It is always a delight when the leading press organs think enough about ideas to find a way to popularize them. It is even more valuable when one can discern from those efforts the trajectories of management of popular thinking offered for ingestion by the well read and well heeled consumer of the product on offer by these large circulation packagers of knowledge. Indeed, it is in the way in which they cook up knowledge--and make it palatable for contemporary taste and the need to direct appropriate approaches to thinking about things that accords with the needs of those who proffer these nuggets of knowledge for the masses--that tells one much about the state of the taste for "knowing" of elite political society in the contemporary United States.
It was with that in mind that I read the quite interesting essay authored by Adam Kirsch and published in the "Review" Section of the Wall Street Journal 17 June 2023--"The Unabomber's Ideas Aren't So Marginal Now," My interest was sharpened because barely a week earlier I has circulated thoughts that at least on the surface appeared to cover roughly the same ground--"The
Unabomber is Dead: But has his Manifesto Become Part of Mainstream
Discourse? The Normalization of the Radical and the American Liberal
Democratic Political Psyche" (10 June 2023). But my thoughts were not directed to what one might discern to be the target audience for Mr. Kirsch's reflections.
Mr. Kirsch's reflections make for excellent reading. Indeed, Mr. Kirsch's essay appears to make my point about the
normalization of the radical in mainstream liberal democratic discourse.
What for a prior generation might have been audacious, can be usefully
de-natured and repurposed not to appear to overturn the social order but
rather to project that social order forward in particular directions.That, perhaps, was the wider point that might have been issued in the effort to drawn for general readers the dotted lines between yesterday's radical and today's progressive chic.
Yet all that misses--as it must--the fundamental point (both of my earlier reflections) and of the Unabomber's place in the evolution of the normalized radical in contemporary space. And that fundamental point is this:
1. The Unabomber's Manifesto exists comfortably within a sizeable manifestation of radicalized resistance to the orthodoxies of social relations embedded within and governed through the apparatus managed by the high priests of liberal democracy and of Marxist-Leninism, through deeply embedded ecologies of social, economic, political, and religious structures manifested in every institution of collective governance.
2. That radicalized resistance pushed both to what one commonly describes as the "left" and the "right." Much of it was embedded in collective resistance; but important elements in the intellectual movements of radicalization were also produced by and through individuals (liberation theology and radicalized education pedagogy, for example). The Unabomber added a radical re-thinking of industrialized society--of modernity expressed through its patterns of production and consumption.
3. Radicalization, when countered, produced violence. Violence was the sacrifice necessary to activate the power of the radical--appropriating the more ancient traditions of social relations evident in virtually all cultures. From theology to activation through sacrifice to actualization. That was the drill--and one adopted in turn by the Unabomber--though he was hardly unique: the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Uruguayan Tupamaro, the Brigada Rossa, the Rote Armee Fraktion and Baader-Meinhof Gruppe, the Students for a Democratic Society; the Symbionese Liberation Army and to some extent the Black Panthers, among others, had developed the template.
4. Radicalization and violence had an effect; just not the one hoped for by radicalized collectives. On the one hand those against which both were deployed effectively suppressed radical groups. On the other the effectiveness of that suppression required two actions that were decisive for the transformation of society itself. First, the core of radical ideas were appropriated, neutered, and naturalized within the ideological systems through which the "establishment" managed authority. Second, the technologies of institutional control were transformed to better police violence and to more effectively avoid radicalized rupture.
5. In effect, the great legacy of the Unabomber, and the generation producing that great cornucopia of left and right radical imaginaries, was to preserve the power structures of the "establishment" by transforming its ruling ideology in ways that both incorporated the opposing radicalization, but also co-opted it to serve as an instrument of continuity in control. . . and violence when appropriately directed.
6. In effect, then, the ruling orders won, but the price of victory was a long term transformation of their respective ruling ideologies through infusions of de-natured radicalism. After 1968 that first tilted ruling cliques and their apparatus to the new-style de-natured radical right (the extraordinary rise of a unified core of vanguard leadership with a radical right tilt after 1968 is worth noting: Deng Xiaoping; Ronald Reagan; Helmut Kohl; John Paul II, Menachem Begin, Ayatollah Khomeini becmes clearer in this light). It then eventually tilted ideology to the now de-natured radical left, first as ideas, and then, pre-emptvely as policy and governance. This is the stage at which the world now ginfd itself. Though it appears that the Unabomber "won" in the long run--it might be more accurate to understand this as a victry for the collective organs of stability and mass management.
