Can We All Just Tone Down the Socialism Rhetoric Please?

I don't want to go into some politico-economic diatribe here, but I've honestly been getting a little disheartened at the slinging around of the words "socialist" and "socialism" in the context of the stimulus package, bail-out of Wall Street, and the Obama presidency in general. Here's the cover story from last week's Newsweek. Here's another one from yesterday on Fox News. From the usual suspects like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, to the McCain/Palin campaign trail rhetoric, to every scared ideologue of the Right, "socialism" has become the new terrorizing watchword of the young 2009. The problem I have isn't really in the political nature of the mud-slinging or the partisanship but in the basic lack of understanding in the vocabulary used to describe the situation. Ask the average American what socialism means, and you'll probably get a response something akin to "government controls the economy" or "the opposite of capitalism" or "that thing the Soviets did" and all of them would be, by and large, wrong.

Dictionary and encyclopedic definitions can often shed light on meaning, but even here, there is a major disconnect with what the term is supposed to mean and what it is perceived to mean: most emphasize the Marxist and Soviet varieties, which are but two out of many. Socialism, arguably, has a much broader meaning than capitalism. Capitalism at its most basic level is a system whereby all means of production (companies, land, etc.) are privately owned and operated and the investment of money into these means of production is a source of wealth itself. Socialism, however, has a larger economic meaning in the sense that the means of production are distributed to a greater variety of individuals, and could be controlled, depending on the society, by groups of individuals (co-ops or syndicates), the public at large through democratic means, or controlled by a state hierarchically from the top down. The problem with the misleading rhetoric coming out of most mainstream media is that the focus is on the latter at the expense of all other meanings. In fact, the original envisioning of socialism did not even include the statist variety - this was essentially created by Lenin and Stalin. It does not reflect well on the economic intelligence of our society as a whole that a seventeen year old blogger seems to understand this far better than the supposed experts in the field. The perception of socialism as a particularly heinous form of government control comes, I assume, from the fact that the galvanizing enemy against which the United States defined itself for 60 years was the U.S.S.R. - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, this is only one form of socialism, the statist variety, and a brief history of the movement shows that most socialists in the world today reject this variety. One could argue, in fact, that anything that is statist is, by definition, not socialism, since true socialism requires some form of cooperative ownership and control. State control of all means of production is really like having one corporation run everything.

Here's where the current situation comes in to play. What is going on now - pumping money into corporations, banks, state and local governments, and the economy at large to create jobs - is not really socialism, since the control of the capital and the means of production hasn't actually changed. A better term for this would be something like oligarchic hypercapitalism or plutocratic hypercapitalism or interventionist hypercapitalism. True socialism would involve something along the lines of firing all of the heads of the companies getting bail-outs and giving ownership equally to the workers of the companies regardless of how much money they have invested, or even whether they have money invested. Or, it would be giving all taxpayers an equal stake in the companies, with decision-making power at the ballot, with the money to be returned in kind as these companies rebuild. At least the Newsweek article gets one thing right: it points out that Republican administrations spend a great deal of money as well, and Reagan and both Bushes actually showed a net increase in spending during their terms. If the stimulus package is socialism, people on the Right should take solace in the fact that Obama has at least this one thing in common with his Republican predecessors.

Remembering Ashoka: Confronting Suffering, Desire, and Progress in History

I recently listened to a story on the radio show Speaking of Faith from NPR. It was an interview with Pankaj Mishra (right), an Indian novelist, essayist, and journalist. Mishra's newest book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, details his travels through southern Asia and his own spiritual journey of self-reform and self-discovery from a Buddhist perspective through a collage of commentary on politics, religion, and history, both ancient and modern. The interview was interesting not so much for Mishra's own views on the state of affairs in south Asia or even his own perspective on the Buddha, but for his rather erudite distillation of how religion shapes politics, especially at the local and personal level. What most fascinated me was his brief discussion of Ashoka, the 3rd century BCE emperor of the Mauryan Empire, and how Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism led to sweeping reform throughout the Indian subcontinent.

