This September marks the tenth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. One can scarcely imagine how many articles and blog posts will begin with similar sentences during the next few weeks. We'll see different angles, hear different tones, and be exposed to all manner of insights and illusions on the subject of 9/11. After all the words, though, and after this much time, will we be any closer to understanding what happened? We all share certain emotions about those traumatic events. What kind of understanding do we share?
9/11 was initially seen as a great unifier and quickly became one of the most divisive events in recent memory. It was a declaration of war, and as Chris Hedges points out in his book of the same title, war is a force that gives us meaning. Unity wasn't just a result of the attacks. It was an imperative result. Any disruption of that unity was seen as a threat to our security, certainly, but it was also more than that. It was a threat to our sense of duty, honor, and courage...because war is what promised to restore all of those things.
For these reasons and others, objective analysis of the conflict, the enemy, and the respective strategies was generally unwelcome. Any attempt to understand Bin Laden's motives, for example, was said to be "too soon" for the still grieving American psyche. Moreover, any such attempt was probably itself motivated by sympathy for terrorists and a desire to justify their cause. Our own president put it very simply. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Granted, his statement was addressed to other nations who might have considered harboring our enemies, but in many people's minds the distinction between foreign enablers of terrorism and domestic critics of the War on Terror was slight, at best.
But it's been ten years now. Osama Bin Laden is dead, which means that at least one of our goals--and ostensibly one of the most significant--has been achieved. We've had time to recover, to plan a strategy and set it in motion, and to see at least some of the results. A few questions seem appropriate to consider. What did Bin Laden accomplish before his death? What have we accomplished? Who is the enemy now, and where do we stand with respect to them? To those interested in the factual background of what follows, I recommend Adam Curtis' documentary The Power of Nightmares and the books Why Nothing Works by Marvin Harris and Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges.
As of the year 2000 or so, Al Qaeda historically had had limited appeal among the Muslims Bin Laden aspired to rule. The group's extreme fundamentalism made it fractious and prone to violent infighting, such that it's questionable whether they even had a coherent philosophy to offer. Intolerance of disagreement, however, was a constant. It extended especially to other Muslims, who have always been the principal targets of Al Qaeda's wrath. In the fundamentalist view, Muslims who demur in the smallest detail are no Muslims at all, and in fact are worse than infidels who never knew the truth. This has led Al Qaeda to practice extensive campaigns of violence against other Muslims.
For the most part, predictably, Al Qaeda's efforts to terrorize their coreligionists into submission backfired, bringing their popularity to a low point before 9/11. Their one reliable sales pitch was opposition to American policy, particularly American military action in Muslim countries. On this it seemed everyone could agree. That is not to say Bin Laden was a freedom fighter. On the contrary, he was thoroughly anti-democratic, power-hungry, and unscrupulous about the use of financial and drug crime as well as wanton violence to expand his field of domination in any way possible. He was, in other words, the mirror image of the American interests ultimately responsible for his training when he was our ally against the Soviets. But even if he was a thug, to Arabs and Muslims he was their thug. In the face of American hegemony, this lent him a certain credibility.
In their desperation, and with the inspiration of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda devised a plan to take advantage of their one remaining strength. They would launch an attack on the US itself, an action of such boldness and scale that it would become a symbol and a rallying point for anti-American resentment throughout the Muslim world. In doing so they would win the widespread support of Muslims who felt oppressed by American power. And there was a second element to the strategy. Al Qaeda calculated that while the US couldn't be defeated on the battlefield, we also couldn't sustain an extended war without drowning in debt. By drawing us into full military commitment in the Middle East and using cheap guerrilla tactics to prolong our expenditures, they would finally drive us out once and for all. They would defeat us not militarily, but economically.
How then does Bin Laden's plan look, ten years out? There was a brief surge in his popularity after 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The results were short-lived, however. This part of the strategy seems not to have succeeded in the long term. On the second point, it has been far more successful, though it's not clear that Congress or either of the post-9/11 presidents have recognized it. The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has officially passed the 3 1/2 trillion dollar mark. Meanwhile our metamorphosis into a Third World nation, already well underway before 9/11, has strikingly accelerated. Inflation, if it were measured by the same Consumer Price Index that was used in the 1970s, would probably be around 10 percent. Unemployment, including those who have stopped looking for work or settled for part-time jobs, is around 15 percent and rising. In 2010 the ratio of national debt to GDP passed the 90 percent threshold. In 2011 it passed 100 percent, and this month the United States' credit rating was reduced to subprime for the first time ever. Representative Barney Frank, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, cited war spending as the primary reason for the downgrade.