7. It then become clear why, for example, radicalized violence tilted from the left in the last century to the right in the 21st century. As the consumption of ideological embedding shifted from the liberal markets, self-actualization, and individual agency models of the "Washington Consensus" modes of globalization to the identity and collectivized managerialism of the left, with its centralizing and more effectively comprehensive management of human behavior, so too the center of violent opposition from left groups to those of the right. But that also suggests the trajectories of change in the coming decades, the battles over which now consume both outsiders and insiders--and prompted the sort of managerial guidance that is published by leading press organs.
8. The bottom line: orthodoxy operates within a broad spectrum of the plausible. As long as they can consume radical opposition and de-natured, embed it in its own operations, orthodoxy will prevail, whatever orthodoxy looks like form time to time. In effect, then, orthodoxy has no ideology other than to be orthodox--its etymology reveals its nature: "having the right opinion," from orthos "right, true, straight" (see ortho-) + doxa "opinion, praise." To borrow from the television series "Queen Charlotte"--embedding a de-natured radical "is only a problem if the palace says it’s a problem.” 9. The established orthodoxy inevitably responds by suppressing the radicalized movement, denaturing its ideological principles and objectives, and them embedding these denatured forms of radical ideology into its own orthodoxies. It was not so much that the Unabomber was ahead of his time; rather it was that the Unabomber served as a necessary ingredient of a complex interaction between orthodoxy, change, and the constancy of control over social relations. The Unabomber's ideas are, in the word of the title of Mr. Kirsch's essay, no so marginal now not because they were right, but because it was necessary to make them safe for democracy.
More detailed reflections follow.
1. The Unabomber was but one manifestation of a general tendency that was crystalized in the aftermath of the Revolutionary moment of 1968 that set the operational foundations for the shape of political life and the contestation over the nature, character and course of social relations that are now manifested in mainstream political discourse. During the time of the activity of the Unabomber, and certainly at the beginning, death and violence were very much associated with revolutionary and transformative moments of the left and the right. Though organized political agitation (in contra-distinction to the racial violence in the United States during the first half of the 20th century) at the start of the Unabomber's campaign of political violence appeared to be driven was driven by the radical "left" but its end in the mid 1990s, the use of mass violence in the service of political transformation ad also tilted toward the radical "right."
2. Yet it might be worth considering whether both emerged from out of the subterranean dissatisfaction with the leadership of the leading forces of the post-World War 2 that erupted in spectacular fashion in 1968. In a sense modernity ended (from the perspective of the stability of the regimes installed to reshape the world after 1945) with that revolutionary moment, that snapshot that was 1968, from out of the manifestation of which the modern left and right emerged. What emerges after 1968 are both profoundly transformative ideologies of the future of social relations and of the social engineering" necessary to achieve these necessary changes among the masses, and a growing acceptance that violence might be necessary to achieve those ends. These trajectories were as important in Marxist-Leninist states as they were in liberal democratic states but they presented differently because of differences in the organization and deployment of political relations. They affected religious establishments as well as the realms of economic production.
3. On the right the organization of advanced stage liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninist institutionalization, centered on production, markets, stability and prosperity and differentiated by the focus on self or collective actualization. These were signified by influential figures, for example, in religion (John Paul II; Joseph Ratzinger; Ayatollah Khomeini; Wahhabi Islam; etc.); and in politics (Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Deng Xiao Ping; Helmut Kohl; Milton Friedman). It also had its figures known for their violence who even then had used that violence to purchase a less than positive reputation --the Argentine dictatorship; General Pinochet; Mr. Brezhnev and his successors, and the like, though the later was more likely viewed as an example of the sort of bureaucratized decadence that ought to be swept away either by the left or the right). These figures and that movement thought that the status quo was
insufficiently strong to deflect or dismantle the eruptive forces on
view in 1968, and that social relations would have to be rethought to
avoid decay and extinction. Several critical triggering events stood out (there were many many others): Vietnam; the invasion of Czechoslovakia; the overthrow and murder of Salvador Allende; the Chinese Cultural Revolution; the American civil rights movement and what was then called the "free speech" movements; what was then understood as Women's liberation, and the like. These gave form to the conviction of the right of the need to rebuild.
