Kristoff: "They want to be just like us!"

When I recently criticized the "Western" ideology which contorts the events in Egypt to fit the pre-packaged "they want to be just like us!" mold, this is precisely the sort of filth I had in mind.

The entire set of assumptions that Kristoff uses to "understand" recent events in Egypt are problematic. Take, first of all, his invocation of us "Westerners". I ask, again, who is this we? Next, consider the following paragraph:

In 1979, a grass-roots uprising in Iran led to an undemocratic regime that oppresses women and minorities and destabilizes the region. In 1989, uprisings in Eastern Europe led to the rise of stable democracies. So if Egyptian protesters overcome the government, would this be 1979 or 1989?

This is an excellent distillation of the ideological framework undergirding what Kristoff says. One could, in effect, simply take this framework and churn out the rest of his conclusions without even so much as gathering a single piece of information about the concrete conditions in Egpyt. It all follows frictionlessly from a certain framework of discussion that is presupposed and unacknowledged.

But what is content of this ideological framework exactly? It's first component becomes clear if we collapse the interests of all the different groups and classes in the United States into this mythical notion of the "national interest". This is the "we", the "Westerners" of whom Kristoff speaks. All of us, from the Washington foreign policy insiders and multinational corporate elites to the jobless and the disempowered... yes, all of us have the same interests at home and abroad. Yes, we are to believe that all ordinary Americans benefit equally from the foreign adventures put together by the Military-Industrial complex. The slogan "money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation" evidently has no merit whatsoever.

Next, having sold the lie that poor workers and rich corporate elites have the same interests here and abroad, we must explain what these allegedly coinciding interests are. Unsurprisingly, these "national interests" are precisely the same as the interests of the ruling class: e.g. "stability in the region" means stable US dominance and control, "moderation and tolerance" means tolerance of US imperialism, "democracy" means capitalism, etc. Thus the 1979 Iranian revolution was "bad" from the get-go because it through out the US-backed Shah and was therefore hostile to Washington's geopolitical and economic interests in the region. By contrast, the 1989 anti-Stalinist revolutions in the East Bloc were "good" because many of them ended up being subordinate to US interests in the region and were willing to accept neoliberal "economic shock therapy". Again, we see here a perfect embodiment of the binary between "anxious" imperialism and "co-opting" imperialism. At the end of the day, it hardly matters whether the interests of the peoples of these respective regions were well-served by what occurred there: the only criterion for "good" and "bad" here is good or bad for U.S. imperial interests.

A more sober, and factually accurate, analysis of 1979 and 1989 would go as follows: 1979 was an emancipatory, mass-democratic event in which a (deeply unpopular) US-backed and funded dictator was overthrown by an uprising from below. This event opened up space for all kinds of possibilities, and it was not fomented from above by the clerics who subsequently squelched it. It was not inevitable that the revolutionary eruption that created it would be extinguished, it's most impressive gains rolled back. But of course, Washington hardly cares that the gains of the revolution were rolled back, democratic participation drawn down. They only see two states of affairs: one in which they had control, and another in whic they don't. That is, one in which they had a client regime with the Shah, and another in which they no longer had the influence and power that client regimes afford. If Iran is not democratic today, Washington isn't losing sleep over that fact. After all, the US's closest allies in the Middle East are the most repressive and opposed to democracy.

1989 was, for Washington, sort of the opposite of 1979. Again, set aside empty rhetoric from US officials about "democracy" (if you want to know what they think about democracy see what they did in Chile in 1973). What happened, from a ruling class perspective, was this. A global power opposed to US interests (Stalinist Russia) disintegrated into a large number of smaller states that could be, for the first time in decades, brought into the orbit of US influence. Despite the fact that many involved in 1989 uprisings opposed both Stalinist domination and Washington-backed global capitalism, these events are all contorted into the model of pro-capitalist triumphalism: "Finally, now they fulfill their deep desire to be just like us!". This is the manic, co-opting/appropriating maneuver which often figures opposite the fearful, survivalist maneuver that captures the anxious, imperialist response to 1979.

So, the question Kristoff is really asking is this: will this revolution result in conditions favorable or unfavorable to the interests of the US ruling class? The perverse thing, whether he realizes it or not, is that he is substituting this narrow question for the following, more general question: "does this revolution create conditions favorable or unfavorable to the interests of the masses of ordinary Americans?" The obvious answer to the general question is "yes". The clear answer to the narrow question is "no". Anytime the oppressed fight for their own self-emancipation it is a boon to the interests of ordinary people everywhere, and, a threat to the rule of elites everywhere. As I've said, there is a lot we can learn from Egypt right here at home. It's not as though we live in a classless, horizontal society.

Though Kristoff tries to offer, within this frustrating ideological framework, the "counter-intuitive" insight that democratic struggle in Egpyt "might not be that bad after all", I don't think this means we should let him off the hook here. Once we make the distinction between "soft" and "hard" imperialism, between appropriating and anxiety-ridden imperialism, it becomes clear that Kristoff is no progressive. I genuinely believe that he means well, but that's simply not enough. Perhaps some colonial officials really did believe that they were on a civilizing mission in what was called the Third World. But that hardly obscures the barbarity of colonialism and the unequal social relations it presupposes. Moreover, that things should look so distorted from the top should not come as a surprise. It would be stranger, in fact, if the "natural" way that things appeared to a person like Kristoff were clear-eyed and unsentimental about power.

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What we can learn from Egypt

Egyptians are revolting over rising costs of living, soaring unemployment, economic misery, and an ossified political system that is hardly democratic and which is unresponsive to their needs. They're sick and tired of crony capitalism imposed on them from above.

How different are things right here in the good ol' USA? To be sure, we're better off with Obama than with Hosni Mubarak. But that doesn't obscure the fact that many of the deep problems facing Egyptians are afflicting our society as well, and for similar reasons.

As Bob Herbert makes clear in a recent column on the suffering caused by the crisis in the US:

What’s really happening, of course, is the same thing that’s been happening in this country for the longest time — the folks at the top are doing fabulously well and they are not interested in the least in spreading the wealth around.

The people running the country — the ones with the real clout, whether Democrats or Republicans — are all part of this power elite. Ordinary people may be struggling, but both the Obama administration and the Republican Party leadership are down on their knees slavishly kissing the rings of the financial and corporate kingpins.

I love when the wackos call President Obama a socialist. Wasn’t it his budget director, Peter Orszag, who moved effortlessly from his job in the administration to a hotshot post at Citigroup, beneficiary of tons of government largess? And didn’t the president’s new chief of staff, William Daley, arrive in his powerful new post fresh from the executive suite of JPMorgan Chase? And isn’t the incoming chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness very conveniently the chairman and chief executive of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt?

You might ask: Who represents working people? The answer, as Tevye would say with grave emphasis in “Fiddler on the Roof,” is, “I don’t know.”

He's talking about the US, not a the strange "Other-ized" image of Egpyt produced by mass consensus media.

And, as I said in a recent post, the inference to draw from Egpyt isn't that we should pat ourselves on the back and rejoice in how eager the Egyptians are to join us in the world of freedom and prosperity. No, the inference to draw is that the Egyptians are showing us something about how power works and how social change happens. They are standing up to an uncaring political/economic strata of elites who have profited from their immiseration for decades. It's time for Americans to do the same. Real change, the sort of change we can really "believe in", is not going to come from on high by way of the usual suspects in the two major corporate parties. It will not be handed to us after a mass email-campaign to our senators or a funding-drive organized by MoveOn.org. It will be won in the same way that all progressive changes have been one in this country: through hard-fought struggle.