Without going into too much detail, and at risk of over-simplification, Ashoka (below) was the emperor of the sprawling Mauryan Empire which in the 3rd century BCE covered most of India and Pakistan as well as parts of Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Known as a ruthless conqueror with a will towards domination, Ashoka invaded neighboring kingdoms one by one until most of the Indian subcontinent and much of South Asia came under his domination. The final military conquest came in the mid-260s BCE with the utter destruction of the country of Kalinga in east-central India, the pretext of which was Kalinga's supposed granting of asylum to the relative of one of Ashoka's enemies, though modern scholars have suggested that it was access to the Ganges that enticed Ashoka. Whatever the reason, Kalinga was subdued with particular brutality, and the result was the wholesale slaughter of its people, totaling by some estimates over 100,000. Following this event, according to the legendary interpretation of Ashoka, the emperor was eager to survey his new domain, but instead, seeing only burning villages and scattered corpses, was reduced to horror at what he had done. In an Augustine-like sudden conversion, Ashoka adopted Buddhism, then only around 150 years old, and became one of the first major Asian rulers to do so. In keeping with Buddhist teachings, Ashoka made non-violence a state policy that included leniency in the punishment of crimes and prison sentences, the banning of any warfare not necessary for self-defense, the outlawing of harm to animals in any way other than provision of sustenance and a promotion of vegetarianism, among many other changes. For the rest of his more than thirty year reign, Ashoka went from being hated and feared to being revered as one of the greatest rulers the subcontinent had ever seen.

Mishra's point in discussing Ashoka for several minutes in the midst of his lecture on Buddhism and its modern bearings on politics seems to be that Ashoka, though he is a well-known historical figure in India, is not as well-known or well-regarded in global history or in world history as has been manifest in the Western curriculum. Mishra compares Ashoka to his near-contemprary Alexander the Great (Ashoka's grandfather Chandragupta Maurya overthrew Alexander's successors in Central Asia), and asks why he is not given the same scholarly interest of the admittedly greater conqueror. Both men conquered wide swaths of land and presided over enormous empires made of myriad diverse peoples. The major difference, as Mishra points out, is that Ashoka finally quit, whereas Alexander's desire to continue over the horizon was so great, that only the near mutiny of his generals convinced him to turn back. It was the self-control through Ashoka's new-found Buddhism that reigned in his hostility. Mishra blames the 19th century "great men" historiographical theory for promoting the study of figures such as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon Bonaparte over figures such as Ashoka. In fact, Napoleon, and later Hitler, studied Alexander intently. It seems the amount of land one conquers is directly proportional to one's later historical relevance, provided that the conquests remain edifying accomplishments following one's death.


It is perhaps odd that the 19th century saw such an interest in the study of these "great men," for although these figures represented to the colonial and imperialist powers who promoted their study a counterpart to the spirit of progress the age embodied, the major intellectual figures of the day were in many ways more concomitant with Buddhist thought than with the modern Western trends, at least according to Mishra. He calls the Buddha a "kindred spirit" with a surprising array of intellectuals ranging from David Hume (left) to Adam Smith. Hume, who like the Buddha, considered the self "ever changing and relative," came to the conclusion that "we are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity... The mind is a kind of theater where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations...." Permanence is an illusion; change, the only constant. Smith, the founder of modern capitalist theory, meditated heavily on the Buddhist concept that desire is the origin of suffering, and wondered publicly if an economic system based on the desire of the individual could be sustained. He optimistically concluded that educated men would be able to deduce the difference between wants and needs, though practically he realized that the system would fail without self-control (Do you hear that Wall Street?).

Buddhism, as Ashoka realized, could be envisioned as a reformist movement within oneself. In the 19th century context, this presents a paradox of thought. On the one hand, the perceived greatness of the Western world was built on desire in the form of progress -- scientific, political, religious, philosophical -- and the rest of the world was being pulled up by it bootstraps as, to paraphrase Kipling, the white man endured this burden. The history of the West from the Crusades through the Age of Imperialism, according to Mishra, may be viewed as a result of this desire in the communal, civilizational, and cultural sense, and the resulting suffering that comes from uncontrolled desire demonstrated itself in the destructive power of World Wars I and II. Scientific and social progress is a "good" thing, which can go very badly when used for misanthropic purposes. On the other hand, Buddhism necessitates only a reform of the self, as opposed to the major collectivist Utopian movements in the West, from Fascism and Marxism to even capitalism and democracy. All ostensibly require control not over the self but over the other.

