4.08.2007
Army of Altruists - Getting Back to Our Discussion on Identity
There was an article in Harper's a few months ago that essentially argued that the military is an institution where working class Americans can fulfill the need to help others and lead meaningful lives. I think you should be able to access the article at: http://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/0081344. If not I can possibly create a link to the PDF. Perhaps you've already read it. In any case I think it's quite interesting and it fits well with some of the discussions we were having earlier. If you agree with the author's (David Graeber) argument then it seems that creating institutions that facilitate the construction of a meaningful life in a non-militaristic manner is a worthy goal. Not to dredge up a topic that we have discussed to great extent in the comments section of another post, but it does seem that among the democratic candidates Kucinich is making proposals that move in this direction. The military offers a powerful myth/narrative in which one accomplishes great things, travels the world, and positions one's self to access a desirable career. It seems that offering other opportunities/narratives for accomplishing this is something that should be explored further.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
19 comments:
Ok, DM; I've been holding off asking this for a while, but if you're going to bring up Kucinich again I feel I have no choice: If you support Kucinich so much, what have you done about it? Have you contributed to his campain, whether in time or money? If not, how come? The dem party leaders you say are in thrall to corporate cash...your donation to K's campaign would sure help break that dependance, no? Obama got tons of press the other day when he announced he'd made a ton of money from 100,000 donors, 40,000 more than Hillary. I'll bet there are 100,000 Kucinich supporters in the county; if they'd all given money I think that would be seen as pretty big political news and a sign that Kucinich is a more serous contender than he's gotten credit for. You've defended him by saying that all politicians say strange things; K is being ignored because of his policies; the trolling for dates was a desperate last attempt to get the media to pay attention to his very serious message...so obviously you're working to help him get that message out there, right? You registered and posted a diary advocating K and explaining why Kos was wrong on DailyKos (you do know that this is a community site, where, if you think "ugh" is a weak answer you can respond to it in a couple different ways, right?) You've been diving into the comment boards on different sites to put the word out about your guy? You haven't heard him mentioned on All Things Considered...ok, you've got some decent connections (better than mine, I'd guess) so you organized a letter writing campaign, right? I would think that if NPR received a whole slew of well written letters from faculty and students at some respected institutes of higher learning, that would merit at least a brief mention after the traffic reports.
It must be terrible to be Kucinich at the fund-raising dinners he's certainly obliged to hold: "So you support my policies regarding leaving Iraqi oil rights to the Iraqis, right?" "Well, yes, but I really find engaging in party politics problematic...it's just kind of square to support a major party candidate...I'm more into local anarchist action...good luck with that national campaign, though." If the typical Kucinich "supporter" doesn't support being engaged in party politics, then Kucinich would be screwed even if he wasn't such a flake.
The potential for direct democracy is greater now than it has been in a long time; if you support some one or some position, work for it; there's no excuse for just griping from on high.
As to the actual subject matter of this post...I haven't read the article you linked to yet, but offering up non-military options for people to travel the world, accomplish great things and position oneself for a desirable career is something I wholeheartedly support. Obviously for me, my the two years in Peace Corps was a really incredible and formative experience. I've often thought that if every American had to spend at least a few months (and preferably a year or more) overseas (and doing something more than drinking your way across Europe with other Americans), then a lot of the problems in the world might get solved--or not exist in the first place.
I think it's significant that the Iraq war was started by a handful of politicians who had probably the least experience of living and traveling abroad of any presidential cabinet ever (certainly since America's been a major player in world affairs). And I think that the typical American's stunning ignorance of and indifference to the rest of the world was critical in the war being as widely supported as it initially was.
The subject of some type of national service program, of the sort that a lot of European countries have, comes up every now and then on the lefty blogs, and it's usually supported by all, at least in the abstract--obviously the exact form of such a program would matter immensely. I'd certainly like to see something of this sort take place or at least be placed on the national agenda for further discussion.