The sooner that ordinary people in the US begin rising up, demanding that their government assuage their suffering and economic misery, the better. The sooner we begin demanding real health care reform for all, full employment, and a re-investment of war funding in education and infrastructure, the better. Tunisia and Egypt are teaching the world a valuable lesson. The first step to understanding it is to open ourselves to the raw facts of our situation in the US, and those facts are not pretty.

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Two Left Views of the Revolutionary Situation in Egypt

Žižek has a piece in The Guardian here, which skewers the "cynical wisdom of western liberals, according to which, in Arab countries, genuine democratic sense is limited to narrow liberal elites while the vast majority can only be mobilized through religious fundamentalism or nationalism". Indeed, he also puts a lie to the even more cynical wisdom that liberation can only be "brought" to the Middle East by way of U.S. military occupation.

Also, see Ahmed Shawki's excellent update on the situation from SW.org here. As he notes, "Right now, the movement is united around the political aim of getting rid of Hosni Mubarak. But hopefully, once Mubarak is unseated, the political questions will then mesh with social questions that still remain unresolved...If that happens, there will be a really explosive mix of political and social issues that represents the possibility of political and social revolution."

Both focus in on the most exciting thing about what's happening in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere: the fact that there is a space being opened up in which social transformation is possible. Comparing recent events to the early, emancipatory stages of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Žižek argues that "it did lead to a breathtaking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. This genuine opening that unleashed unheard-of forces for social transformation, a moment in which everything seemed possible, was then gradually stifled through the takeover of political control by the Islamist establishment."

It is always easy to say, in a cynical deterministic way, that unsuccessful revolutions were always fated from the very beginning to turn out as they did. But this facile bit of cynicism is not grounded in fact. The 1979 Iranian Revolution was not fated to turn out as it did from the very beginning, and, though seldom discussed, there were many emancipatory possibilities in its early stages. We must learn from such failures, such "revolutionary rehearsals", so that we can do better the next time around. The same is true right now: we cannot say what the result of these uprisings will be a priori. The exciting thing is precisely that, unlike the normal functioning of an oppressive society, space is being opening up in which people may have the opportunity to determine their own fate, to shape society in a humane, democratic way that brushes against the grain of neoliberal capitalism.

To fear this opening as such, to distrust this new possibility in itself, is just to side with the status quo. It is also to verge on an old colonial kind of racism which suggests that "I'm not sure the time is right for the Arab region to go through the democratic process", i.e. "the Arabs are not yet ready for self-governance". To fear incredible possibility of a free and democratic society created by these uprisings is to fear freedom and democracy themselves. It is to be content with the slow-grinding, everyday, ordinary oppression and exploitation that characterizes an unjust social order. No one except the most inveterate conservative could take such a position.

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Sort-of Update: I might have added a third, namely, this piece by Noam Chomsky in the guardian. Echoing the views above, Chomsky holds that "It's not radical Islam that worries the US – it's independence...The nature of any regime it backs in the Arab world is secondary to control. Subjects are ignored until they break their chains."

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Hegel and Marx on Freedom

"For Hegel freedom consists in being in a certain reflective and deliberative relation to oneself, which itself is possible, so it is argued, only if one is also already in a certain (ultimately institutional, norm-governed) relations to others, if one is a participant in certain practices... Put most simply, for an action to count as mine, it must make a certain kind of sense to the agent, and that means it must fit in intelligibly within a whole complex of practices and institutions within which doing this now could have coherent meaning... On his view, all of the standard conditions of action (e.g. "doing it voluntarily, uncoerced") could be fulfilled, yet we would not want to say that the action is truly "mine" such that I could fully or truly stand behind it, own up to it, and claim ownership of it... Hegel denies that we can separate the moral-psychological, individual dimension of freedom from social relations of dependence and independence said to be equally constitutive of freedom..." Robert Pippin, Hegel's Practical Philosophy, p.4-7

There is much about this that is very attractive as a conception of freedom. Hegel rejects the impoverished "negative" liberal conception of freedom that claims that we are free to the extent that we, as isolated individuals, are not "interfered" with by external coercion. Whereas this anemic view of freedom begins from the idea that persons are asocial atoms unto themselves, Hegel's conception of freedom proceeds from the fact that we are not isolated individual atoms: the institutions, traditions, practices, norms and social relations which surround us are partly constitutive of us. To be free is, therefore, not to be cut off from these constitutive features of human life. To be free is to stand in the right kind of relation with respect to oneself and others. It is to be able to affirm the basic institutions of social life; it is to be able to see oneself and be at home in such institutions.

But, of course, life under modern capitalism is such that we cannot rationally be at home in our society. We cannot see ourselves in the basic institutions of society (e.g. the market, private ownership of the means of production, etc.), since they lord over us as something alien to us, something not under our control. As I noted in a previous post:

"Consider the well-worn idea that you 'can't buck the market'. We have become so used to things as 'market forces'...that you are just as likely to come to grief as if you ignored natural forces -gravity, magnetism and so on.... you'd better do what the market says or else you will be in trouble. But what is the market? Simply the accumulated effects of innumerable human decisions about production and consumption. It is, thus, our own product, from which it follows that, once more, we come to be dominated by our own product."

Think of the terms in which the present financial crisis is described. People in the media talk about the economy as though it were a natural disaster, completely beyond our control, laying waste to human lives in its wake. But the market is no force of nature; it is something that human beings constructed. And what we've built up, we can tear down. "The market is like a monster we have accidentally created, but which now comes to rule our lives". Capitalism is, thus, in Marx's words, "the complete domination of dead matter over men". We cannot affirm the basic institutions of capitalist societies as our own since they dominate us. They are not the products of deliberative, collectively exercised reason, as are the expressions of a democratic process. The basic institutions of capitalism are the products of a system whose basic function is to generate profit for the ruling class. The result is that work, daily life, leisure, the majority of cultural production, etc. all tend to be structured around this unsavory, inhuman end of profit accumulation. This condition of not being able to affirm and recognize our social condition as our own is what Hegel called alienation. Freedom, then, is a kind of "non-alienation", an achievement in which alienation is overcome by way of a socially-grounded self-determination.

Moving from Hegel to Marx, it's worth saying a bit more about why contemporary capitalism is both alienating and unfree. By any measure, capitalism has succeeded in developing the forces of production (e.g. technology, productive instruments and techniques, instrumentally useful technical knowledge, etc.) to a very high degree. But rather than putting this powerful productive capacity in the service of meeting human needs, developing human talents and capabilities, creating the conditions for flourishing, etc... instead, almost all human potential is subjected to, and dominated by, the need to increase profit. Growth for the sake of growth, accumulation for the sake of accumulation, profit for the sake of profit. These are the unsavory priorities that shape social life under capitalism.

Whereas a free society would be one in which the productive forces were put in the service of human interests... ours is one in which human interests are subordinated to the expansion of the productive forces for the sake of expansion. Whereas a rational society would be one in which capital was subordinated to human ends, ours is a society in which human ends are subordinated to the dictates of capital. Whereas capitalism makes us feel as though we're the playthings of larger economic and social forces beyond our control... a socialist society would be one in which we could take control over our own lives by democractizing the basic structure of society. We can only call a society our own when we are able to say of the basic goals of that society that they are the products of our collective deliberations.

It should be obvious why so much of Hegel's conception of freedom appealed to Marx. To be sure, Hegel did not properly understand what the institutions and basic structure of modernity are like. Moreover, whereas Hegel claimed that modern capitalism was a product of a rational historical process, Marx was unrelenting in showing this to be false. History, Marx argued, is not the gradual unfolding of reason, culminating in modern capitalism. History is a political struggle among different groups, framed by the way in which the social surplus is produced. Capitalism, therefore, is not the rational overcoming of alienation, but merely another form of alienation, another class society like those that preceded it. The difference, however, is that capitalism, for the first time, creates the conditions for a free society in a way that previous societies did not. Whereas a free, egalitarian society may not have been possible in the Bronze Age, capitalist societies have made possible such a high degree of productivity that we can satisfy all basic human needs without working ourselves to death doing it. For the first time in human history, the high level of development of the productive forces under capitalism make possible a society free from alienation, class domination and objectively necessary poverty and suffering.