So, what can we learn from Ashoka? Mishra centralizes him in the context of politico-religious history and asks what it means to be on the "winning" side of history. Surely, Ashoka would be considered a "winner," but is he more valued historically because of his conquests or because of his self-reform? The wielding of power has gotten us far, if progress is indeed the propeller of history, but violence always begets more violence. If desire is necessary for progress, Mishra's argument seems to imply that suffering is also an inevitable by-product. In studying history for nearly a decade, I've grown particularly wary of any generalizations, but one thing I've found that is difficult to argue against is that there is rarely a war that does not lead to more violence, and non-violent movements, when they are not violently crushed in their infancy, often achieve political and social goals if given the chance. And Mishra reminds us that the disposition towards violence exists or has existed in all cultures and that treating one form of violoence as endemic to one particular culture or ideology (Islamic terrorism, Western militarism, authoritarian despotism) misses the point in that it views violence from the perspective of the perpetrators and not the victims. The lesson to be gleaned from the life of Ashoka is that true reform, what has often been attempted from the top down in the form of communism and fascism, must proceed from the bottom up to be truly effective. Non-violent movements, organized civil disobedience, democracy itself is a process that works best when it develops locally, and it must be localized in the individual before it may spread. Unlike other systems of government, democracy cannot be imposed -- we must learn this before we attempt to introduce much of the world to its ideals. Reinhold Niebuhr, (above) whom our current president counts as an intellectual influence and who is perhaps among Mishra's "kindred spirits" with the Buddha, was an early recognizer that the ills of the world cannot be solved simply by "converting" the world to democracy and capitalism, that this was a failure of imagination, and that political and economic proselytization was not the answer. It is no surprise that 19th century historians an politicians looked to figures like Alexander the Great as models because they represented the great progress that Western leaders of the period wished to emulate. Let is return to the implication that desire is necessary for progress. If desire truly is the beginning of suffering, must progress always be coupled with it? Because suffering is a reality, it is one thing, regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof ,that we must confront in this world. I want to end with an extended quote from Mishra's work, during his visitation of a madrassa in Pakistan, that in part illustrates the difficulties in interpreting suffering in the world: where it comes from, how we might deal with it, and why violence as a solution will only create more problems if we allow it to become our primary weapon of change. Progress, in the sense of self-reform as a Ashoka so championed, seems to be a viable option for our uncertain future.

I hadn't expected to be moved by the casual sight in one madrassa of six young men sleeping on tattered sheets on the floor. I hadn't thought I would be saddened at the human waste they represented--the young men whose ancestors built one of the greatest civilizations in the world, and who now lived in dysfunctional societies under governments beholden to, or in fear of, America, and who had nothing to look forward to except possibly the short career of suicide bomber. The other kind of future once laid out for them had failed. This was the future in which everyone in the world would wear a tie, work in an office or factory, drive a car, practise birth control, raise a nuclear family, and pay taxes. There were not nearly enough secular schools to educate these young men in the ways of the modern world--and few jobs awaited those who had been educated.... But the fantasy of modernity, held up by their state, and supported by the international political and economic system, had been powerful enough to expel and uproot them from their native villages. This had also been the fate of their fathers and countless others like [them]. But the journey from the old to the new world had become harder over the years for most people. Now, this journey seemed never-ending, and it seemed to consume more and more people as it lengthened: hundreds of millions of stupefied and powerless individuals, lured by the promise of equality and justice into a world they had no means of understanding, whose already strained and partially available resources they were expected to exploit in order to hoist themselves to the level of affluence enjoyed by a small minority of middle-class people around the world.... Having lost the protection of the old moral order, their particular bonds and forms of authority, they hoped to stave off chaos and degeneration by joining such authoritarian movements as Hindu nationalism and radical Islam, by surrendering their dreams to demagogues like Bin Laden.

An Historical Perspective on Torture

On January 22, in only his second full day in office, President Obama signed into law an executive order forbidding the use of torture in government interrogations. More than a repudiation of the policies of the Bush administration, the order is nothing short of a statement recommitting America to the Constitutional principles on which it was founded--equality under the law and the right to a fair trial. Certainly, introducing these prisoners into the justice system, where the innocent can be set free and the guilty sent to jail where they belong, will strengthen our resolve and make the US a safer, not more dangerous, place. If the goal of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was "to destroy America's way of life," then didn't the Bush administration play right into their hands with its flaunting of these supposedly hallowed principles? By sanctifying the use of torture, we said to our enemies not that they should fear us, but that we would inadvertently bow to their wishes by condoning that which we supposedly stand so stridently against. By way of life, bin Laden likely referred more to our economic and foreign policies, but if the foundations of these crumble, the house cannot be far behind. And, if America is truly weakening as a nation relative to China and the European Union, our reassertion as a moral leader in a dangerous world can only bolsters our credentials on the world stage. This is desperately needed in the aftermath of Iraq. The moral argument against torture seems apparent enough, and the point, at least for the meantime, is hopefully moot, but I'd like to point out how it has failed pragmatically as well. So, for the moral relativists, a practical argument against torture:

Many historical societies, at some time or another, have used torture either as a way to extract confessions among the accused or as a form of punishment, usually as a prelude to execution. In some societies it may have been a continuation of religious human sacrifice; in others, born out of the militaristic nature of the culture. Roman torture first took the form of military-style punishment and was later utilized privately as the aristocracy employed it as a fear-inducing weapon designed to keep the lower-classes and slaves in their socio-economic places. Some of the most historically memorable instances of Roman torture in the first few centuries of the common era were a point of entertainment for the masses--gladiatorial games, the participants of which were almost always either prisoners or slaves. And of course, as anyone who has studied early Christianity knows, the brutality of the first and second century Romans against the first Christian martyrs was legion (no pun intended).

