Fed up with certain complacent tics in the liberal press
after the recent border brouhaha (i.e. President Trump’s attempt to enforce his
“zero-tolerance” policy on illegal immigration by separating the children of
illegal immigrants from their parents detained in custody) I fired off this
letter to the New York Times. I hope
it was at least worth a chuckle. You judge. (To the Times, who didn't publish me: thank you at least for not alienating me from all my friends.)
Dear New York Times,
I wonder if your style editor might consider researching the
word “totalitarian,” frequently used by your editorial columnists these days,
and banishing it from your style book (if banishing words from a style book is
not too totalitarian)? The word is liberally applied by writers in your paper
to immigrant-bashers in the Trump administration, for reasons I will try to
explain. “The horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism” warn us about “forces
pervading the politics of the United States and Europe today” (especially as
they pertain to issues of immigration) wrote Richard J. Bernstein in your
paper, June 20, 2018, shortly after the border fuss, in a typical outburst of
overwrought journalism. I know some people will bristle at the word “fuss.” I
just want to splash some cold light on deliberations.
Let me stress that I am not for or against immigration. The body is nothing but a swarming republic of immigrating and emigrating molecules. Immigration represents intrusion,
disruption and opportunity all at once. We are all immigrants, members of a powerful antique brotherhood. European
settlers in America, empowered by a sense of privilege and destiny, gained admittance to this club by proving themselves nimbler, smarter and more ruthless than the now effectively extinct race of indigenous Americans—themselves Asian immigrants—who once tried to block
their immigration.
(To scientifically-minded know-it-alls who swear indignantly that there is no such thing as race—a word of obscure origin—I use the word in its ordinary, pre-scientific sense. In English it once meant “wines of a characteristic flavor,” all sparkling, so to speak, with distinct possibilities.)
(To scientifically-minded know-it-alls who swear indignantly that there is no such thing as race—a word of obscure origin—I use the word in its ordinary, pre-scientific sense. In English it once meant “wines of a characteristic flavor,” all sparkling, so to speak, with distinct possibilities.)
I believe many share responsibility for immigrant family
separation, including past administrations and illegal-immigrant parents
themselves. Pro-immigration Democrats in Congress, allied with the same
Republican business interests who stalled the promising e-verify program, block
effective border-control legislation, hoping that the ensuing border chaos will
blow up in the administration’s face. American parents are routinely separated
from their children after being charged with a crime. I welcome genuine
discussion about the issue, without words like Hitler and totalitarian being
hurled indiscriminately. It grieves me to see children used as ammunition in a
propaganda war. I actually agree with Anne Coulter for once. (Who needs a red
pill or a blue pill when reality is so damn purple?) There is no such thing as
“woke” or asleep. Life is an in-between.
Count me as an open-minded member of the environmentalists
for sensible immigration law, who regularly face scurrilous accusations of
“greenwashing” their racism. I am willing to throw open the borders to
unrestricted immigration, but not without a debate. I know that history is an airy soufflé sustained by hope and
unintended consequences. In this letter, my interest
is narrowly focused not on immigration but on words, and on the excesses of
political rhetoric. My curiosity piqued by passages in the press like the one
above, in the following paragraphs I try to make sense of the stubborn grip the
elusive word “totalitarian” (an immigrant itself, as it turns out) has on our popular
imagination.
In use, the word seems to have little content beyond its
formulaic links to Hitler and Stalin. If you call someone a totalitarian, you
might as well be calling him a Nazi. But there are persistent attempts by
commentators to fill in the empty space enclosed by the word with actual
content.
Many of these attempts stem from the resistance of
old-school philosophy to the mid-twentieth-century ideas of postmodernism,
including its critique of the correspondence theory of truth. According to this
theory, truths (statements of fact)
correspond to the facts they express, and this correspondence is what we call truth. Truth is something like the
totality of truths. There are countless attempts in the philosophical
literature to understand the nature of this correspondence. Despite its ancient
provenance, it is a theory well-suited to the information age, where all
processed facts are already several layers of abstraction removed from ordinary
language.
In his article Bernstein, seconding Hannah Arendt, deplores
totalitarianism’s Nietzschean (i.e. postmodern) nihilism toward what he calls
“factual truth”—real, honest-to-goodness truth, as opposed to mere “poetic” or
“religious” truth. Modern man accepts the binding authority of plain facts as a
medieval peasant once accepted the authority of Holy Scripture: unconditionally and
reverently. Like Arendt and George Orwell, both adherents to the correspondence
theory, Bernstein equates facts with truth. “One of the most successful
techniques for blurring the distinction between factual truth and falsehood is
to claim that any so-called factual truth is just another opinion—something we
hear almost every day from the Trump administration.” (An opinion is a
statement that lacks correspondence with a fact.) Old-fashioned
policy makers (liberal technocrats) who could once hold the floor by reciting a
laundry list of facts suddenly feel threatened by populists (i.e., the rabble)
who are deaf to information. (The People are hard-ass dudes.) “What happened so
blatantly in totalitarian regimes is being practiced today by leading
politicians with great success,” Bernstein alleges. (Why are contemporary
accusations of totalitarianism almost never leveled at leftist populists?)