Freedom would not be to walk through a supermarket perusing 20 different brands of toilet cleaner without "external interference"... freedom would be to see in basic social institutions the mark of human, democratic reason. It would be to see oneself, as a member of a modern democratic society, in the basic structure of society and, thus, to be able to reflectively endorse and affirm that society. Such is not possible when the iron law of profit dictates what is to receive investment and what is to wither on the vine. It is not possible to reflectively endorse and affirm what is imposed upon us in the interests of inhuman ends. That is to say, it is not possible to be fully free in a society in which the commanding heights of the economy is governed by the demands of profit and controlled by a small class of capitalists.

In light of the above we can make sense of Alasdair MacIntyre's claim that "...at least one philosophy course, and, more adequately two, should be required of every undergraduate. Of course an education of this kind would require a major shift in our resources and priorities, and, if successful, it would produce in our students habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world. But to unfit our students for the contemporary world ought in any case to be one of our educational aims." To "unfit" students for the modern age, as I'm reading it, means to get them to think critically, i.e. to become aware of alienation (to see clearly the sense in which we cannot truly be at home, and hence free, in modern capitalism). A good education would not be one that subordinated all curricula to the capricious demands of the labor market. A good education would be one which produced in us "habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world" in such a way that they would come to demand that the world itself change. Rather than pandering to the world as it is, good education would challenge us to think seriously about how to change it for the better and truly make it our own.

It should be obvious, but it's nonetheless worth saying, that bureaucratic central planning is equally condemned by this view of freedom. The mechanistic distortions of Stalinism are anathema to freedom. If the basic institutions of society are under the control of a bureaucratic nomenklatura, this is hardly better than capitalism. In such a case we would still feel that we were subject to forces beyond our control, forces which were emphatically not the products of collective, democratic deliberation. For if the state, rather than private capitalists, dominates production there is still the question: but who controls the state? Thus, it should be obvious that taking this Hegelian-Marxist view of freedom leaves only one route to overcoming alienation and class domination: the most radical form of democracy. Only when we're all able to interact with each other as equal co-legislators are we fully free. As long as social relations of domination exist, freedom is not possible. Thus, freedom and equality are not antagonistic others, but mutually constitutive aspects of the same goal.

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G.A. Cohen BBC Video: "Against Capitalism"

Sure, the tone and presentation is a bit ridiculous... and the bit about "shmoo" is sort of hilarious in an embarrassing way. But I think this is on the whole really quite good. This aired on the BBC in the 80s, I'm told, as a sort of response to Milton Friedman's 1980 pro-capitalist "Free to Choose" TV series.

The second part is much better than the first, not that the first part is bad. The points about productivity, unemployment and leisure time are particularly poignant right now (e.g. "The same system that overworks people in the interests of profit, also deprives them entirely of work when it's not profitable to employ them.") Such arguments are almost never made in the licit, consensus media. The reasons why not are obvious: this forms the basis of the one of most intuitive, simple arguments for socialism. The questions we must ask are: why not use the highly developed productive forces to shorten toil and maximize human potential? Why squander such productive potential by putting it all in the service of enriching the ruling class?

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"Why... they want to be just like us!"

The imperialist orientation toward "events" elsewhere in the world typically falls on one or other side of the following dichotomy.

On the one hand, there is the survivalist, frightened, anxious gaze that "Otherizes". On the surface, it can be relatively collected or vitriolic, but the basic attitude is the same. Such a gaze regards that which is "other" as nothing but a threat. Underlying all of this is a rigid unwillingness to question the basic beliefs and ideological framework that legitimate the status quo.

On the other hand, there is the co-opting, appropriating gaze that obliterates all difference. This orientation tends to project a great deal onto other people (expectations, presumed endorsement of one's own politics, etc.). This gaze appropriates movements elsewhere on the globe, and contorts them in such a way that they are entirely consistent with the status quo at home. Again, underlying all this is a similar unwillingness to question or revise basic status quo beliefs and ideological coordinates.

I think we could plausibly argue that the Anglophone media has covered the events in Egypt in one or other of these two ways. Whereas the first response from the US ruling class was one of disbelief, shock, and anxiety, the most recent news from Washington suggests that a shift is underway toward a more co-opting, appropriating gaze. Again, this is typical: when power is in a position to do so, power often reacts swiftly to put down resistance that is visible enough as to not be ignored. But when conditions are such that resistance is growing in confidence and numbers, powerful groups often attempt not to simply "oppose" resistors directly, but to "accommodate" or "co-opt" them in such a way as to undermine their potential as a threat. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is absolutely a case of the latter, whereas the indifference and direct violence against the black liberation movement that preceded it seems more like a case of the former.

It has been obvious from the beginning of the Egypt protests that the US could not directly intervene, for both political and logistical reasons. Politically, there would have been very little support or legitimating grounds for a direct US intervention. The fallout within and without Egypt would have been massive for a US war machine that is already held in contempt by much of the world for its brutal occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, the US has indirectly lorded over Egypt by "soft imperialist" tactics, and a move toward direct, "hard imperialist" intervention would breach this longstanding approach. Logistically, the US is over-extended and facing a deep economic crisis at home. It simply could not afford an adventure or increase of military expenditure in Egypt. Thus, the only available course of action for Washington is to work its connections and to try to manage "damage control" via PR. The PR effort, predictably, has shifted back and forth between chastising the protesters and expressing anxiety on the one hand, and appearing to support them and "democracy" on the other.

Now that Mubarak is on his way out, now that it is clear that the protesters will prevail, it comes as no surprise that Obama and Co. have come out as tentative supporters of some kind of "regime change". How could they take any other position at this point? They are merely being dragged along with the tide of this revolution. The interesting question is not "is Washington publicly taking a "pro" or "con" position vis-a-vis the protests?" The question is "what kind of "alternative" is Washington pushing for, and what sort is it pushing against"? Once power realizes that something must change, its task is to influence and mold the alternative in such a way that as little changes as possible (e.g. this is more or less exactly what happened to health care "reform" the US).

So, now that much of the outright anxiety and fear (what about our oil?, what about the "islamofascists"?, etc.) has given way to appropriation, the line coming from the "soft imperialists" is "Look! The Egyptian people want to have freedom just like us!".

Thus, the inspiring revolutionary uprising in Egypt is de-fanged, sanitized and re-packaged for mass consumption. Rather than implicitly criticizing our own society and proposing ways that we, Americans, could change it... the protests are merely an affirmation of our status quo. It's as if they're simply holding a big 4th of July BBQ celebration in our honor in demonstration of their "desire" to "graduate" and join "us" at the adult table.

The reality, of course, is precisely the opposite of this rose-tinged fantasy. The Egyptian people are sick and tired of a frozen, ossified political system that is unresponsive to their needs and interests. They are sick and tired of skyrocketing food prices, high unemployment, repression of labor, neoliberal policies and economic insecurity. They are, in short, angry about problems that are angering Americans every single day. They want changes that Americans desperately need: a complete transformation of the political institutions in society, an overturning of the existing strata of elites, a turn towards more Left economic policy, a full-employment economy, etc. etc.