Operating on a cost-plus basis, the defense industry has long been generating monstrous inefficiencies that have spilled over into other industries. This is to the extent, of course, that other industries continue to exist. Since WWII, the manufacturing base for productive goods has virtually disappeared in the wake of war socialism, Soviet style. Of course, not all our economic ills result from the War on Terror. But the fact remains that we now spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined. We spend ten times as much as the first runner-up, China, and this is only counting programs in the Pentagon budget itself. War-related spending in other agencies probably brings the total near a trillion dollars annually. President Obama recently challenged the Afghans to develop an economy not based on war. The comedian Harry Shearer quipped that this sounded like a wonderful idea...and when would it be our turn?
As we go on competing with extremists for control of the Middle East, the people of that region continue to be caught in between. The great majority want to be dictated to neither by the US nor by Muslim fundamentalists. This attitude seems as unfathomable to us as it is to Al Qaeda. Obama has basically stayed the course, yet Afghanistan remains without a viable government other than the Taliban. The Russians learned that you can't conquer Afghanistan, and lost their empire in the process. We're now learning that you still can't conquer it even when you pitch the operation as something other than conquest (a most salesmanly and most American expedient that was supposed to make all the difference).
Those who wrote Bin Laden's obituary this year mostly described him as a failure, a man whose unrealistic ambitions made him foolish enough to trifle with a superpower. There is some truth to this narrative. Bin Laden failed to build significant support for a new fundamentalist caliphate in the Middle East. This is a good thing, so far as it goes. But he may well have succeeded in his ancillary goal of bankrupting the American empire. Even though he is dead, the endgame he set in motion has played out more or less successfully. Each day we are two billion dollars further in debt and that much further from claiming the upper hand.
Michael Scheuer's indispensable book Imperial Hubris, published anonymously in 2004, essentially narrowed our realistic options down to two. We will either have to annihilate the Muslim nations or learn to do business without using coercion. Neither is likely to happen any time soon. The only remaining choice is to steel ourselves for future conflict and loss. Scheuer has some advice that seems especially appropriate on the tenth anniversary of the attacks:
Stop Celebrating Death and Defeat
Since the 11 September attacks, many Americans have engaged in an almost nonstop celebration of the massive US defeat suffered that day. Purportedly sorrowful commemorations of the dead, these endless, well-planned and -scripted effusions of grief, international contests for memorial designs, and, most of all, rivers of stilted, never-forget oratory serve no purpose save to recall our utter defeat and allow us to wallow in dread of the pain to come. In my own organization in 2003, we celebrated "Family Day" by treating visiting relatives to this sort of celebration of defeat. In the main corridor stood a shrine erected to the debacle of 11 September. Beautifully matted photos of the twin towers burning and collapsing, framed artist renderings of architects' plans for memorials to the dead, photos of pseudo-Diana flower piles placed in front of US embassies abroad, and--the macabre centerpiece--a glass display case holding metallic shards from the World Trade Center. All these are, to use an old-fashioned phrase, unmanly. Americans are made of sterner stuff--or, at least, better be, for, as Robert D. Kaplan wrote about our current foes in the Atlantic Monthly, "In a world of tribes and thugs manliness goes a long way."
9/11 memorials have always been a heady mixture of arrogance and self-pity. The tenth promises to be the most extravagant orgy yet, but as Scheuer observes, such things serve no real purpose. After ten years, perhaps it's time to move on. Perhaps we might stop reminiscing on our brief moments spent basking in the world's sympathy and start reflecting on why so much of that sympathy has been lost. We might take a cold look at our response to what happened and judge carefully whether it has helped or hurt us. It remains to be seen whether America is "ready" for such a course. But if we can't be smart about it, let's at least be manly.
Showing posts with label Marvin Harris. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marvin Harris. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Why Nothing Works
The anthropologist Marvin Harris was a developer and proponent of cultural materialism, a theory that emphasizes factors of production and demographics in the analysis of social phenomena. While this may sound somewhat esoteric, its main implication is fairly simple. It is the infrastructure of everyday life, the methods of producing goods and services, and the pattern of economic relationships in a society that determine that society's attitudes, beliefs, and ideology...and not, as we often assume, the other way around. Most often, a culture conforms its ideas to its conditions as a way of explaining and coping with them. Harris' popular book Why Nothing Works, published in the 1980s, dealt with the rapid changes in American social life following World War II and tried to explain, among other things, feminism, the gay rights movement, increasing crime rates, inflation, cults, fundamentalism, and the decline of marriage and the single-income family.