Bernstein longs for science to provide the same
truth-grounding role in the new world which God played in the old one. But if he thinks he is opposing totalitarianism by clinging to old-fashioned
Enlightenment superstitions about science, he is pathetically mistaken—especially since he doesn't have a clue about what the word is really supposed to mean.
Like others who swoon at the occult magic of the word
“totalitarian,” Bernstein misinterprets the casual mystification, cruelty and
gaslighting practiced by bullies, thugs and murderers at all levels of the
power chain as if it were dictated by an office memo, or written up in a
company mission statement. Compare the elaborate regimen of torture and
psychological conditioning through which 1984’s
Winston Smith is implausibly forced to renounce his belief in 2+2=4, Orwell’s
secular version of the True Cross. Monochromatic conspiracy theorists like
Bernstein and Orwell see things in black and white, but the truth is
multicolored. (Forget the banality of evil. Worry about the banality of slogans.)
The bully and thug doesn’t need a rogue’s playbook. He is an instinctive
manipulator, with an inborn knowledge of human psychology. He takes perverse
delight in his work, unlike the unconvincing bureaucrats in Orwell’s famous
novel. (Compare the convincing bureaucrats in a Kafka novel.) Evil joy is his
keynote emotion, one that consoles him in the day-to-day drudgery of his
thankless task, and gleeful enthusiasm at the wreckage he leaves behind. He makes few long-range plans. His knack for
mayhem is its own reward. In his political avatar he never lays the foundations
for a lasting state. (Even in the case of the Soviet nightmare, aided by
“scientific” socialism and its yen for facts, the terror was relatively
short-lived). His reign is invariably as brief as a blazing meteor. Think of
Edmund in King Lear. Inspired malice,
not programmatic intent, rules his actions. Programs are for cucks and E.U
politicians. As the sun sets on its nighted plans, evil leaves pretty contrails in the sky. Any contemporary politico who practices the art of disruption
feels a kinship, however slight, with the legendary monsters of the last
century.
The word “totalitarian” gives us a spooky little chill when
we hear it, like the word “Orwellian,” and convinces us at once that it holds
the key to a mystery that concerns all of us nearly, the problem of evil—i.e.,
the problem of Hitler and Stalin. It assures us that are we are free of
complicity in the crimes of these men. For the key element of totalitarianism
is its cultivated hostility toward facts (like Orwell’s famous 2+2=4) which we,
for our part, cherish. “Nothing is true; everything is allowed,” in the words
of Friedrich Nietzsche. Man is innately good apart from the corrupting
influence of bad ideas. But the comforting feeling the word “totalitarian”
gives us that we finally understand the source of our fears evaporates as soon
as we actually examine it.
One thread in the tangled skein of our overused word
“totalitarian” is the idea of a centralized economy. Having undermined
“factual” truth as the first step in its plans of world domination, totalitarianism
then seeks to solidify its hold on power through total control of all
other aspects of the lives of its citizens. But the German economy under the
popularly-elected Hitler was a loose association of autonomous
corporations—Krupp, Siemans, Porsche, Hugo Boss—much like ours. (IG Farben even
supplied Zyklon B to Nazi gas chambers.) Neighbor exerted on neighbor far more
pressure to conform to the state than did the secret police. Such conformity is
the universal glue of all political unions, murderous or benign. Responding to a latent cruelty in his people,
an inspired leader brought that cruelty to light and unleashed it on the world.
It was the source of his power. Whether in a tyranny or a democracy, all
governance is a partnership between leader and people. They form a totality. So
why exactly do we reflexively label Nazi Germany (but not ourselves)
totalitarian?
Benito Mussolini used the term “totalitario” (totalitarian) to describe a state that fulfills a
totality of its citizens’ needs (and demands a totality of their loyalty in
exchange). The word “totality” has a nice “I really mean it” sound to it. It
expresses commitment and devotion, a total investment of one’s being, and has a
“modern” ring. (Compare Ernst Jünger’s 1930 essay, “Totale Mobilmachung,” total mobilization: life as a soldier’s
struggle and achievement.) Mussolini liked that. It satisfied certain aesthetic
needs. It evoked memories of the Church Militant. Soldiers of Christ united in
a cause. Onward, Christian soldiers, to salvation (the universal goal of
history) with our race leading the way. A new secular church for the twentieth
century. (Compare the modern liberal ideal of total inclusivity—with its “merit”-selected architects leading the way.) What
country doesn’t want a population of energized citizens, especially in
difficult times? Supreme leader as high-school coach giving a half-time pep
talk.
