Is it not fair to say that structural analysis can be over-emphasized? The disappearance of social agents, the reduction of subjectivity to the blind operation of impersonal forces is surely a form of scientism. It is not properly dialectical in the Hegelian sense of “not only Substance, but also Subject.” It considers things only in their substance as material or symbolic relations, but what disappears from that is any ability to act differently or change anything at all, leading directly to Nihilism.
I think that both divisions of antagonism, inter-class and intra-class, are actually both equally valid apriori. If you only have intra-class division, then that leads to witch hunts like QAnon, yes. But if you only have inter-class structural analysis then your theory becomes mechanical, rigid, lacking in fine distinctions of spirit which is ultimately what human existence is about. Perhaps it is that very failure which led to the reproduction of class domination after communist revolutions. In my view to be a “true” leftist is an impossibly nostalgic position today. The cracks in leftism are visible for all to see, and it’s because they cling to this rigid worldview which is not informed by organic experience but is ultimately rationalistic and abstract.
This is an awesome comment! Thanks so much for taking the time to share. I’m traveling right now, so can’t respond at length, but wanted to note that I agree with what you’re saying — structure cannot be determinative finally because it’s underdetermined in itself. This creates the subject but also the space of the subject’s freedom.
I don’t know that this actually is a left/right divide in practice:
-a lot of leftists are hostile to this kind of thinking because they think it attracts attention away from very rich individuals
-a lot of AI guys are overwhelmingly right wing for some reason, while still clearly thinking about forces above the level of the individual. I guess they maybe found a way to think of structural forces as agential, which in some ways I would say they are
I wonder if the split is more between idealism and materialism? By this, I’m meaning idealism as “human will is a different kind of thing to anything else in the world, giving us a level of control over our destiny,” and materialism as “no, it’s subject to the same material constraints and influences as everything else.” The distinction is maybe relevant if right-leaning discourse becomes materialist in that sense and left-leaning discourse becomes idealist.
I mean; I’m with you, to be clear. I am a left-leaning materialist by the definition above, although not by many of the bizarre definitions I’ve read elsewhere. But I can’t say I feel like my views are the typical ones
That's a really interesting way of slicing it, Robert! "Does Will possess real freedom with regards to structure or is it fundamentally determined by it?" This question has been operating deep within my own work, and I've found myself following the Žižek/Hegel rabbit hole on this one for a while. Žižek's dialectical materialism wants to have it both ways, where Spirit emerges as free from matter precisely because matter is underdetermined and incomplete within itself. We have a scenario then where structure and its inherent failure is the condition of the possibility of true freedom. The choice between the two options of "freedom or no?" is a false choice, but this makes things make more complex (and out of our hands) than we had previously imagined.
It's like when people argue with each other using examples from different scales. Averages vs. anecdotes.
One is speaking at the population level (like with left side of the picture) and the other at the individual level (right side of picture). Individual level explanations are good vs evil like you propose or better vs worse.
But once we get to the population level the disagreement is over "statistical thinking" vs "force theorizing." The statistical thinking move might be to say luck is responsible for the wealth distribution. Agentless particles abound. While force theorists might say wealth is inherited and that explains the distribution (plus other top down power effects enjoyed by the influence of wealth).
Personally, I think the data favors force theories at the population level.
There's a great deal of wisdom in this piece, a few notes:
1. It connects with something I wrote once:
"The original sin of humanity is witchhunting. Many human societies throughout history have believed that there was no such thing as natural death or even natural misfortune. These societies saw all non-violent deaths and sometimes even simple bad luck as originating in witchcraft carried out by specific villainous individuals. In the witch-hunt, we see a refusal to understand that the causes of strife are larger than ill will. We see an insistence that problems only arise because individuals have chosen to do the wrong thing. “Witchcraft” serves as a cognitive emblem that lets us avoid thoughts like “maybe that old woman is a bit odd because we’ve isolated her and let her grow poor”. “Maybe the crops failed because that just happens sometimes”, “Maybe strife is raging in the village because we haven’t thought about the equitable division of land”. All the complexities of the world are squished. All considerations of larger social and natural structures are squashed. The enemy must be an individual person motivated by ill will and not a larger arrangement of society, or an aspect of the natural world. Once we kill the enemy, everything will be okay. The solution is punishment, the more final the better. In this sense, the witch burning is the original sin of humanity and the perfection of the (il)logic of addiction to punishment. The fetishistic sense is that we can avoid changing the way things work, or even thinking about the way things work if only we hurt the bad people. That the world is just except when bad people wantonly choose to be bad. Punishment, when it becomes an addiction, lets us sustain these illusions, and is not unlike drinking to avoid unwanted thoughts- that maybe the problems are larger, deeper, harder."
2. I think a similar instinct is present on the left, it is just weaker. Even many leftists talk as if capitalism were just a result of the bad will or 'greed' of actors.