Harris' theory stands in contrast to some conservative modes of analysis, which tend to privilege (or vilify) abstract ideas as the source of social change. For example, champions of "family values" see the 1960s as a true pivot point in the history of American domestic life. In this reading, the change in mindset brought about by the feminist movement caused women to leave the home and pursue careers, which in turn had various detrimental consequences for children and society. Harris points out, however, that the entry of women into the workforce actually preceded the women's liberation movement by at least a decade. Women went to work for other, more mundane reasons and developed a theory of equality and liberation as a response to the new problems they faced. In Harris' view, most of the changes in American life in the last few generations can be explained by the increasingly dominant influence of corporate monopolies (or oligopolies) and government bureaucracy.
The question then arises, who is right? Did Harris find the real answer in economics? Or are there deeper forces at work, as reactionaries would have it, like the loss of religious faith or a general "moral decline?" As convincing as much of Harris' argument is, there is still something compelling about the thought that ideas matter in and of themselves. If we can shape our own ideas, and in turn shape the world with them, we are empowered. If our ideas are simply a function of technology and convention, we are reduced.
To begin with, Harris has some things in common with conservatives. Although he sees feminism as an understandable (and perhaps inevitable) response to certain economic realities, it doesn't follow that the two-income family is entirely a good thing. In fact, Harris sees the employment of married females as an adjustment to the increasing power of large corporations and increasing economic pressure on employees. To the extent that the women's movement compensated for this shift in power by winning more equal treatment, it was beneficial. But at the same time it also served to entrench and legitimize the forces that drove women out of the home in the first place, often against their preference. In this sense it has actually left women, and workers generally, with less power and fewer options. Thus Harris stands somewhat apart from political feminism. And while he borrows the Marxian emphasis on factors of production, he does not seem to be an ideological Marxist. In Why Nothing Works he explicitly rejects the post-modern agenda, which is based on Marxist critical theory. Indeed, he devoted his final work, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times, to denouncing the political effects of post-modernism.
To the second generation Marxists who laid the groundwork for post-modernist theory, ideology was of course all important. With his concepts of quiet revolution and the long march through the institutions, Antonio Gramsci located the battlefield squarely in the ideological realm. Economic change was the goal, but cultural change had to come first. Christianity was particularly an obstacle, as Gramsci wrote, because the civilized world had been saturated with it for 2000 years. If only because of the sense of continuity it provided, religion was a kind of immune system against radical change.
On the other side we find those I'll label as traditionalists, opponents of political correctness, Marxism, feminism, etc. They are mostly religious and conservative in the broad sense and are often, but not always, identified with the political right. They agree with post-modernists on one essential point, which is the importance of ideology and especially religion. They would look with suspicion at Harris' thesis that big business is to blame for social chaos (though it should be mentioned that Harris also includes big government monopolies as part of the problem, a point that would likely draw some selective agreement). Instead, traditionalists blame the leftists who claimed to have planned capitalism's demise. As the communist activist Willi Münzenberg put it, "We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks." Where Harris asks a series of questions and finds corporate oligopoly as the answer to each--why nothing works, why the help won't help you, why America changed--traditionalists would instead find a lack of spiritual sense, right morality, and respect for authority both human and divine. To them, a declining economy is the direct and visible result of the West's broken immune system.
So, back to the question of who's right. There is potentially a lot of common ground between the traditionalist approach and Harris' materialistic analysis. If religion is our society's immune system, and the immune system is weakened, this is certainly a significant fact, just as a weakened immune system in a medical patient is significant in all kinds of ways. An observation of compromised immunity, however, is not the same as a diagnosis. It remains to be discovered what is actually causing the disease and by what mechanism. It seems plausible that faith gives a us a certain amount of immunity from the vagaries of economic life. That is to say, it's plausible that a more spiritual people might also be more civil despite the growing influence of impersonal corporations and bureaucracies. Yet it's doubtless also true that our economic infrastructure affects our character, and that the effects are at least somewhat predictable.
Of course this all begs the question of what role religion plays in sustaining morality and civility, whether it is a necessary role, and how exactly it works if it works at all. These are issues I plan to visit in a later post. They're beyond the scope of a book like Why Nothing Works, which shouldn't be understood as offering any answers to "why" questions of the philosophical sort. But Harris certainly does offer insight into what doesn't work, or perhaps how nothing works. If anything, his answers seem even more valid after 25 years.