4. Though shaped by the same events (and contributing to them as well) the more spectacular reaction was from the left, precisely because of the sense, at the time, of its (momentary) defeat, by the (decadent) forces of the establishment (here both left and right shared a view of the institution of social relations by the early 1960s). That sense of defeat, and impatience with mass society viewed as too complacent (and in the language of contemporaneity times--too despicable--to be left to its own devices), required the sort of push that revolutionary action--violent action, could provide. and with it a tendency toward violence and a certainty that the entirely of social structures would have to be re-imagined and re-built along more suitable lines. This is a vision led, to some extent by Marxist-Leninist Asia (and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong); but with its revolutionary cells virtually everywhere else. In an age of the Cultural Revolution's Red Guards, the Uruguayan Tupamaro, the
Brigada Rossa, the
Rote Armee Fraktion and Baader-Meinhof Gruppe, the
Students for a Democratic Society; the
Symbionese Liberation Army and to some extent the
Black Panthers, the Unabomber might have been noteworthy only because he was acting alone and to some extent because of the attack not on the political but the industrial system. Yet even there the Unabomber had company in the form of
Liberation Theology (Gustavo Gutierrez) and the emerging radical pedagogy of education as social transformation (
Paolo Freire) that have over time also become "mainstream." One imagines him more in the tradition of
Savonarola--preaching against the corruption of the Church and of morals in 15th century Florence, than of the Leninist collectives that made up the
bricolage of Marxist-Leninist and liberal democratic radical left groups after the mid- 1960s.
5. These figures and those movements also saw in the social relations of the 1960s a suffocating decadence and a sense that society must be rebuilt--and the individuals living within it as well. But the focus was a bit different. Identity, autonomy, and the re-imaginging of core social relations--of the body, of power, of equality, of consumption, of production, of social hierarchies, and the like --occupied the core of these movements. Identity categories, both for individuals (gender, race, religion, class) and collectives (imperialism, consumerism, colonialism, patriarchy, and the like) drove a re-conceptualization of not just social relations but their manifestation in the ordering and purpose of society and the markers by which that ordering could be assessed.
6. In a sense, then, the death of the Unabomber and the (momentary) rekindling of interest in the Manifesto he produced serve to make unavoidable the realization that the revolution of 1968 has not merely succeeded but now become banal. It is not so much that his ideas are in the language of Mr. Kirsch, no longer marginal--but that the very use of the terminology of marginalization suggests just how deeply embedded the radicalism of the movements from after the explosion of 1968 have now already reshaped the way in which elites (certainly) and those who manage mass instruction on self-consciousness (as a leading force) can think about the world around them and the historical development that brought them to this place and time. In defeat or victory--however momentary--all of these groups contributed to the reconstruction of the worldview of those who have a hand in shaping and enforcing collective world views.
7. That leads to the question no one would willingly ask--about pathways to the victory of ideas over the longer term. At the same time, the need for stability and prosperity makes it imperative that such radical impulses from the left and the right be made safe(r) for both liberal democracy and Marxist Leninist societies--the heirs of the 1950's establishment that had been targeted by the rebellions of 1968. it is to those ends that modern press and propaganda organs must be carefully deployed to both instruct and manage (expectations is the current term) that may be realized through these now neutered ideas. And, indeed, from the vantage point of 2023, it might appear that the object of the 1950s "establishment" was precisely that--to first suppress the movements, and then neuter and co-op the ideas that they generated. The object was to transform the establishment (in terms of its ideas) without affecting its control over the critical levers of social relations. If the 1960s era radical rights and left had become the generative sources of ideas for the evolution of social relations in collective society, then the establishment would itself become the nexus point of the anti-establishment. Indeed, by 2016 it was possible the phenomenon was plainly visible in the US presidential election campaign.
No one wants to be the square who hates rock 'n' roll. And no one wants to be "establishment" in the 2016 presidential race. Hillary Clinton quickly distanced herself from the label when Bernie Sanders used it against her in the last presidential debate. Republican Jeb Bush only grudgingly accepted the label. (People Keep Talking About 'The Establishment.' What Is It, Anyway?)
8. The establishment could keep its power only by officiating in its own demise. And in the process of rejecting itself, it could protect the scope and exercise of its power to manage social relations. That was the point of the 2016 use of the establishment trope as a sort of fetish object by people who one might be forgiven for thinking operate at the heart of the establishment. By 2023, for example, the largest enterprises could assume the stance of being great social actors advancing public policy objectives (Business Roundtable
Statement of Purpose of a Corporation;
Brief
Thoughts on Martin Lipton: "ESG, Stakeholder Governance, and the Duty
of the Corporation" (Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance)). The governmental movement from a politics of equal opportunity to one of social justice might be another.; climate justice still another. The transformation of discrimination from a marginal public policy issue to the core of the social ideology of the state serves as yet another. And the embrace of notions of sustainability and the role of industrial production (along with the morals of consumption) represent still another. The Unabomber touched on several of these--but so did the dense web of what was then radical operations after 1968. But radical forward movement also radicalizes resistance. The transformation of ideologies of the body, and of gender, appears to provide a current focal point; more a gateway to more generalized conflict going forward.