3. It's important to keep in mind that some things *really are* a result of individual malice, but more deeply individual malice is not really the opposite of structural failure- structural failure allows bad people to accumulate power, and structural failure creates opportunities for bad people to pursue their objectives in destructive failure. Individual malice and structural failure are, unfortunately, the closest of friends.
First, your premise: conservatives do not posit a mysterious line of evil running through the body politic, instead they’re with Solzhenitsyn, who famously said,
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
But yes, we believe in right and wrong, so there are moral dividing lines in life we should not cross. Therefore I contend the difference between the productive and the predatory rich in your illustration is not mysterious or esoteric at all.
Some people get wealthy by creating products and services of value.
Others “rig” markets, usually in tandem with corrupted governments to enrich themselves irrespective of the worth of their offerings.
I’m not a big fan of Ayn Rand, but if you’re familiar at all with the action in Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart is the heroine who does the real work of running the family railroad. Meanwhile her brother James is a bum, a grifter, in bed with an increasingly confiscatory socialist state, aiming to secure his fortune and the railroad’s through artificial manipulation, limiting competition, price controls and whatnot.
To put all this in terms you might more easily relate to, the husk of General Motors was awarded $50,000,000,000.00 of taxpayer money, not as some reward for management success on the lines of Toyota and Honda, or even GE and Caterpillar, no, they’d done a dreadful job, building seriously compromised cars for decades while everyone begged them to do better. They got fifty billion of your money because they were cozy with the government and vice versa
“In conservative logic, the appearance of predators, cronies, rent seekers within a system must always be portrayed as purely incidental to that system.”
this is true only if the “incidental” goes against what they view as pure or good. if such events would happen in a system they abhor, it would be endemic.
in addition, i hesitate to say they can’t notice patterns. like all people, they do, and this is where the dissonance which spurs them to cook up conspiracy occurs. school shootings are due to a mental health crisis, borne of any number of social woes, ranging from losing religious faith or accepting gay people in the mainstream. they then identify individuals (still in the individualistic mode) or groups of people who arbitrarily share traits of “bad” individuals who spearhead so-called malignant social change and then target them.
indeed, there is little structural awareness beyond “the jews” and “soros,” but the sapling is there, withered from thirst.
I get that societal structures have an influence on individual behavior, but there are still individuals who can be held responsible, if not for creating certain structures, because they are now dead, but those still alive who are maintaining structures impeding freedom and justice.
A conservative example would be the current debate about the Department of Education. Many conservatives hold that bad schools can never be reformed unless this inhibiting structure, one they believe rewards failure goes away.
Conservatives gladly agree that there are many great teachers out there but view them as hamstrung by, ahem, a ruinous system or structure
Great analysis. As you say there are leftist forms of this also. I would say that these leftist forms also complicate the argument a bit.
As Paradoxical Emergence said, structure can be overrmphasised and reified. However, from my perspective this is only a modulation of what you are speaking of. The (bad) Marxist does not blame the individual but he blames an oppressive class. There is a (bad) way to read Marx (helpfully critiqued by Postone) so that the whole thing is about a class oppressing another. Now the solution is to exterminate that class, and that is what we see in hiatorical communist regimes. Of course a far right person may also consider an ethnic population to be the cause of bad things and something to be exterminated. And similarily a very radical (bad) leftist may blame a group like "men" or "white people" for some evil.
So this sacrificial (I am thinking about all this in Girardian terms) logic can contaminate structural analysis also. I think hhat learning ones way out of it can not be accomplished by any intellectual or conceptual shift, but requires a kind of existential transformation of the thinker, a conversion. A deepening of oneself and ones gaze.
I am not sure how this is a new revelation. I am pretty sure it is part and parcel of conservative talking points to explicitly state that there is an assumption of agency. And with agency assumed, so does good and evil, which exists as it’s own division.
What is interesting to me though is that I am pretty sure that the left does this as well. What I mean is that if you were to take a full systemic analysis of, say, Floyd: you would have to see all the details of Floyd scenario as being part of the system as well as the generalities. So his virality, for example, would be recognized as the desire of systems, as would everything else mentioned. George Floyd going viral must be understood as what the system wanted.
In order not to say that, you would need to assume that people, as subsystems, could resist macro-systems and go against their desires. This is basically just the reinvention of agency as defined as the aggregated resistance of subsystems against the desires of macro-systems.
Now this is me speaking: Good and Evil can soon after be contended with as the proper fulfillment of one’s position given agency. Thus Evil people are those who abandon their post and duties by their own will. Which goes beyond rich or poor.
