before. New ways to organize, new modes of communication, and even some pretty nifty new ways to engage in collective action. But none of it hits up against the old-style political sphere: none of it makes Kings and Councillors sit up and take notice.

They ignored Seattle, didn’t they? Why shouldn’t they ignore our e-petitions?

Which leads me to…

3. Theorists of justice will remain as ineffective as they’ve been for the last fifty years.

Since the Cold War started, we’ve had a rash of provocative, thoughtful, and wonderfully argued theories of justice. From Rawls to Nozick, from Sandel to Habermas, one thing has remained clear throughout: philosophers aren’t politicans. Good books do not get turned into equally good policies. In fact, most of the good books were written as attacks or apologies on the institutions of the welfare state. After the fact, if you will, they argued for extensions or retractions of this wonderful and frightening system. But so far as I can tell, the last theorist of note that anybody paid any attention to was Walter Lippmann. Maybe John Dewey, if you count his newspaper articles.

Thinking about justice, it turns out, is not a particularly just thing to do. As much as I’d like to believe that the various social movements succeeded or failed based on thoughts and theories, it seems as if strategies and techniques played a larger and more important role. The Civil Rights movement didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know: it just found the right levers to push on (civil unrest and collective violence, mostly) to make us act. Activists of all stripes (fundamentalist and queer, feminist, pacifist, or anti-globalist) have depended on old strategies, and increasingly, these strategies, rather than the theories that justify them, have begun to seem attenuated and weak. Again, it’s a matter of getting leverage, of making things happen, and as even Archimedes would admit, the bigger the world, the bigger the lever required. Justice theorists seem to think it’s sufficient to supply a place to stand.

And…

4. “Reasonable” doubt is the new conservatism.

My colleague Dom Eggert has point this out in his blog recently, and it’s true. Increasingly, political rhetoric is all about “getting to maybe.” Once you’ve gotten there, every decision seems, at least, plausible. So Bush claims to be balancing security and freedom, or NAFTA balances the lost industrial jobs with tech sector gains. Climate change, intelligent design, domestic surveillance, etc. all have one thing in common: there are at least two different ways to look at it. “Opinions differ” will increasingly be administration-speak (both Republican and Democrat) for “We’re gonna do what we want, even if you don’t want us to.” And we bloggers will just fuel the fire by contributing to the doubt.

Phew…. I’m exhausted from this fit of cynicism. Tune in later for some caffeinated optimism.

Justice and Justifications: The Duty to Deliberate and the “Barrel of Reasons”

“I am not one of those who may be questioned about their Why. Do my experiences date from yesterday? It is a long time since I experienced the reasons for my opinions. Should I not have to be a barrel of memory, if I wanted to carry my reasons, too, about with me?” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Lately it has come to my attention that some political theorists would rather not have to justify themselves all the time. Frankly, I’ve never met a philosopher who couldn’t give you ten arguments for his favorite breakfast cereal, let alone for important political decisions. Yet a certain stripe of liberal takes it to be a priori offensive that he might ever be coerced, even socially, to provide justifications for his political positions. A lot of this debate comes out of the deliberative politics discussion, especially the claims made by Gutmann and Thompson that while justifications are required of citizens in order to grease the wheels of institutional design and legitimate self-governance, only some reasons are acceptable.

The restriction on properly moral reasons, rather than on simply selfish preferences, is not obviously offensive. “Because I said so!” has long been taken as an unacceptable sort of reason, and even Catholics can agree that “Because the Pope said so!” isn’t the sort of reason likely to be persuasive to non-Catholics. Even the Pope provides reasons and justifications for his positions in his encyclicals, and it is the mark of a good, thoughtful Catholic to repeat these arguments rather than simply the conclusions. I take it to be the mark of any successful religion that you occasionally concern yourself with persuasion instead of simply inculcating your own youth with the faith through parental and pastoral domination.

So the real obstacle to deliberative duties, it seems, are the libertarians. If freedom is your main concern, then it makes sense that you would prefer not to instantiate a duty to deliberate even if this is in the service of your other liberties. Having to make arguments, as Nietzsche points out, may actually be something of a burden for your average assault-rifle toting survivalist nut-job. Or, I guess, for the exhumed remains of Robert Nozick’s dessicated corpse.

Now my response to this objection may well be a bit ‘prudential.’ (As my friend Steven Maloney argues.) I’m a prudent sort of fellow, though, so I’ve got little else to add. Real libertarian types tend to associate justice with freedom, and so they don’t take prudence as a sufficiently persuasive arguement: this is actually a good move on their part, since I’d say the same to them while supporting a distributive model of justice. But, as the saying goes, “Ought implies Can,” and if your model of the good/free society is plum impossible, you ought to shut up and write crappy science-fiction like your hero Robert Heinlein. And I think it is demonstrably the case that a society cannot survive without coercive measures, and that in fact the least coercive measures would be an enforceable duty to defend your positions. (It’s another thing to say that these defenses should be reasonable or should require reciprocity or mutual respect… but I’m getting there.