Harris' theory stands in contrast to some conservative modes of analysis, which tend to privilege (or vilify) abstract ideas as the source of social change. For example, champions of "family values" see the 1960s as a true pivot point in the history of American domestic life. In this reading, the change in mindset brought about by the feminist movement caused women to leave the home and pursue careers, which in turn had various detrimental consequences for children and society. Harris points out, however, that the entry of women into the workforce actually preceded the women's liberation movement by at least a decade. Women went to work for other, more mundane reasons and developed a theory of equality and liberation as a response to the new problems they faced. In Harris' view, most of the changes in American life in the last few generations can be explained by the increasingly dominant influence of corporate monopolies (or oligopolies) and government bureaucracy.
The question then arises, who is right? Did Harris find the real answer in economics? Or are there deeper forces at work, as reactionaries would have it, like the loss of religious faith or a general "moral decline?" As convincing as much of Harris' argument is, there is still something compelling about the thought that ideas matter in and of themselves. If we can shape our own ideas, and in turn shape the world with them, we are empowered. If our ideas are simply a function of technology and convention, we are reduced.
To begin with, Harris has some things in common with conservatives. Although he sees feminism as an understandable (and perhaps inevitable) response to certain economic realities, it doesn't follow that the two-income family is entirely a good thing. In fact, Harris sees the employment of married females as an adjustment to the increasing power of large corporations and increasing economic pressure on employees. To the extent that the women's movement compensated for this shift in power by winning more equal treatment, it was beneficial. But at the same time it also served to entrench and legitimize the forces that drove women out of the home in the first place, often against their preference. In this sense it has actually left women, and workers generally, with less power and fewer options. Thus Harris stands somewhat apart from political feminism. And while he borrows the Marxian emphasis on factors of production, he does not seem to be an ideological Marxist. In Why Nothing Works he explicitly rejects the post-modern agenda, which is based on Marxist critical theory. Indeed, he devoted his final work, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times, to denouncing the political effects of post-modernism.
To the second generation Marxists who laid the groundwork for post-modernist theory, ideology was of course all important. With his concepts of quiet revolution and the long march through the institutions, Antonio Gramsci located the battlefield squarely in the ideological realm. Economic change was the goal, but cultural change had to come first. Christianity was particularly an obstacle, as Gramsci wrote, because the civilized world had been saturated with it for 2000 years. If only because of the sense of continuity it provided, religion was a kind of immune system against radical change.
On the other side we find those I'll label as traditionalists, opponents of political correctness, Marxism, feminism, etc. They are mostly religious and conservative in the broad sense and are often, but not always, identified with the political right. They agree with post-modernists on one essential point, which is the importance of ideology and especially religion. They would look with suspicion at Harris' thesis that big business is to blame for social chaos (though it should be mentioned that Harris also includes big government monopolies as part of the problem, a point that would likely draw some selective agreement). Instead, traditionalists blame the leftists who claimed to have planned capitalism's demise. As the communist activist Willi Münzenberg put it, "We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks." Where Harris asks a series of questions and finds corporate oligopoly as the answer to each--why nothing works, why the help won't help you, why America changed--traditionalists would instead find a lack of spiritual sense, right morality, and respect for authority both human and divine. To them, a declining economy is the direct and visible result of the West's broken immune system.
So, back to the question of who's right. There is potentially a lot of common ground between the traditionalist approach and Harris' materialistic analysis. If religion is our society's immune system, and the immune system is weakened, this is certainly a significant fact, just as a weakened immune system in a medical patient is significant in all kinds of ways. An observation of compromised immunity, however, is not the same as a diagnosis. It remains to be discovered what is actually causing the disease and by what mechanism. It seems plausible that faith gives a us a certain amount of immunity from the vagaries of economic life. That is to say, it's plausible that a more spiritual people might also be more civil despite the growing influence of impersonal corporations and bureaucracies. Yet it's doubtless also true that our economic infrastructure affects our character, and that the effects are at least somewhat predictable.
Of course this all begs the question of what role religion plays in sustaining morality and civility, whether it is a necessary role, and how exactly it works if it works at all. These are issues I plan to visit in a later post. They're beyond the scope of a book like Why Nothing Works, which shouldn't be understood as offering any answers to "why" questions of the philosophical sort. But Harris certainly does offer insight into what doesn't work, or perhaps how nothing works. If anything, his answers seem even more valid after 25 years.
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