Is it not fair to say that structural analysis can be over-emphasized? The disappearance of social agents, the reduction of subjectivity to the blind operation of impersonal forces is surely a form of scientism. It is not properly dialectical in the Hegelian sense of “not only Substance, but also Subject.” It considers things only in their substance as material or symbolic relations, but what disappears from that is any ability to act differently or change anything at all, leading directly to Nihilism.
I think that both divisions of antagonism, inter-class and intra-class, are actually both equally valid apriori. If you only have intra-class division, then that leads to witch hunts like QAnon, yes. But if you only have inter-class structural analysis then your theory becomes mechanical, rigid, lacking in fine distinctions of spirit which is ultimately what human existence is about. Perhaps it is that very failure which led to the reproduction of class domination after communist revolutions. In my view to be a “true” leftist is an impossibly nostalgic position today. The cracks in leftism are visible for all to see, and it’s because they cling to this rigid worldview which is not informed by organic experience but is ultimately rationalistic and abstract.
This is an awesome comment! Thanks so much for taking the time to share. I’m traveling right now, so can’t respond at length, but wanted to note that I agree with what you’re saying — structure cannot be determinative finally because it’s underdetermined in itself. This creates the subject but also the space of the subject’s freedom.
I don’t know that this actually is a left/right divide in practice:
-a lot of leftists are hostile to this kind of thinking because they think it attracts attention away from very rich individuals
-a lot of AI guys are overwhelmingly right wing for some reason, while still clearly thinking about forces above the level of the individual. I guess they maybe found a way to think of structural forces as agential, which in some ways I would say they are
I wonder if the split is more between idealism and materialism? By this, I’m meaning idealism as “human will is a different kind of thing to anything else in the world, giving us a level of control over our destiny,” and materialism as “no, it’s subject to the same material constraints and influences as everything else.” The distinction is maybe relevant if right-leaning discourse becomes materialist in that sense and left-leaning discourse becomes idealist.
I mean; I’m with you, to be clear. I am a left-leaning materialist by the definition above, although not by many of the bizarre definitions I’ve read elsewhere. But I can’t say I feel like my views are the typical ones
That's a really interesting way of slicing it, Robert! "Does Will possess real freedom with regards to structure or is it fundamentally determined by it?" This question has been operating deep within my own work, and I've found myself following the Žižek/Hegel rabbit hole on this one for a while. Žižek's dialectical materialism wants to have it both ways, where Spirit emerges as free from matter precisely because matter is underdetermined and incomplete within itself. We have a scenario then where structure and its inherent failure is the condition of the possibility of true freedom. The choice between the two options of "freedom or no?" is a false choice, but this makes things make more complex (and out of our hands) than we had previously imagined.
It's like when people argue with each other using examples from different scales. Averages vs. anecdotes.
One is speaking at the population level (like with left side of the picture) and the other at the individual level (right side of picture). Individual level explanations are good vs evil like you propose or better vs worse.
But once we get to the population level the disagreement is over "statistical thinking" vs "force theorizing." The statistical thinking move might be to say luck is responsible for the wealth distribution. Agentless particles abound. While force theorists might say wealth is inherited and that explains the distribution (plus other top down power effects enjoyed by the influence of wealth).
Personally, I think the data favors force theories at the population level.
While reading this I thought about the emotionally healthy practice of focusing credit and distributing blame.
It seems to me that the conservative mindset is to distribute credit and focus blame.
I think this is why Schmitt’s “friend/enemy” distinction is making a return on the Right. Great comment!
There's a great deal of wisdom in this piece, a few notes:
1. It connects with something I wrote once:
"The original sin of humanity is witchhunting. Many human societies throughout history have believed that there was no such thing as natural death or even natural misfortune. These societies saw all non-violent deaths and sometimes even simple bad luck as originating in witchcraft carried out by specific villainous individuals. In the witch-hunt, we see a refusal to understand that the causes of strife are larger than ill will. We see an insistence that problems only arise because individuals have chosen to do the wrong thing. “Witchcraft” serves as a cognitive emblem that lets us avoid thoughts like “maybe that old woman is a bit odd because we’ve isolated her and let her grow poor”. “Maybe the crops failed because that just happens sometimes”, “Maybe strife is raging in the village because we haven’t thought about the equitable division of land”. All the complexities of the world are squished. All considerations of larger social and natural structures are squashed. The enemy must be an individual person motivated by ill will and not a larger arrangement of society, or an aspect of the natural world. Once we kill the enemy, everything will be okay. The solution is punishment, the more final the better. In this sense, the witch burning is the original sin of humanity and the perfection of the (il)logic of addiction to punishment. The fetishistic sense is that we can avoid changing the way things work, or even thinking about the way things work if only we hurt the bad people. That the world is just except when bad people wantonly choose to be bad. Punishment, when it becomes an addiction, lets us sustain these illusions, and is not unlike drinking to avoid unwanted thoughts- that maybe the problems are larger, deeper, harder."
https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/notes-on-punishment
2. I think a similar instinct is present on the left, it is just weaker. Even many leftists talk as if capitalism were just a result of the bad will or 'greed' of actors.