Torture has been variously outlawed in the past and the Geneva Convention is by no means new in its interpretation and moral outrage against the practice. In the late 6th century, Pope Gregory I famously declared all confessions extracted during torture to be inadmissible in courts, but this proclamation was not far reaching, applying only to those courts under the jurisdiction of the Church, and torture continued to be used for the purposes of punishment, as well as in the recently converted Germanic peoples. In the case of this culture, which had yet to be fully synthesized with the Romano-Judeo-Christian one, the use of compurgations or ordeals, from which we get our modern word, was commonplace to determine the innocence or guilt of convicted persons. The process usually involved enduring some sort of physical pain, after which one would be judged on that endurance. One process involved grasping a hot iron or dunking one's hand into a pot of boiling water. The wound would be bandaged and if it healed quickly, innocence was presumed, whereas a lengthy recovery or the development of a particularly nasty scar would result in a conviction. Gregory the Great's proclamation did not touch this practice and ordeals were commonplace until at least the early 13th century. Still, torture, in its modern definition, was a feature of Roman rather than Germanic law. In the year 1215, Pope Innocent III forbade the use of ordeals at the Lateran IV Council (Canon 18) and negated their efficacy in courts. The implementation of this rule was, however, not out of compassion, but an attempt to diminish the significance of "planned miracles" because the standard belief of the Church was that miracles should be spontaneous and should not be expected to prove the worth of common people. Around the same time, the polymath emperor of the sprawling central European Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II, also outlawed ordeals for a more practical reason, stating that they would only determine who was stronger, not who was morally right.

This legal standard was not to last though, and the use of torture as a weapon of the powerful would return with legal sanction as the Inquisition came into the fore. Less than forty years after Lateran IV outlawed ordeals, Innocent IV's papal bull Ad Extirpanda (1252) authorized papal inquisitors to confiscate property, imprison, torture, and execute suspected heretics. Two centuries later, as the specific category of witchcraft (maleficarum) evolved, first the use of ordeals began to resurface and then the use of torture in extrication of confession reemerged as a serious practice in Western Europe. Scholars such as Norman Cohn have pointed to the example Rome set for the medieval world and argues that the same techniques used by the Church to deal with heretics had precedent among, ironically, the Roman persecution of Christians. More to the point, he argues that, while "financial greed and conscious sadism" were certainly aspects of these torturous trials, the real motivation was religious zeal, and that torture as a practice was not only legitimate but a necessity, because it was required to extricate the devils from the perpetrators. The practical implications here are the most suspect, but unfortunately, the historical record of common people from pre-modern times is usually scant. There do exist, however, some telling examples of the futility of torture as a reliable tool for information gathering. One occurs in 1587, when the mid-wife and widow Walpurgia confessed, under considerable duress to copulating with the devil, denying the name of Christ, terminating pregnancies with a magical ointment, and a number of other fantastical crimes that she certainly did not commit. Her case is representative of a great many witchcraft trials from the late 16th and early 17th centuries: a woman, usually older, sometimes illiterate and oftentimes a widow or mid-wife, is accused by men of the same socio-economic class, authorities (usually secular in England and religious on the Continent) are called, and under torture, patently false accusations are confessed to after which the persecuted person is put to death (usually by hanging in England and by burning at the stake on the Continent). From the hand of Junius, a male accused of witchcraft in 1628, we have an actual letter written to his daughter and smuggled out of his prison detailing the torture he endured: "Innocent have I come to prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent I must die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must...be tortured until he invents something out of his head. When I was the first time put to the torture...I said 'I am no witch, I have a pure conscience on the matter; if there are a thousand witnesses, I am not anxious.' And then came also--God in highest heaven have mercy--the executioner, and put the thumb-screws on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from the writing.... Thereafter they stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the [strappado]. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony.... And so I made my confession...but it was all a lie."


The methods have little changed over the years, and neither have the results.