9. It is in this way that one can better understand the normalization that is at the heart of the transformation of the Unabomber's ideas (as well as those of that revolutionary generation--now rapidly aging). Normalization represented the most sublime way in which radical threats could be eliminated (beyond the temporary traditional forms of suppression) by adopting a policy of appearing to embrace ideas (in much more benign form of course) without changing power relations in the slightest. It follows that the establishment concept hasn't quite disappeared--even as it might also have morphed with the times to the discursive trope of the
deep state (at least for some). But the resiliency of both is precisely in its ability to suppress threats, and then to absorb the ideas that made the suppressed movements threatening, but in a neutered and useful (to the establishment) form. While discourse and direction changed--the power alignments in social relations have not. It is in this context that the radical left and the radical right underestimated the resiliency of power relations. One doe snot overthrow the establishment--one presents a credible enough of a threat that one might negotiate apportion within it--radicalism with establishment characteristics. And that is the formula that is again applied to the current generation of the radical--appropriation, de-naturing, absorption of ideas and suppression of the movement.
10. But transforming its ruling ideology in ways that both incorporated the
opposing radicalization, but also co-opted it to serve as an instrument
of continuity in control is not the end of the story. Violence is co-opted as well, and sometimes those groups that can serve as the unofficial shock troops of established authority. . . . and violence when appropriately directed. On the one side one has the example of the 6 January 2021 violence when supporters of "former President Donald Trump stormed Congress . . . in a bid to thwart the certification of Joe Biden's election victory." (
Capitol riots timeline: What happened on 6 January 2021?). On the other one has Congressperson Rashida Tlaib who has “urged climate activists to be 'much more aggressive' as they plan a campaign of blocking highways and chaotic protests later this summer. . . 'If we don't get the policies we need, if our legislative process is failing us, then direct action gets the goods.'” (
'Squad' member Rashida Tlaib urges eco-zealots to be 'much more aggressive' in a secret pep talk ahead of their summer of blocking highways and vandalizing art galleries).
11. To some extent, some of this operates as subtext in Mr. Kirsch's excellent essay. And, indeed, it also illustrates its purpose (conscious or not) as an instrument of normalization in the service of established orthodoxy and its control systems. That is the "bigger fish" that Mr. Kirsch appears to be frying. Like most of us, he notes that the ideas in the Manifesto, as well as in his other writings) got lost in the terror and the aftermath of capture, trial, and imprisonment.--"virtually no one expressed much interest in the ramblings of a mad bomber." (Kirsch, supra). No one, that is, who counted--among the establishment and its operational ele4ments in the press, academia, and other institutional centers of influence. But now it is OK--precisely because the world has not just caught up with those ideas, but have expressed them better. "The obsessions that turned him into a killer have become mainstream." (Ibid.). Mr. Kirsch does note the singularity of the Manifesto's blendig of elements of the normalized radical left and right: "from hatred of what was not ye called 'wokeness' to fear that artificial intelligence will render human beings obsolete." (Ibid.). But then explains it away by the suggestion that this hodgepodge (when viewed from the rationalizing universe of the normalizing establishment of contemporary society) "reflects the mind of a conspiracy theorist--a type that has become increasingly common in American politics" (Ibid), but one still slated for marginalization. That judgment is augmented, it appears, by the Manifesto's target--technological progress. The need for marginalization intensifies as its power to bridge difference in political ideologies emerges--"In this way, radical environmentalism, which is ordinarily thought of as a leftist movement, converges with far right groups that want to withdraw from society, such as survivalists and militias." (Ibid.). That, in turn, is grounded on a view of personal autonomy which is both reflected in the core principles of liberal democracy, but inherently subversive when it challenges the basis and forms of collective organization and the role of the managers of that organization in line drawing between social production and autonomy. The critique here reduces itself to a charge of "monomania"--the Manifesto's "belief that every problem has the same solution." (Ibid.). But even here Mr. Kirsch pauses: "But the basic idea that the only dignified life is an independent one is very much in the American grain. And his sense of crisis, his belief that technology was on the brink of making the planet unlivable, is now shared by many of the people who create that technology." (bid). The difference is that those on the inside believe the problem is manageable--and that the path toward management is embrace of the discourse and ideologies of concern made palatable by its balancing with the aspirations to collective prosperity and security. That takes the radical sting out of the ideology and reduces it to risk management--the very core of contemporary approaches to policy in both the public and private sectors.
No comments:
Post a Comment