I think that's pretty harsh, TN. DM can certainly support K without doing all the things you've suggested. In a small way he's done it even by bringing K up; I had completely forgotten about K's existence.
It's likely that I'm less involved in politics than anyone else here. I vote (although I missed the last election) and very occasionally donate very small sums to political causes I agree with. I don't usually cross picket lines, and I try not to support companies that I think do politically obnoxious things. That's pretty much it. I've always felt a bit guilty about this, but have never quite managed to figure out why I have such a distaste for political involvement (cool anarchist book-fairs are certainly not the answer, however, at least for me). Being able to walk away from politics is perhaps a middle-class luxury... but even issues that affect me very directly, such as the ridiculously high and regular UC tuition increases, I have a hard time getting involved with. If I were to paint myself in the best possible light politically, I'd say I'm dedicating my life to teaching people how to think carefully and communicate clearly, and that this should have good political repercussions. But maybe I'm just complaining from on high. (how was that for a diversion from the post's topic?)
DM, I agree the general thrust of this post (though I haven't read the article myself yet). I still think K is a bad voice for these types of causes; he has set himself up to appeal to a relatively narrow section of society, while I think these causes should appeal to a very broad section of society.
Oh, and for what it's worth, four years ago I remember hearing about Kucinich pretty regularly on NPR-based stations (mostly "Morning Edition" and "Air Talk," which were on during my morning commute).
First off, I do think it would be nice to discuss this article in a little more depth as it is actually a bit more complicated and interesting than I indicated in my original post. Graeber argues that the right has been far more successful in appealing to values than the left and this accounts for their success. Graeber (the author) is also an academic (an anthropologist) who is heavily involved in political activism (although I'm not sure exactly how), which brings together a couple of other themes we have been discussing. And he has written a short (around 100 pages and pocket sized) book on anarchy which might be worth eventually addressing.
The Peace Corps was also the first thing that popped into my mind after reading the article, but in some ways it is an elitist institution in the sense that one does usually need to have a 4 year degree and the ability to go a couple of years without making any money. I'm also not sure if the Peace Corps necessarily solves the need to help others as many Americans don't necessarily include poor brown people living in other countries within the category of people that they find it meaningful/satisfying to help. A political movement that provides a means of satisfying one's desire to live in accordance with one's values must also take steps towards actually defining those values. This is the genius of the political right. They provide both the ideological system (evangelical Christianity) and the corresponding set of action (military service, heterosexual marriage, etc.)
I appreciate TN's continual calls for more concrete examples of new values and myths that the left could potentially unite around. I feel like we are certainly moving in that direction particularly with transcritique's discussion of the byrds, but of course this is not an easy move to make. In my mind a cohesive system of value, symbol, and action would be emerge out of ongoing dialogue. The important thing here is not undermine this dialogue with the assumption that it cannot amount to anything. I think many of us can relate to A's distaste for party politics and anarchist book fairs. The difficulty is in finding something more tasteful (and thus my original discussion of aesthetics) that also has relevance for enacting change at the level of economic policy. I'm not sure if anything we've discussed so far quite fits the bill. Green Medallion mentioned community gardens at some point. I like the idea of gardening.
I think I will respond to TN's comments on Kucinich and fund raising back on the original Kucinich discussion as I still hope we can get into Graeber's article here.
The article seems only to be available to Harper's subscribers. Could you post it somewhere, DM?
I think my distaste for politics might have to do with an over-emphasis on the aesthetic element. I have no real interest in how politicians market themselves and puff themselves up, and I feel like that's 90% of what I read about in the papers, especially around election time (as a result I think I read the papers _less_ in the months leading up to November). I find most campaigning insulting.
The blame still lies partly at my feet, though; the information about the "important stuff" such as policies and the reasons behind them is certainly available to anyone who makes an effort to find it.