3. It's important to keep in mind that some things *really are* a result of individual malice, but more deeply individual malice is not really the opposite of structural failure- structural failure allows bad people to accumulate power, and structural failure creates opportunities for bad people to pursue their objectives in destructive failure. Individual malice and structural failure are, unfortunately, the closest of friends.
Congrats on the new job! 🌟
But I must take exception to your analysis here.
First, your premise: conservatives do not posit a mysterious line of evil running through the body politic, instead they’re with Solzhenitsyn, who famously said,
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
But yes, we believe in right and wrong, so there are moral dividing lines in life we should not cross. Therefore I contend the difference between the productive and the predatory rich in your illustration is not mysterious or esoteric at all.
Some people get wealthy by creating products and services of value.
Others “rig” markets, usually in tandem with corrupted governments to enrich themselves irrespective of the worth of their offerings.
I’m not a big fan of Ayn Rand, but if you’re familiar at all with the action in Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart is the heroine who does the real work of running the family railroad. Meanwhile her brother James is a bum, a grifter, in bed with an increasingly confiscatory socialist state, aiming to secure his fortune and the railroad’s through artificial manipulation, limiting competition, price controls and whatnot.
To put all this in terms you might more easily relate to, the husk of General Motors was awarded $50,000,000,000.00 of taxpayer money, not as some reward for management success on the lines of Toyota and Honda, or even GE and Caterpillar, no, they’d done a dreadful job, building seriously compromised cars for decades while everyone begged them to do better. They got fifty billion of your money because they were cozy with the government and vice versa
“In conservative logic, the appearance of predators, cronies, rent seekers within a system must always be portrayed as purely incidental to that system.”
this is true only if the “incidental” goes against what they view as pure or good. if such events would happen in a system they abhor, it would be endemic.
in addition, i hesitate to say they can’t notice patterns. like all people, they do, and this is where the dissonance which spurs them to cook up conspiracy occurs. school shootings are due to a mental health crisis, borne of any number of social woes, ranging from losing religious faith or accepting gay people in the mainstream. they then identify individuals (still in the individualistic mode) or groups of people who arbitrarily share traits of “bad” individuals who spearhead so-called malignant social change and then target them.
indeed, there is little structural awareness beyond “the jews” and “soros,” but the sapling is there, withered from thirst.
I get that societal structures have an influence on individual behavior, but there are still individuals who can be held responsible, if not for creating certain structures, because they are now dead, but those still alive who are maintaining structures impeding freedom and justice.
A conservative example would be the current debate about the Department of Education. Many conservatives hold that bad schools can never be reformed unless this inhibiting structure, one they believe rewards failure goes away.
Conservatives gladly agree that there are many great teachers out there but view them as hamstrung by, ahem, a ruinous system or structure
Great analysis. As you say there are leftist forms of this also. I would say that these leftist forms also complicate the argument a bit.
As Paradoxical Emergence said, structure can be overrmphasised and reified. However, from my perspective this is only a modulation of what you are speaking of. The (bad) Marxist does not blame the individual but he blames an oppressive class. There is a (bad) way to read Marx (helpfully critiqued by Postone) so that the whole thing is about a class oppressing another. Now the solution is to exterminate that class, and that is what we see in hiatorical communist regimes. Of course a far right person may also consider an ethnic population to be the cause of bad things and something to be exterminated. And similarily a very radical (bad) leftist may blame a group like "men" or "white people" for some evil.
So this sacrificial (I am thinking about all this in Girardian terms) logic can contaminate structural analysis also. I think hhat learning ones way out of it can not be accomplished by any intellectual or conceptual shift, but requires a kind of existential transformation of the thinker, a conversion. A deepening of oneself and ones gaze.
I am not sure how this is a new revelation. I am pretty sure it is part and parcel of conservative talking points to explicitly state that there is an assumption of agency. And with agency assumed, so does good and evil, which exists as it’s own division.
What is interesting to me though is that I am pretty sure that the left does this as well. What I mean is that if you were to take a full systemic analysis of, say, Floyd: you would have to see all the details of Floyd scenario as being part of the system as well as the generalities. So his virality, for example, would be recognized as the desire of systems, as would everything else mentioned. George Floyd going viral must be understood as what the system wanted.
In order not to say that, you would need to assume that people, as subsystems, could resist macro-systems and go against their desires. This is basically just the reinvention of agency as defined as the aggregated resistance of subsystems against the desires of macro-systems.
Now this is me speaking: Good and Evil can soon after be contended with as the proper fulfillment of one’s position given agency. Thus Evil people are those who abandon their post and duties by their own will. Which goes beyond rich or poor.