This argument is the same one I used to use on my Italian anarchist friends: when the government steps aside, organized criminals take up the slack. Whether it’s the Mafia or the Triads or Hamas, the mixture of corruption and humanitarianism is a lot closer than many think. The leap from mobster to politician is an easy one, and the coercive possibilities of the state must be limited in such a way to make the two identities radically incompossible. Berlusconi isn’t so bad so long as he doesn’t break people’s legs when they don’t pay their taxes.

So, if we’re stuck with the State, (and we are, damnit, because I said so if for no other reason!) then we should try to create a State whose coercions are the least offensive. History seems pretty clear on this: people who aren’t concerned with, say, consistency or rationality like to take power so they can enforce their particular brand of nonsense on the rest of us; whether it’s Papists or Levelers, Communists or Creationists, they’d all rather argue from a position of authority than from a position of reason. We can be most free if we apply the coercive powers of the State in order to assure that the only authority recognized by the majority of our citizens is that of reason. Once we’ve accomplished that, the only duty to justify oneself will be a duty derived from a shared understanding of the basic necessities of communication. At that point, people will laugh as hard when you cite the Bible as they do today when you cite medical research paid for by the tobacco companies.

Apples, Potatoes, Politics: One of these things doesn’t belong

Take the group of things we call ‘apples’. Let’s not get too technical, but merely admit that we mostly know what that word entails, and that we can therefore select members of the group from non-members when we go to the grocery store. We know not to put a potato on an elementary teacher’s desk, for instance, unless she is a French teacher, in which case the potato would serve as a joke: “pomme de terre” ha ha.

What group does this grouping itself belong to? The word ‘apples’ belongs to a number of hierarchically related linguistic groups: nouns, words, etc. Apples themselves belong to a number of hierarchically related biological groups: fruits, plants, things, etc. The sound apples bridges the gap, since it belongs to a special group of sounds called phonemes (meaningful sounds) and then from there bridges off through the physical group to join apples in the realm of things.

In one sense, this is the materialist/idealist problem in a nutshell. Boring, eh? It gets interesting again when we admit that none of these groups belongs to itself, except language. That is, the linguistic construction ‘thing’ is not itself a thing: it’s an idea or somesuch. But the linguistic construction ‘language’ is linguistic. It’s a set to which the set itself belongs. I think that’s cool, but it’s still not very interesting.

When I go around talking about politics, though, I’m actually making a lot of claims regarding this kind of set theory. I talk about the Democrats and the Republicans and I call myself a political philosopher. There’s this French cat named Alain Badiou, however, who disagrees. “That’s not politics,” he argues. It’s partisan wrangling for management of state institutions. Yet if American and European political parties have succeeded in identifying that partisan wrangling with politics tout court, if we’ve come to believe that they supply the only viable modes of political action and devote all our energies to partisan elections, than the set of politics has beeen covered over, replaced. It’s as if we’ve all begun to think of potatos when someone says ‘apples.’ A good trick… and in fact, it’s a political trick. In essence, (and this is a bit more of another Frenchie, Jacques Ranciere) the political set is made up of tricks like this: setting the viable actions and restricting the terms of debate. “Tax relief” instead of “tax cuts.” “Saving Social Security” vs. “fixing the entitlements system.” “Gay marriage” vs. “equal rights.” That’s politics.

The Dems and Reps have been such good politicians that we forget to pay attention to politics, which would maybe be something like campaign finance reform (remember that?) or voting rights for felons, or the institutional requirements of capitalism like the status of regulation as a ‘taking,’ or the relationship between public goods and private property, or the role of common citizens in the habituation of their children. The parties engage each other in these debates, and so a few thousand people spell out the basic shape of the political landscape, and then stage these massive PR campaigns for bipartisan representation as a governmental form. Politically, we’re all of us vegetarians: we’ve stopped thinking that the meat of politics is healthy for regular folks to consume, and left it to the policy wonks and party strategists.

Do you need set theory to say that? I dunno, but the right has made a lot of progress by publicizing their understanding of the true nature of politics amongst the party faithful. That’s the whole liberal media bias meme in a nutshell: demonstrating the various attempts to set the terms of a debate on the part of the left. (I’m thinking of the absurdly named “No Spin Zone.”) Maybe we could use a bit of that, ourselves.