To say that there is no friction between Egyptian protests and the political situation in the USA is to deeply misunderstand both Egypt and the US. It is to walk about covering ones eyes and chanting the trite slogans that cover up the deep cracks in the status quo. The Egyptian people aren't "trying to be like us". They are doing something that we should take note of, that we must learn from: real change only comes as a result of mass struggle from below. The protesters are bearing witness to a basic fact about entrenched power which Fredrick Douglass captured nicely when he said:

"The whole history of the progress of human a
liberty shows that all concessions yet made
to her august claims have been born of
earnest struggle.... If there is no struggle,
there is no progress. Those who profess to
favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation
are men who want crops without plowing up
the ground, they want rain without thunder
and lightning. They want the ocean without
the awful roar of its mighty waters. The
struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a
physical one, and it may be both moral and
physical, but it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will."

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Once more on "evolutionary" psychology

This is a kind of follow-up on two recent posts (here and here) on "sociobiology" and "evolutionary" psychology.

It's obvious to all (and to scientists in particular) that human beings learn from science and act on the basis of scientific knowledge all the time. That is to say, we rationally regulate our conduct on the basis of beliefs grounded in scientific knowledge (e.g. I don't bring a plugged-in toaster in the shower with me because I have the belief that it would electrocute me, a belief that is based on accumulated scientific knowledge about electricity, etc.).

This illustrates the obvious point that we act on the basis of beliefs we hold. The set of beliefs I hold forms the framework within which I act. Beliefs may be considered separately from actions, but actions (in order to be such) cannot ever be made sense of apart from beliefs. For something to be an action at all, apart from a mere event (e.g. physical movement), it must express some belief we hold. It's worth saying a bit more about the distinction between a physical movement and an action in order to drive the point home. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it:

The distinction is obvious if we consider the criteria of identity in each case. The same physical movements may constitute in different contexts quite different actions. So a man may go through the same physical movements involved in signaling his name and be concluding a treaty or paying a bill, which are quite different actions. But is not this man performing the same action in each case, namely signing his name? To this the answer is that writing one's name is never merely by itself an action; one is either signing a document or giving information or perhaps just doodling. All these are actions, but writing one's hand is not. Equally, the same action may be constituted by quite different physical movements. Writing on paper, passing coin, even saying the words may all constitute the same action of paying a bill.

When we talk about explaining human behavior, we sometimes blur this distinction. Because there is no human action that does not involve physical movement we may suppose that to explain the movement is to explain the action... My head nods and I am asked, "why did you nod your head?" If I answer by referring to a nervous tick, I point in the direction of a story about necessary and sufficient antecedent conditions, a story about nerves and muscles and possibly about conditioning in early childhood... But to explain the nod as a nervous tick is precisely to explain it not as something that I do, but as something that just happens. If on the other hand I explain the nod by saying that I had been asked a question and was answering "Yes", then I certain explain the nod as an action. I do so by pointing to the purpose which it serves. This reference to an agent's purpose always carries with it implicitly and often explicitly a reference to some antecedent event or condition... But if I explain my nod of the head as an answer to an antecedent question, I certainly do not refer to a generalization stating some constant conjunction which holds between questions and answers. From the fact that the question has been asked it never follows that it will be given some particular answer or indeed any answer. What makes a reference to antecedent questions part of an explanation of what one was doing is that one is explaining the role of one's nod in carrying through a socially established and recognized practice, that of asking and answering questions. That is, the background to my explanation is formed by the customarily recognized rules of a particular social order". (See MacIntyre (1969: p.56) in Laslett et al. Philosophy, Politics and Society, Oxford: Blackwell)

Something will not have been an action unless some agent undertook it and did so on the basis of a reason. Actions are those "distinct sorts of events for which we may appropriately demand reasons or justifications from subjects whom we take to be responsible for such events occurring."

As MacIntyre makes clear, it is quite obviously true that the beliefs that I am liable to hold are strongly influenced by the available concepts in the society into which I am thrown at birth. I couldn't reasonably have formed beliefs about electricity in the Bronze Age, say, since electricity presupposes all sorts of bundles of complex knowledge and concepts that did not exist at the time. If you want to understand and explain why people act the way that they do, you cannot but include in your explanation the concepts, dominant ideas, theories, culture, etc. that are available to the agent. Without taking such things seriously, you cannot explain human behavior at all. Again, as MacIntyre describes it:

Suppose that a team of Martian social scientists is observing human behavior. What they are watching we should describe as chess-playing, but unhappily they lack the concept of a game. Mars is gameless. They therefore do not discern the rule-governed character of the players' behavior, although they arrive at many statistical generalizations about the movement of small pieces of wood by human beings. What is it that they do no understand when they fail to understand these movements as a game of chess?

They fail of course first of all to grasp the players' action as distinct from their physical movements. It is not that they wrongly explain what is done; rather they fail to identify the actions which are to be explained.... The analogy with a social system is clear. To explain actions within it we have to identify the rules and their connexion with reasonable or unreasonable, true or false beliefs. Thus we cannot explain actions by means of beliefs and not raise questions of truth and falsity, reason or unreason... Thus in any society we shall only be able to identify what is going on if we have identified and assessed the established methods of reasoning and criticism in that society... Explaining actions is explaining choices, and explaining choices is exhibiting why certain criteria define rational behavior for a given society.

So, let us compare all of this with the model of explanation adopted by "evolutionary" psychologists (I use scare quotes because I doubt that such a research program has any serious scientific grounding in the theory of evolution itself).

For these folks, human behavior is explained in mechanistic terms. The lines between beliefs, purposes, reasons on the one hand, and action on the other, are cut. Actions are understood in the same way that mere physical events are understood.

Here's what I mean. Think of the way that a physicist explains events. They observe a lot of events, note the constant conjunction of what appear to be cause and effect, and then, by way of an inductive inference, hypothesize about general laws in light of which such events are to be understood. We have no reason to think that the conditions in which such laws are valid are subject to change anytime soon.

Now, what the sociobiologist does is assume that human actions are just like physical events. They conflate physical movement with action. Thus they can say that there are general laws, like those governing the behavior of gases, that can explain human behavior. They assume that actions are mere events which can be explained by reference to general laws inferred from the constant conjunction of certain variables.

So, for instance, they see, say, men in the United States behave in a certain way (e.g. hit on women at bars) and then say: "might there not be some invariant general law that explains this behavior?". They assume that human beings are mere objects that are caused ("programmed", "hardwired") to act in this way: the only question then becomes what the natural law is that appropriately generalizes from this cause and effect relationship. Finally, they go all-in for the view that the content of such general laws are wholly (or largely) determined by an individual's genetic makeup. The line of causation from genetic makeup to behavior, they think, is one that is opaque to us from the first-person perspective. There's nothing internal here at all: the causal story here has nothing to do with what it's like to be a human agent from the inside. It is purely external, in the same way that we externally explain and observe the behavior of gases.

So there are at least three components to their view: (1) the mechanistic view of human action which says that there are general laws that explain it (analogous to ideal gas laws), and (2) the view that the general laws boil down to facts about genes, and (3) the view that the causal mechanism from genes to behavior is non-rational and external to first-person reasons, intentions, etc.

Let me say why I think (1) is false. First of all, it is absurd to say that we can understand human actions without reference to belief. We cannot even identify an action as such without at least in principle presupposing that some belief is being expressed by it (the MacIntyre examples above make this point clear). The social sciences (or the "human sciences") must therefore study beliefs in order to study human action. But, and this brings me to my second point, studying the beliefs of an agent means studying the available concepts, theories, socially recognized practices, norms etc. in the society in which the agent is located.