The righteous rise
With burning eyes
Of hatred and ill-will
Madmen fed on fear and lies
To beat and burn and kill

They say there are strangers who threaten us
In our immigrants and infidels
They say there is strangeness too dangerous
In our theaters and bookstore shelves
That those who know what's best for us
Must rise and save us from ourselves

Quick to judge
Quick to anger
Slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice
And fear walk hand in hand...

-Rush, "Witch Hunt"

Some Post-Inauguration Thoughts

So, I'm sure that everyone on the blogosphere has been writing about this, and it's an extraordinarily unoriginal topic, but I thought I'd write a short note about the Obama inauguration and the politics of the past few months/next few years in general. It's difficult to put into words how January 20th made me feel: on the one hand, I couldn't happier that the Bush years are finally, FINALLY, over and the fact that he's being replaced in one of the most historic ways imaginable is just icing on the proverbial cake. But it was also a day with a gnawing in the back of my mind that there is no possible way that Obama can live up to all the expectations this nation has of him. Has any other president come to office with such lofty goals, most of which have been projected onto him by a populace yearning for a leader? I had to remind myself over an over again during the election, as I projected my own hopes and dreams onto him, that he was not a messiah but a politician, and given my usually cynical disposition regarding American politics, this was constant reality-checker. I do think Obama will be a good president, but with a system as dependent on money and the pursuit of power, can any politician, even the righteous, survive without making moral compromises? I got emotional on election night as the results came in and immediately felt bad for letting personal feelings triumph intellect in an arena which should be reserved for rational thinking. Then again, after eight years of irrationality, I'm willing to let my emotions receive some benefit of the doubt. The 20th was no exception and I found myself getting emotional in the oddest moments, notably John Williams' absolutely gorgeous arrangement of Copland's "Simple Gifts". But as a good citizen, I feel I must not let my admiration of the man get in the way of my better judgment and not prevent me from recognizing mistakes and missteps, as I'm sure there will be some.

We shouldn't forget that Obama won in large part due to the economic crisis, the nation's intense distaste for the Bush administration, and the ineffectiveness of the McCain campaign. Certainly, he was an extremely strong candidate, appealing to disparate groups and spawning the greatest grassroots organization in the history of the Internet, but I can't help but think that the election would have been much closer were it not for the former factors. Politically-speaking, I'm not sure this is a "transformational" election or not and I'm not sure we can know until it recedes into history, though, for obvious reasons, it is an historic election. Randy mentioned the other day how perturbed he was that the 4th graders in his class didn't appreciate the "enormity" of this inauguration, but in a sense, I think for the future this is a good thing, because the more "normal" the election of an African-American to the presidency seems the better.

A few things I found especially interesting about this election (I know it's about two and half months late for this discussion, but I wasn't blogging in November so humor me): Obama did better than John Kerry among every demographic in the country except gays and voters over 65. The gay vote may have been due to the fact that overall, Obama has been less vocal about this issue that Kerry was, and by the fact that, other than California's Proposition 8, gay rights was not promoted as a national issue to the extent that it was in 2004. The lower numbers of Democratic voters over 65 is the only instance I've seen that racism may have played a role in the election (I have seen no convincing data that it was direct result of racism--after all, it could simply be that, with McCain's age, the elderly identified more with him). If it was race, it probably means that once the generation born in the pre-Civil Rights era begins to die off, racism as a factor in elections will have become significantly marginalized.

I also wonder where Republicans will go from here, and I think they are now certainly as weak as they have been since before 1980, but the reports of their utter demise have been drastically overstated. The unilateral arrogance of neoconservative foreign policy has likely run its course, but the ideals of small government and lower taxes are not simply going to go quietly into the night. If I may play conservative's advocate for a moment, my worries as a Republican would be not in the future of the party but in the make-up of it. Watch McCain's concession speech. One of the most noticeable differences between the crowd there and any crowd at an Obama speech is it's lack of diversity. Whites made up 74% of the elctorate in 2008, its lowest number ever in a US election, and whites were the only racial demographic to vote for McCain over Obama. These numbers will only continue to decline as blacks, Latinos, and Asians compose more and more of the population of America, to the point that, somewhere between 2040 and 2050, people of European descent are expected to make up less than 50% of the US population for the first time ever. If Republicans can't find a way to reach out to and appeal to people of all colors, they run the very dangerous risk of becoming nothing more than a jingoist, neo-imperialist party and descend into irrelevancy.

All in all, I'm very hopeful and excited about the next four years, and though I expect to be underwhelmed by the results at times, I can't deny that I have never been this excited about a politician in my lifetime. This marks the first time ever that I have actually voted for the person who won the presidency, so this is also the first time in which I feel like I have some personal stake in how well he does. Here's hoping...