The word “totalitarian” was then turned against its inventor
by nameless anti-Fascists (it is hard to track down exact sources) and used as
a general term to designate states that are oppressive, or illegitimate, or
something. Should we just say Fascist? But
we have to use the lowercase word “fascist” if it is to be a general term
applicable to any state, and then the whole tug-of-war over meaning starts
again. The signification of the term
(what does it have to do with totality?) has never been satisfactorily
explained, even by its creator. E
pluribus unum, isn’t that the definition of totality? But in most people’s
mouths totalitarian is practically a synonym for authoritarian, an equally
slippery term, and not exactly one which springs to mind when we read the motto
on our currency.
We recoil from the idea that our autonomy and free will have
their roots deeply planted in a—what should we call it? Totality? Something
which embraces, sustains and gives rise to our very individuality. This is
partly the reason why the word “totalitarian” gives off sinister vibrations for
us, and why we are so eager to apply it to evil regimes. At the same time, we
sense that our belief in our self-sufficiency arises from confused ignorance.
Philosophy has always sought to understand the paradox of a freedom subject to
nature (compare Kant).
Something of a philosophical buzz surrounded the concept of
totality before its use in a word by Mussolini. In Hegel’s Logic totality (one of Kant’s categories of pure reason) is a very
primitive—and deficient—manifestation of the Absolute Idea. (Bear with me
here.) Imagine infinity and eternity exhaustively itemized in a bookkeeper’s
ledger. That’s totality.
Martin Heidegger considered the concept of “totality” to be
imbued with Western Metaphysics and the forgetfulness of Being. But he located
the source of this baneful forgetfulness (and the debasement of language that
emanates from it) in the United States. Having immigrated from the continent,
the word “totalitarian” became associated by educated American readers with the
name Hannah Arendt (Heidegger’s refugee Jewish friend and student) after the
publication of her book The Origins of
Totalitarianism in 1951. Its history forgotten, the word “totalitarian” was
then applied in the post-war years exclusively to Communists (the original
anti-fascists!) by the American press and State Department. It was linked to
pejorative shibboleths like a “centralized economy” and “rigid adherence to a
creed,” with a blizzard of ill-defined terms like “ideology” supporting the
whole lexical edifice on a foundation of air. Muslim Jihadists, godless
Communists and Evangelical Christians (compare The Handmaid’s Tale): all our enemies in the culture wars are
totalitarian under some definition or other.
Hannah Arendt’s own treatment of the term in her book,
infused with her personal history, only adds to the confusion—confusion
carefully cultivated as an effective rhetorical tool in a thousand applications
of the word to the Trump administration in Vox,
the Guardian, the New Republic, the Washington Post, the New Yorker and the New York Times, to name a few. (Of course, all these outlets are
careful to say that Trump and his associates only “recall” or “threaten”
totalitarianism—in other words, wish to summon it like ghosts from the deep.)
Hannah Arendt’s totalitarian regimes are invariably old-fashioned despotisms
enhanced with twentieth-century technology. Arendt never—unlike her teacher,
Martin Heidegger—exhibits much interest in the essence of technology, or asks whether it is despotic in some more
original sense than a murderous tyrant. Technology undercuts and dominates
every clash of personal wills and fuses, as Michel Foucault saw, the oppressed
with the oppressor in an indissoluble totality. In many ways technology—to which the idea of recursivity is central—is the
very embodiment of a self-enclosed totality, and therefore totalitarian in an eminent sense.(The representation of nature as a dynamic ecological system according to the science of control systems is technological, hence also totalitarian.)
In short, the misused word “totalitarian,” newly dusted-off
by the liberal press to refer to our Orwellian enemies in the Republican Party,
with their reputed disrespect for facts, is just an empty propaganda slogan—a
debasement of language. Unseemly name-calling. Republicans are far from having
a monopoly on the degradation of language, which Hannah Arendt considered
primarily a cause rather than an effect of the rise of totalitarian states. (I confess I have not always been scrupulously fair to Arendt in this cantankerous manifesto. Feminist hagiography makes Arendt off-limits to criticism in our totalitarian lecture halls.) When Republicans brazenly deny facts, for the most part they are just trolling
Democrats, who are inordinately fond of facts. (If only they were always fond
of the right ones!). Who can resist? Democrats should not take the bait. Let’s
stop confusing facts with truth. Since there is something like an economy of
knowledge, those with wealth and privilege will always have more ready access
to facts than those who are fact-impoverished. An extensive infrastructure
supports the collection and validation of facts. Democrats are rich in facts.