But what is a social scientific theory? It is a collection of concepts, beliefs about humans, etc. Sophisticated social theories are continuous with our "naive" beliefs about the society we live in that guide our actions. So this means that social science is part of its own object of study, it is a self-reflexive undertaking. This is not so with physical science. It is not the case that our beliefs, concepts, scientific methods, norms and justification practices are part of the object of study of physical science itself. Such things are external to the object of study of physical science: physical science does not study it's own methods and practices as physical objects: it is not the case that physical science itself is part of the object of study of physical science.

So, physical science is not self-reflexive in the way that human sciences are, and that's fine given its object of study. Raymond Geuss is excellent on this point:

"To treat a belief as if it were about a mere object in nature implies both something about how one can and should investigate it, and about how one can use it to argue, evaluate, and guide action. An inert external object can sometimes be manipulated if I have sufficient knowledge of it. If I discover that the unwieldy sofa has a handle on the other side, I can perhaps grip and shift it, whereas I could not before. In doing this, of course, I need take no account of the beliefs or preferences of the object- it has none... Objectifying thought is especially prone, however, to false universalization for the obvious reason that it will encourage investigators to construe local phenomena as universal... If I think it will rain tomorrow, my belief and the weather are two distinct states of affairs. The weather is what it is regardless of what I might think. My belief itself is completely "external" to it and would not appropriately figure as part of the meteorological report. It is perfectly natural for us to adopt an objectifying attitude towards the nonhuman world of nature. The question is whether it is also appropriate to adopt such an attitude toward a society of which I myself am actually a member... But the beliefs and attitudes people in the society have about themselves and their society are themselves an integral part of the society. If everyone in a society, say, early twenty-first-century Britain thinks that people are universally selfish, then that belief is reflective in a way that my belief about the weather is not. Since it is a belief about people in general, it includes the members of the society in question, and holding it will have an effect on that society."

This is all just to say that beliefs are part of the object of study of the human sciences, and therefore the social/human sciences are self-reflexive. Social theories are continuous with their object of study, and, interestingly, they can therefore play a role in their own falsification and confirmation. If propagating a certain theory causes people to have different beliefs and thus to act in radically different ways, then the data which could confirm or disconfirm this very theory have themselves changed radically. This is not true of the physical sciences. So much for the assumption that human behavior could be studied mechanistically, on the model of the physical sciences. So much for the assumption that human behavior could be explained by reference to invariant physical laws. Human behavior is bound up with beliefs, and the possible beliefs an agent could hold must be explained by reference to a certain social order. And as everyone knows, social orders change and develop over time. Thus, human behavior must be explained and understood in historical context. Throw in the premise that history is political (all history is the history of class struggle), and you have thus reached the conclusion that human behavior is dynamic, plastic and must be understood relative to the configuration of power in that society, the level of material development, etc. This does not mean that human behavior is determined by social/political causes rather than physical ones. It only means that behavior is dynamic, liable to change, and develops in relation to a determinate context.

All of this should make clear how absurd it would therefore be to suppose that extant social norms, practices, and human actions could be explained by a collection of facts about our genes. At best, our genes are but one variable in a very complex field. There is no scientific warrant for singling out one such variable, genetic makeup, and supposing that it trumps all others.

The reasons to reject (3) are largely supplied above by the MacIntyre quote. It is patently absurd to say that we could explain actions without reference to beliefs and reasons. That is to say, it's patently absurd to say that we could explain human action without reference to what it's like to be a human agent from the inside. We are the kinds of beings that have identity crises, who are not sure what we should do with our lives, who struggle with hard decisions as to what the right thing to do is. That is because we act on the basis of reasons. We think that the question "what should I be when I grow up?" is a real question, and a genuinely hard one at that. Nobody thinks that "do what will best pass on your genes" is a plausible answer to that hard question. No parent would suggest such a thing to their child. From the inside, internally, we take ourselves to act for all sorts of reasons, the vast majority of which are not explainable in terms of the external function of "passing on one's genes". What the fuck do I care about my own genes anyway? I care about my life going well. I care about love, relationships and people. I care about justice, about fighting oppression, about human emancipation and freedom. It's highly possible that caring about these things puts me at odds with the goal of passing on my genes most effectively. I care about all kinds of things that don't seem at all to me like mere epiphenomena, mere window-dressing for the "unconscious desire" to pass my genes on.

When someone unfairly wrongs me, or breaches norms governing our relationship, I don't think it would be acceptable for them to say "but I'm just passing on my genes" or "I'm just allowing my genetic makeup to manifest itself behaviorally unbenknownst to me". I would hold such a person responsible for what she did. I would resent them in a way that I would not resent a mere object.

I think we should be more than a little suspicious of a theory of human action which is so radically at odds with everything we, as human beings, think about human action. At the very least, the burden of proof on such a theory should be extremely high, given that it should cause us to doubt and revise the vast majority of what it is we think that we're doing when we act.

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Who's "We"?

Sholto Byrnes of the New Statesman asks, "If we are in favour of democracy in Tunisia and Egypt, how does this fit with our continuing friendly relations with the absolute monarchies of the Gulf?" This framing of the question dominates much of the English-language media coverage of the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

But who is this "we"?

When foreign policy-makers in the back rooms of Washington decide what they're going to do, it has literally nothing to do with the interests or views of the vast majority of ordinary Americans. To be sure, the discussions in the back rooms include conversations about what they can reasonably expect to get away with, so "public opinion" has some (albeit quite small) bearing in the form of a weak constraint. But the priorities and general political trajectory of the foreign policy establishment represents the interests of the most powerful, not the vast majority. The decision calculus used by Washington to determine what should be done has literally nothing whatsoever to do with my views on the matter.

Yet when debates about foreign policy arise in the mass media in the US, the discussion is almost always focused on the nebulous concept, thoroughly steeped in ideology, of the "national interest". Thus we hear talk of "pro-US" forces, or "Western-friendly" groups. But in what sense is a friend of the US ruling class, such as Hosni Mubarak, a friend of mine? This is absurd.

The concept of the "national interest" assumes that all is well here in the US. It assumes that all US citizens, regardless of class divisions, share some core set of interests in the preservation of the status quo. This is "radically false" as Chomsky recently put it:

The whole framework of discussion is misleading. We’re sort of taught to talk about the world as a world of states, which, if you study international relations theory, there’s what’s called “realist international relations theory,” which says there is an anarchic world of states, and states pursue their national interest. It’s all mythology. The interests of the CEO of General Electric and the janitor who cleans his floor are not the same. There are a few common interests, like we don’t want to be destroyed. But for the most part they have very different interests. Part of the doctrinal system in the U.S. is to pretend that we’re all a happy family, there are no class divisions, and everybody is working together in harmony. But that’s radically false.

So, to answer Byrnes's misconceived question, I myself (and 99% of U.S. citizens) have never had "friendly relations with absolute monarchies", so I don't see any difficulty whatsoever in standing behind a mass, revolutionary groundswell that is aiming to throw off a brutal, corrupt oppressor.

Let the ideologists for the ruling class worry about how they'll spin their narrow imperialist interests. Ordinary people need not worry themselves with such nonsense. Our task is to find a way to learn the lessons from the struggles in Tunisia and Egypt (and who knows where else next). Our task is to find ways to apply their struggles to our own conjuncture -and this seems to me to rather clearly suggest that mass struggle from below is needed in order to shut down the U.S. war machine and roll back the coming austerity onslaught that is sure to come from our "representatives" in both major parties. When people get together and say "enough is enough", the ruling order cannot but take notice. When people perpetually acquiesce to the "lesser evil" and write flowery letters to their rulers asking nicely for reform, it's not hard for our "representatives" to turn their backs and bow before wealth and power.