I think this may take you to the article: http://www.mediafire.com/?0iy13yinotg. Let me know if that doesn't work and I'll try something else. Everyone else seems to be able to just make these nice links that you can click on and they take you right where you need to go. How do I do that?
Go to the "new post" and click the "help" link in the upper right hand side; the explanation for making links in under posting basics, I think. I don't know if it's because I'm using Safari or something else, but there's supposed to be some toolbar that you can use to make links real easy, but I can't do that and instead have to cut'n'paste a lot of html bullshit (which is also explained on the help page).
In general I'm kinda frustrated with the basic blogger template...I know there's a lot of nice features you can add/use, but don't know how (well, am too lazy) to set them up. Somebody should really take the initiative on that.
I read the article. I can accept the claim that some people join the military because they want the opportunity to do good or be a part of something bigger than themselves (Although, interestingly, none of the people I know who joined the military gave these reasons for joining. Also, the marketing slogan "I am an army of one" that the Army uses certainly seems to cater to egoism in the sense of having excessive regard for oneself). I also like the suggestion in some of the other comments that there should be a sort of Peace Corps that is as accessible as the army is. I think many people have altruistic urges that are frustrated, to the detriment of our society.
The claims about how the right appeals to voters by appealing to certain values in a particular way are hard for me to evaluate, mostly because I don't follow politics enough to get a feeling for whether the claims are true or not. I'll think about it some more.
(Feel free to skip the next paragraph which contains somewhat tangential stuff)
I have quite a few gripes about this article--well, mostly the first half of it. For instance, Proposition 1 seems just plain false to me. Counter-examples seem fairly easy to conceive of. He argues for it a little, but the argument is fairly roundabout, and depends on a number of really questionable assumptions (for instance, he seems to assume that if a society doesn't have a word (e.g. "altruism") for something, then that thing does not exist in that society). I'll spare you all an essay, but I really do think his reasoning is pretty consistently awful. All this flakiness is really too bad, since he does have something to say that I think is worth saying.
I read over the article today after lunch, I can't remember the details now but this clarifies the role of values DM has been asserting for me quite a bit. It provides a useful contrast between left and right and pin points the heavy responsibility of the left's inadequacy in inspiring identification with its values. This military as mass altruistic service vs a university of liberal elites further points out an institutional opposition and a history of these institutions roles in the development of the inequalities we find in the present. I think this opposition also makes clear some of the common ground TN and DM share. It may introduce a starting point that allows us to critique the liberal elites sequestered within their Ivory Towers (where we can imagine they enjoy using unclear language and getting off on outdated French Theory) for turning their backs on the wider population while at the same time pointing to a need to offer a set of values that can bring an end to the right's enrichment through intensified inequalities. Our shared frustration with the inability of national politics as they exist today to execute any positive change, (and in particular, as TN identified, those needed to confront the coming global environmental crisis produced by global capitalism), further points to a failure to present a set of values by the forces opposed to those of the right. I think these common factors born in the failures of the left point to a very productive set of concrete possibilities that we can develop, at least for ourselves, without having to reproduce the values (and their corresponding language) of the right. In fact, this presents an opportunity for us to think about the many forces at play and, for me, the increasing need of the multi-target mode of critique I keep returning to. That is, we need to keep the heat on the fascists and expose all their inequality (defined here in its most abstract, general sense) producing practices, but don’t let the liberals and lefties get away with murder just because they are the only alternatives. I wanted to say more, but I will return to this later.
I don't have the energy to get into this in any detail now, but, for what it's worth, I think that there already are pretty clear and consistent left/liberal values that are as relevant now as ever. They haven't been articulated or acted on anywhere near as forcefully as they should've been in a long time now, and there's plenty of blame for that to go around: the democratic party establishment, the academic left, the advocacy groups and unions, the folks like myself who don't do as much as they could to support these values all share in this.
But I don't think there's necessarily any need for dramatically new values or language, though. Do you? That's kinda the vibe I'm getting from your comment. I think this would be an interesting argument to address...I've been meaning to do a post laying out the values I'm coming to this blog with (though it's probably pretty clear anyways)for awhile...maybe this weekend.