But only an elite technocrat with a defective sense of reality thinks they have
a fast track to truth. Let our managerial classes concern themselves with facts. Leaders tap into a future more real than the factual present.
Read Stanley Fish’s recent Stone column—“‘Transparency’ Is the Mother of Fake News,” New York Times, May 8, 2018—on the
ponderous irrelevance of most facts. Facts are overrated—even overabundant—but
the truth is in short supply. Just because you think your pet fact demands everybody’s immediate attention doesn’t mean
that it really does. The Fact—standing alone outside history and purged of all
interest and motive—is a creature of metaphysics. Even the most mundane fact is impregnated with a forgetfulness that closes off the future and all its possibilities. A so-called "possible world" is just a cloned variation of the actual one, woven out of select abstract negations of the same attenuated facts with which we construct our world rather than dwell in it (and are constructed by it in return). Why be caught in a factual
error when, like a good liberal or conservative pundit, you can weave a story
that highlights irrelevant facts and casts the important ones into obscurity,
all the while remaining willfully ignorant of what you are doing? (An "important" fact is simply one which is upfront about its questionable bearing on truth.) In other
words, why ever lie when you can just—lie? There is hypocrisy in proclaiming
truth while remaining ignorant of the true nature of facts.
I love America, but I wish I could enlighten her fathomless
ignorance. Still sitting on a preponderance of the world’s wealth, legacy of
two centuries of genocide and slavery, America pretends to fulfill the totality
of its citizens’ needs by promising us “freedom” and supplying us with the
latest expensive technological gadgets like social media. It uses targeted
advertising to elicit—or create—the totality of our deepest desires, dreams and
opinions, in all their diversity, and to satisfy and disseminate them with
marketing expertise. It demands loyalty to its core values in exchange, values
which it honors with reverent lip-service, like everybody else. So I guess that
makes us totalitarians—like everybody else.
And “exclusionary” to boot. United we stand against the
enemies of democracy, the one true religion, soldiers in the cause of universal
salvation: the reduction of every facet of human experience and natural
existence to commercial exploitation.
With the help of Amazon, Facebook and Google—facilitators of
our dreams and maestros of artificial intelligence—America calls the shots on
the world stage. Immigration has always been a vital cog in her wheel. Migrants
come, wave after wave, astraddle on the dolphins’ mire and blood, from
struggling countries well-stocked like Amazon fulfillment centers with low-wage
labor. They are at the disposal of American capitalism, which seems to
cultivate foreign poverty like U.S. agribusiness cultivates El Salvadoran
bananas.
Liberal: sworn to hard-fought principles of freedom.
Generous: from the Latin word generosus, meaning high-born, high-minded.
When did these words come to denote the cynical indulgence a
master—enslaved by his own lavishness—uses to pacify his slave? Technology
exudes prodigality as its chief poison. Talk about the banality of evil! The
toy-store banality of the sleek new products on display at a tech expo
positively glistens with evil possibilities, regardless of any of the military or
surveillance uses to which these beaming novelties can be put. Technology
polices and surveils, so as to better serve. It arrogates to itself the sum of
human aspirations. As for migration, a much-used term in cybernetics, it means
to move data or software from one location to another, so as to maximize
efficiency and distribute resources evenly. Everyone profits in the shuffle. As
far as business is concerned, we all know that the name of the future is
mobility and fluidity. Mobilismo (to
coin a new word). Futurismo.
(Futurism. Marinetti. Boccioni. Lest we forget the paramount
importance of art in the creation of any national-scale criminal enterprise, I
want to stress that all politics is a product of the creative imagination.
Count Lincoln Center as a major factor in our global expansion.)
Lords once spacious in the possession of dirt, now rich in
intellectual property, we skim above the treetops in a dream of weightlessness
like Marvel franchises on crystal meth, slaying populist dragons with the
obscene versatility of our facts.
(And stop harping on Russia and its stiff-necked strongman, the ice hockey-adept Vladimir Putin, that nettle in the West's sneaker.
Swallowed up by this web of totalities, all the fir trees in the Siberian
forest are destined one day to become either oriented strand board or display
specimens in a nature theme park. Let us hope Russian backwardness spares them
a while longer.)
How fast is your processor? Everything is fluid, blurred by
motion. Whatever has the solidity and composure to stand still is left behind
in the rush (Rausch, intoxication)
and is resolved into its constituent metallic ores like a quarried mountain in
order to make a smart phone. (At least our phones are smart.) As Martin
Heidegger said, only a god can save us.