UPDATE: It appears that Byrnes has edited and clarified what he means by adding a parenthesis that didn't appear when I first read the post. Now, it reads: "If we – by which I mean the governments of Europe and North America – come out in favour of popular uprisings that sweep away dictators, how do we justify our past (indeed, our very recent) support for autocrats such as Mubarak?", whereas the bits between the dashes did not appear when I first read the piece. Perhaps he read the post?

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US State Dept: Egypt Not Ready for Democracy

(Hat tip to Lenin's Tomb for this video). Al Jazeera is great. Wow. How refreshing is it to see an anchor actually take a clear look at what's going on in the world.

Yes, doesn't this make it clear just how much of a beacon from "freedom" and "democracy" the US is all over the globe? Every time there has been a progressive uprising anywhere, they have tried to sabotage it or put on the brakes. To tell the Egyptian people that they should take it easy and put on the brakes is beyond offensive, particularly given Washington's relationship with the repressive, autocratic Mubarak regime.

Now, Washington isn't stupid. Of course, Obama will come out and say something vague about the need for reform and blah blah. But the facts are rather clear cut here:

"The U.S. does not want to see the Egyptian regime fall any time soon,’’ Hamid said in a telephone interview. “But people who are protesting, the tens of thousands, do want to see the regime fall some time soon. They are diametrically opposed interests."

It hardly needs repeating that Mubarak has been propped up single-handedly by the US, from whom he receives the tidy sum of $1.3 billion each year (his regime received the annual aid every year since 1979, and he's been president since 1981... you do the math). The US doesn't do that for nothing- and it's not as though they don't already know that the $$ they give to Mubarak has been used to torture and repress the Egyptian people in order to legitimize his autocratic rule. Egypt is the second-largest recipient of military aid from the US behind Israel, and a close third is Colombia, the most right-wing and repressive government in all of South America by a large margin.

It will be interesting to watch how much longer the US foreign policy elite can successfully walk this delicate tight rope of sponsoring Mubarak's repression while appearing to take a "moderate" stance vis-a-vis the protesters who are demanding real democracy and freedom.

Obama has come out and patronizingly admonished the Egyptian protestors to be "peaceful". "Violence is not the answer" he said. It's interesting that someone who has authorized far more drone bombings than Bush is all of the sudden a fan of avoiding violence. It's interesting that someone who gladly has paid for and loaded the weapons being used against the protesters should have the audacity to tell the protesters to "calm down". It's interesting he's all of the sudden for "non violence" given that Obama, "winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has, ...in his first eleven months in office, ordered troop escalations in Afghanistan of 21,000 and 30,000, to effectively double the U.S. fighting force—while military contractors will continue to outnumber those in uniform." As unemployment tears through millions of lives accross the US, Obama still found it in his heart to increase war funding by $100 billion in 2010. That's a lot of money to spend on devices and training devoted to exterminating human beings in a foreign country. Funny that such a person can be taken seriously for suddenly coming out in support of "peace".

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Follow-up on "Evolutionary" Psychology

I haven't yet received any feedback on my recent post on sociobiology/"evolutionary" pysch. But I thought I would head off a few obvious objections from folks disposed to accept the legitimacy of such projects.

First, I'm not putting forward some position to the effect that "everything is just socially constructed" and there is not such thing as the "natural". I'm not saying that science, as such, is just mere political ideology (although it is clearly an instrument put in the service ends, and often unjust ends at that). My claim is that the facts about what human beings are like contradict the pseudo-scientific theories that fall under the heading of "sociobiology". My claim is that such projects are bad science.

These folks like to talk about "human nature". But there are deep confusions lodged at the heart of this idea. We talk about the idea often enough, but what exactly does it mean? What are we really asking when we ask if human beings are "naturally selfish", say?

It seems to me that we presuppose a mechanistic, objectified picture of human beings when we ask such questions. We assume that we are like computers and we then ask what the programming is like. This metaphor is deeply misleading.

A better way of thinking about our "nature" is a follows. Human beings, because of the way that we are biologically constituted, have certain capacities, natural powers that we can exercise in a variety of ways. We have the capacity for creativity, to ask ourselves questions like "should I have done x?", to reflect on abstract theoretical matters, and so forth. We have the capacity to feel a rich array of different kinds of pleasures and pains. We have a certain degree of plasticity: we can determine who we are in some sense (and this is why the difficult life choice of deciding "who you want to be" is so hard... any theory that suggested such a choice was easy or pre-determined is clearly missing something). We have the capacity to be responsive to reasons, though we often fail for various reasons to be so responsive. Having a capacity doesn't mean it must be exercised.

To be sure, affective impulses and motivations need to be taken into account- but such matters are hardly as simple as having a transparent "desire set" or a collection of "revealed preferences" or whatever. Moreover, any plausible theory of human agency would have to make the distinction between "natural" desires and "conventional" desires. As Raymond Geuss puts it, "it is by no means obvious that the hunger that is satisfied when Neolithic human tore raw meat with their fingers is the same kind of thing as the hunger that is satisfied by dining in a five-star restaurant in 2008." The broader point here, however, is that we have the capacity to not act on desires, whatever their grounding may be, as when the heroin addict decides to buck his overwhelming desire to continue taking the drug in order to begin recovery. To say that there must be some "higher order" desire dictating and mechanistically determining this person's desire to get sober is ad hoc and implausible; nobody working at a rehab clinic would agree that such an assumption makes sense at all. The point is that the addict could relapse, or she could not; the genuine uncertainty is what makes the job of helping addicts get clean so difficult.

Let's take a slightly different tack. To suppose that human behavior is mechanistically determined or predictable is a bit like making the following mistake. Suppose someone gave you a set of oil paints, a brush and a blank canvas and told you that you had to create some art object with only those materials. Now, clearly, there would be constraints on what you could do with those materials. You couldn't, for example, create a marble statue out of them. You couldn't make a film with them. But there is a wide array of possibilities before you nonetheless, as the history of painting makes clear. It would be absurd to say that because you had certain materials with certain physical constraints, that those materials determined (mechanistically) what it is that you would end up painting. It would be absurd to say that the subsequent artwork was predetermined by the materials you used in some law like way. But that is just like saying human beings are determined by their biological constitution. Giving us facts about our constitution doesn't yet say anything about what human agency is like. It's like saying that because you know how my bike is configured and what its function is, you're therefore in a position to say exactly where I'm going to ride on it. Absurd, to say the least.

There is a distinction between having some generative capacity to do something, and being mechanistically caused to do something. Adobe Photoshop, for example, is an open-ended platform that allows users to do a huge array of different things. But it does not follow that each time I use Photoshop that I am just being determined by Photoshop. It doesn't follow that Photoshop mechanistically causes and thus determines whatever I end up doing with it. The same mistake is made when we think about human powers and capacities in a mechanistic way.

So I am by no means ignoring or denying that we're part of the natural world: we have natural powers and capacities in virtue of which we are properly called "human". And I would be the first to say that we should investigate them scientifically and learn more about them. But the fact that we have natural powers and capacities doesn't give us much to go on if we want to understand what human behavior (or human societies, culture, or social norms, etc.) is going to be like in the future. That would be a bit like saying that because I knew you had a brush and a certain set of paints that I could mechanistically determine, from a mere analysis of those artistic materials, exactly what imagine you must end up painting. That is patently absurd. There is no way to draw a valid inference like that from a mere analysis of the paints and brushes. Every one of these pseudo-scientific charlatans should be forced to read Nelson Goodman's excellent 1954 Fact, Fiction and Forecast, particularly his famous article "The New Riddle of Induction".

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Against "Evolutionary" Psychology

There is a tendency these days (anyone teaching in a university setting cannot fail to notice how thoroughly students exemplify it) to assume that anything that aspires to the mantle of "hard science" is therefore legitimate and has something important to tell us about topics as far flung as social justice, economic growth, sexuality, interpersonal relations and the structure of human agency.