It just occurred to me that another way that the right maybe appeals to people's desires to do good is in its support of certain programs that provide support for religious institutions. I'm thinking of school vouchers (which may be used to send your kids to religious schools) and some of the programs Bush promoted a few years ago that allow churches to get funding for activities or projects that are deemed appropriately secular. The left typically resists these programs on the grounds of separation of church and state or that the programs unfairly distribute resources. Yet religious institutions, for many people, are the most viable outlet for their altruistic motivations. So the left appears to be--and maybe is!--frustrating people's desires to do good.
In general I have opposed these sorts of programs, but could see myself getting behind them if they were done in a way that was fair and clearly beneficial to society. Perhaps the left should, rather than oppose these programs, offer alternatives to the Republican programs. They should say "that's a great idea! But we've got a better way to do it."
Perhaps I'll comment on A's recent thoughts later, but there was something I read in the Sunday times that made me think of our discussion about values. Speaking at a gathering of all the Republican candidates in Iowa, Mitt Romney said, "The Republican party - and conservatism generally - are a philosophy of strength. Military strength, economic strength, personal strength, and family strength." We could probably pull apart this comment and show that Romney's use of the word strength is more or less meaningless. However, it does convey a subjective feeling. I think what Romney is doing here is a typical manipulation of the aesthetic dimension of politics. Strength is a symbol and Romney is saying that it is good and beautiful and associated with being conservative. The meaning of "economic strength" is irrelevant as long as it evokes a positive feeling in the audience.
Tigrenoche has claimed that the democratic party already has a language and values that can be used effectively within this aesthetic dimension of politics. I'm not so sure about this. Although there is something unpleasant about such blatant manipulation of symbols like "strength" or "freedom" it is a necessary and probably desirable aspect of politics. I wonder what distinct values the left has articulated.
I was actually thinking that one of the big flaws in this article, and the division he tries to set up between the right and the various outlets for altruism (church, army) it offers vs. the left which ony provides more selfish, individualistic identities (get a liberal arts degree and become an artist, e.g.), is that there's this whole field of work that he doesn't mention, which employs tons of people, called the social services which is predicated on some notion of altruism and whose employees tend to skew very liberal. This is obviously a sector of the economy that I'm pretty familiar with, and while there are tons of religiously minded folks involved in these lines of work, and quite a few socially conservative types (mainly church-going blacks, in my experience), in general I'd guess that only college professors lean left more consistently. Part of the liberal skew in this field comes down to demographics--minorities and women are vastly overrepresented, and once you count in nurses, you're looking at probably one of the more unionized sectors of the economy. While obviously some social service jobs require a college or graduate degree, there's quite a lot of lower level jobs that don't or that are entered through trade/vocational schooling. Anyways, I may have more to say on this later, but I think that not taking into account this line of work really weakens the argument he's trying to make.
And, A, to your last comment--the other thing with the vouchers and various "faith-based" initiatives that Bush and the R's have started up in the last six years is that most independant studies of the work they've been doing have shown them to be very ineffective and tend towards the conclusion that they're really just a way to financially reward churches and organizations that support republicans. So in addition to just opposing such stuff on separation of church and state grounds, you've got corruption and poor performance as well. I'm not super dogmatic about the separation of church and state stuff, but I think for now we just need to assume that anything the current administration tries to do is going to be corrupt and incompetent, and should be opposed for that reason alone.
And obviously, the last two comments by "sandra" were actually by "Tigernoche." I always forget to check that first...
If social work and the army do indeed serve similar goals, then the contrast becomes very interesting. One difference is that the army pays much better for a person without a post-secondary education. The army is also associated with masculinity while social work is often perceived as a feminine profession. While these differences are important they don't explain why the military is associated with the political right while social work is associated with the political left. If both are seeking to help others, then why such different political positions? Any thoughts?