What I mean by "hard science", of course, is the paradigm (the characteristic methods, assumptions and so forth) exemplified by Newtonian physics. In Newtonian physics, we're after mechanical explanations of the phenomena about which physics theorizes. As Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, "at the core of the notion of mechanical explanation is a conception of invariances specified by law-like generalizations. To cite a cause is to cite a necessary condition or a sufficient condition or a necessary and sufficient condition as the antecedent of whatever behavior is to be explained." As far as the practical aims of physics are concerned, such methods and assumptions seem to be warranted and justified.

It is not clear that the same is true of the scientific study of human behavior. Whereas a "number of thinkers in the 17th and 18th century" may have been forgiven for transferring the "ideal of mechanical explanation from physics to the understanding of human behavior", there is little excuse for such a mistake today. The material motivations to do so ("scientific" technocratic management practices, business accounting, social control, etc.), however, are important for understanding why the mistake persists. Why, however, is the application of mechanistic explanation to human action a mistake?

There is a lot to say about this, and I wouldn't pretend to be able to give a full answer here. But let us first just take a moment to consider what it would be to understand human action mechanistically. It would mean, first of all, to hold that all talk of "intentions, purposes, and reasons for action" must be entirely eliminated, or reduced to talk, crudely put, of "matter in motion" (or, if you like, of a person's genetic makeup, or her "evolutionary" hard-wired disposition to perform certain behaviors that have the macro-function of preserving the species or whatever).

If merely stating what the view entails isn't enough to convince you of its unsoundness, let me say two further things. First, it is obvious that such theories put forward controversial claims. But from what standpoint are such claims made? They are self-consciously made from the standpoint of a rational human scientist testing the soundness of a hypothesis. But if this human scientist accepts what the mechanistic approach says about human action (namely, that it is causally determined by asocial, non-rational factors reducible to "matter in motion"), what is she to make of her own scientific undertaking? That is to say, what is she to make of herself and what she's up to? What is she to make of what she's doing when she proposes, tests, evaluates, defends and rationally reflects on scientific theories in the scientific community? If her own theory were true, it would clearly undermine the practice of science itself, for what could the scientist herself be doing if not merely expressing, say, her irrational "hard-wired" casually-determined impulse to behave in certain ways? Think about it: what would it be to rationally justify a scientific theory if that were true? That is, if we eliminate all talk of intentions, beliefs, purposes, reasons, etc. then how could we plausibly make sense of the practices of evaluating theories, testing hypotheses, reflecting on the consistency of scientific arguments, etc?

This is all a way of saying that the mechanistic view objectifies, and thus distorts, its object of study (human behavior). Human action, and the complex social formations in which such actions occur, is not like the weather. We have no reason to assume that human behavior is law-like, predictable, and mechanically explainable in the same way that the weather is. In fact, all of the facts about humans about which we are most confident suggest that such assumptions radically misconstrue and distort what human beings are like. The obvious inference to draw, then, is that our methods must be different from those which we use to make sense of weather. Methodology must be appropriate to assaying its object of study. It would be absurd to stubbornly impose inappropriate methods and concepts on some phenomena and expect the phenomena to give way (yet, as an aside, I note that this is more or less exactly what neoclassical economists do).

The second thing I'll say is this. Imagine that you are reflecting on some putatively scientific theory of human behavior. Suppose that you are reflecting on whether or not it is sound, viz. whether or not is the most plausible theory about such matters. Suppose further that the theory you are reflecting about is a mechanistic one, viz. one in which all human behavior is explained in terms of the agent's motivation to "pass on" her genes. Now, in evaluating such a theory, you couldn't take a merely external perspective. You, after all, are a human agent. And any theory of human agency must have something to say about what it's like from the inside, viz. what it's like to be a human agent. So you'd have to ask yourself: have I ever thought about any action I undertook in terms of whether or not it satisfies the goal of "passing on my genes"? The answer that every single human being ever would unequivocally have given to such a question is "no". After all, for most of human history we didn't even have the concept of a gene, and such biological matters weren't even studied until relatively recently. So it can't be that we have always been consciously acting in that way; if the theory were true we'd have to be determined wholesale by forces about which we could have no direct awareness. If true, the theory suggests that something is radically mistaken about all of our ordinary practical concerns, daily reasons for action, (indeed all of our communicative practices in which we offer reasons to others in order to justify the ways in which our action impinges on their lives), etc. In other words, if true, the theory holds that we are all radically mistaken about what it is we're doing when we act in the world.

This is obviously a bit of a problem for any plausible theory of human behavior, for more reasons that I can count. First, such a theory appears to radically distort it's own object of study on the basis of unsupported, unjustified assumptions (i.e. that the exact methods and mechanistic assumptions of physics and natural science are appropriate to the social/human sciences). Second, the theory undermines the possibility of justifying itself, because it undermines the process of offering reasons in defense of beliefs, viz. it undermines the idea that human beings are responsive to reasons. Third, such a theory, in requiring ex ante that its object be predictable and law-governed, sets itself the insurmountable task of explaining how complex and dynamic the development of human history has been. There is more to say, but let us stop there.

So, what has this to do with "evolutionary" psychology? Well, it should be clear that the very form of some of its explanations of human behavior are radically misconceived. Human behavior is an extremely complex phenomenon, and establishing a clear link between certain facts about a person's genetic makeup and their behavior would require a scientific theory more precise, more articulated, and more robust than any "evolutionary" psychologist could reasonably say that they possess. Any sober practician of such a project would surely admit that what they are doing is highly speculative. After all, surely they know about the problem of underdetermination of theories by the data. Or, surely they would concede that some of the behaviors they observe could be overdetermined in important ways: if 17 different variables, 16 of them social/political/historical/etc., contribute to a certain behavior, on what basis can we reasonably attribute sufficient causation to just one of those (putative) variables, namely, someone's genes? This is pure quackery. Rigorous scientists have the modesty to tell us that even the relationship between dog breed and dog behavior is not well understood. But these "evolutionary" psychological zealots sell us trumped-up speculative non-sense as clearly verified fact. That is a crime and a serious detriment to the entire idea of what science is. It distorts the scientific content of evolutionary theory itself. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981) Stephen Jay Gould made this point forcefully in the wake of the re-emergence of eugenics under the name of "sociobiology". But that hasn't stopped ideologists for the existing order from running with genetic-determinism.

But, as I suggested above, we should not assume that the wide currency and popularity of such "theories" is due to some understandable error in reasoning. No, the wide currency of such views has to be explained politically. They are popular because they are discussed so often, and they are discussed so often because they fit cleanly into existing legitimating frameworks. The status quo almost always justifies its myriad inequalities by telling us that they are inevitable and natural (rather than contingent and open to the conscious re-shaping by human beings).

We should be far more skeptical about the findings of psychology. Any fair appraisal of psychology must take seriously the implicit disagreements generated by the disciplines of political science, economics and sociology- all of which ostensibly study similar subject matter. Moreover, any legitimate appraisal would have to answer the objections posed by philosophy as to the methodology and normative assumptions undergirding the practice.

But at the very least, the unsatisfactory paradigms within the discipline itself that have dominated over the last 80 years (from radical behaviorism to introspectionism), should give one pause as to whether to jump on the bandwagon of the latest craze.

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How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

The cost of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy—where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision—investing in education yields great bang for the buck.

Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field.

Read the rest here.

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How not to criticize Obama

As any reader of this blog could not have failed to notice by now, I do not think that the Obama presidency has been a victory for the Left or progressives. I can't say I ever expected it to be such a victory. I do not think that our society is (in any substantive sense) more just than it was before he took office, although there have been a few marginal improvements, "low hanging fruit" as some would say, here and there. I don't think that the Democratic Party is a force for progressive change, and I think a quick glance at the record of the party since it returned to power in 2006 makes the point rather obvious.

Still, there is a species of (ostensibly) Left criticism of Obama that makes me uneasy. It usually manifests itself in an excessive emphasis on Obama's individual psychology, his alleged weakness of will, or whatever.

I should say I think such analysis is a blind alley. It really is the system, in many important respects, that deserves the emphasis. It's only by ignoring the way our society functions that won could actually be surprised to find out that the Presidency isn't a fountainhead of progressive energy.

One interesting dimension of this misplaced emphasis and excessive criticism of Obama, the person, is the racial dimension.

Many Black people, rightly in my view, are skeptical about these sorts of attacks on Obama. With so many explicitly (or thinly veiled) racist attacks on Obama (for being a "foreigner", a Muslim, anti-colonial renegade, etc.) this skepticism is well placed. Moreover, there are similar "criticisms" of high profile Black men to consider here as well. Think of the way some white people boldly claim that they hate Kobe Bryant or Kanye West or Barry Bonds or Terrell Owens or Michael Vick. We could go on here. To be sure, many of aforementioned men (certainly this is true of Kayne) have done something obnoxious at one time or another. But who hasn't? I'm not convinced that when some white guy confidently declares his hatred for, say, Kobe, that he's saying something that lacks racial content. It sounds to me like a thinly-veiled way of saying the N-word without coming out and saying it. The readiness with which such vitriolic things are said (e.g. Tucker Carlson saying Vick should be executed) speaks to deeper biases.

So a healthy skepticism from the Black community regarding the tone and motivation of certain kinds of attacks on Obama is hardly unjustified. It reflects an awareness of certain patterns of discrimination and racism. As anyone who knows or cares about such matters is well aware, there has been no shortage of criticism of Obama from the Black Left in the US. But social criticism is not the same as obsessive scrutiny of some person qua person. My problems with Obama aren't personal. They're political. To be sure, I do think less of people who are blase, and I think this is true of Obama, about much of the most irredeemable injust on this planet. But that is a political qualm. Nothing but confusion comes from excessively focusing on Obama the person. As a matter of fact, Obama seems like a very likable, extremely swell guy. I have no reason to think that Obama is a despicable person, but that's irrelevant if we're talking politics. As I've argued elsewhere, asking the question "is Obama a progressive at heart?" is a pointless. It is a red-herring. Let's talk about (rather than entirely occluding) things like institutions, social structures, relations of production, exploitation, overproduction, oppression and all the rest of it. Save the individualized psychologizing analysis for another occasion.

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The Dialectic of Technophobia and Technomania

"Technology can solve all of our problems" exclaim enthusiastic proponents of what is often called the new "Information Age". With the advent of social media technology like Twitter and Facebook, we've entered an inevitable march toward the best of all possible worlds. "What about global warming", you ask? Well, just give Steve Jobs a couple more months and he'll have that technological problem worked out just like that.

On the other side of the coin, rightfully distressed by the irrational, myopic technomania exemplified above, we get the technophobes. Rather than presenting us with new emancipatory possibilities, Facebook and Twitter are unmitigated disasters they tell us. Others, especially some anti-modernist environmentalists, insist that such technologies are inherently evil and rotten to the core. What we need, such forces suggest, is to fetishize the pre-industrial in itself. We need to simply invert technomania, they tell us, in order to free ourselves from the shackles of the status quo.

The head-butting of these two exaggerated and, I should add, implausible views fits cleanly into the ideological framework that dominates understanding in the "authorized" mainstream media. In lieu of such facile analysis, we need a more complex understanding of what's at work.

As Marxists have long argued, ambivalence is the best attitude to strike with respect to Modernity. The same goes for the high level of development of the productive forces (i.e. technologies of various kinds, productive instruments, technically useful scientific knowledge, etc. ) in modern capitalist societies. "Contradiction" (not in the logical sense, of course) is a crucial concept that Marxism brings to the analysis of such phenomena. At the same time that the possibility of eradicating world poverty is brought into existence, the possibility of global destruction at the hands of atomic bombs is brought about as well. The technological capacity of modern industrial societies makes horrors as terrifying as Auschwitz possible at the same time that it provides the potential for a truly just, human society of equals.

Whereas now, for the first time in human history, we have the technological capacity to feed the world's population without working ourselves to death doing it, such potential is not realized. Whereas the high development of technology and scientific knowledge unlocks the possibility of a radically different kind of world, hitherto un-thikable, this possibility is foreclosed by those in power with the help of these very technologies and sets of scientific knowledge.

This should not be surprising. Technology is paradigmatically that which is of only instrumental value. That is to say, it has no intrinsic value in itself. Hammers are not bearers of intrinsic worth; they are valuable to us only in virtue of what they can be used to accomplish. They are valuable only as a mere means to other goals, other things we value. To value a hammer, or an iPhone, as intrinsically valuable would be to fetishize such things, to impute to them an importance which they could not rationally be said to possess.

So when assessing any instrument or piece of technology, the question cannot be whether the thing is good in itself. The question must be: what goals does it help us to accomplish, and are such goals worthwhile? What ends is it put in the service of, and are they worthy ends? Something may be a better or worse means to some end, but there's always a remainder when we ask whether something is an effective means. There's always something left over: what of the ends themselves? What is it that we're trying to do in the most fundamental sense with the technological capacity we have? What are the ultimate goals?

This is the question occluded by the facile debate among technophobes and those enthralled by technomania. For capitalism, the tacit answer to the question of ultimate goals is clear: perpetual growth for the sake of maximization of profit. But is this an answer we should endorse?

If this is a rotten, unsustainable final end (and I think that it is), this should be no stain on technology as such. Rather it is a stain on the uses to which our impressive technological capacities are subjected to under a rotten system.

The contradictions are paralyzing. Rather than put technology in the service of reducing menial labor and eliminating all forms of poverty and devastation... technology is more often put in the service of producing new weapons and means of exterminating human beings. Soberly grasping such contradictions must be part of any serious analysis of the social and political function of technology in contemporary societies. Any attempt to evaluate new technology under the fetishistic banners of technophobia or technophilia are bound to generate nothing but confusion. Any attempt to break out of the ecologically disastrous trajectory of existing societies must also eschew such facile polemics. Put in the service of worthier goals, certain technologies would have to be part of any sustainable world. But adjusting the goals in this radical way requires a radical transformation of the basic economic structure of contemporary societies. It means rejecting some technologies outright and reconfiguring social life in a way that doesn't depend on planned obsolescence, automobile-scale development, and the profitable wastefulness of capitalism.

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How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)

Here are couple of quotes from the excellent How to Eat Your Watermelon, a documentary about the life and work of Melvin Van Peebles (filmmaker, actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, etc.):

"I was sick and tired of always seeing black people walking into a lynch mob with a hymn and a bible. I wanted to make a movie that black people could walk out of standing tall."

"I read an article about how blacks could move into the mainstream, if they'd only remember their manners, etc... So I wrote an article, guy wouldn't publish it, called "How to eat your watermelon in the company of white people (and enjoy it)"... that sort of Judo was one of the major elements of Sweetback. I took every stereotype and stood it on its head."

"All my life I had seen X-rated movies, if X-rated means damaging to young minds. Well, there was Tarzan, there was King-Kong, there was Mantan Moreland, etc. etc. and I couldn't find in my mind, anything more devastating to the psyche of a young African-American than those things. If you don't call those things X, then I think you've lost your credibility to judge."

I highly recommend the documentary. Trailer below.

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