TN:
Well, I'm certainly not for the existing faith based initiatives. It seems to me that they might not be inherently bad, however, and that if they are not inherently bad then the correct way to attack them might be to embrace the general idea of the programs (which appeals to people's desires to do good) and propose alternative ways of running them. This approach might be better both rhetorically and policy-wise. I don't know about this approach myself (note all the "might"s above) but it seems worth considering.
DM:
I think part of the reason I resist the talk about "needing a new language" is that I'm not always sure what is meant by it. If you mean that the left needs to present itself in a different way, then I agree with you fully. But it certainly doesn't follow from that that we need to value different things from those that we do value, or that we literally need a new language or new words. I value things like fairness, happiness of myself and others, security for myself and others, and so on. I know you don't yourself think these are bad things, but your posts seem to imply that there's something fundamentally wrong with the values we do have, and these are some values I do have. Since I know you're not an evil person, there must be something I'm missing.
And re. the "strength" rhetoric... it makes me sad that it is apparently effective. It is very subtle: Nobody would argue that strength isn't good, yet there is something more implied by this rhetoric. What that something more is is hard to put your finger on, but I think it's a sort of bullyish aggressiveness that some on the right find attractive and most on the left find repellent. You can't argue directly with it since you agree with the literal meaning of it.
There was a short thing I read somewhere about this sort of rhetoric. I'll find it and post it in a new thread.
A couple random points...
DM--actually, I don't know that the army pays that much better for someone w/o a post-secondary ed. Check out http://www.goarmy.com/benefits/money_basic_pay.jsp which gives a median range. I figure this doesn't take into account room and board, which help a lot...but then even with room and board, less than 20k/year is pretty low considering it comes with a very high probability of active duty in Iraq.
Another point I wanted to make with regard to the original Harpers article is that I have to wonder how accurate the survey he cites of soldiers having altruistic motives is. I'm sure it applies in a lot of cases, but it's also true that saying you joined to help others sounds better than saying you joined to get college money or challenge yourself and a lot better than saying you joined to kick Iraqi ass. There's a statistical term for this sort of survey error that I can't remember...I'd imagine that most people joining the services have a variety of motivations for doing so, some noble, some selfish.
As to why the military is traditionally more associated with the right, well, in part it's because the officer class does skew very Republican, and they're the ones that end up as spokesmen for the military. My understanding--read about it awhile back, could probably find the source if challenged--is that the enlisted ranks are pretty representative of the country as a whole in their political leanings. So part of this perception is an illusion. But also some of the appeal of joining the military I'm sure does come down to the ability to blow shit up and be really tough, which are things that typically appeal more to a right than a left wing mindset.
This perception of the military as right wing is also in large part a legacy of the '60s and the Dems being the party that turned against Vietnam, the party of hippies, etc. I would guess that if you looked back before, say '68, the military wouldn't have been as linked to the R's and the right wing. I think I picked up a lot of my politics from my maternal grandfather, a marine who served in WWII and Korea and was also a hardcore, FDR worshipping liberal.
And, as seems to happen a lot here, A. says something I was wanting to say, but much more clearly and concisely than I probably would've managed, namely: "...part of the reason I resist the talk about "needing a new language" is that I'm not always sure what is meant by it. If you mean that the left needs to present itself in a different way, then I agree with you fully. But it certainly doesn't follow from that that we need to value different things from those that we do value, or that we literally need a new language or new words. I value things like fairness, happiness of myself and others, security for myself and others, and so on."
I think that the Dems/the left needs to do a better job of selling itself than it has the last couple decades, but I think that the basic values that I and most self-described liberals hold to be the basic liberal values, are just fine. We don't need some radical rethinking of values, we don't need a "perpetual questioning of the political" as I understand TC08 wanting to do. We just need to do a better job of advocating for our values and persuading people that they're the better ones.
Post a Comment