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“ORDER” AS A POLITICAL VALUE SHOULD BE REJECTED
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“ORDER” AS A POLITICAL VALUE SHOULD BE REJECTED1. EMPHASIS ON SOCIAL ORDER BREEDS REPRESSIVE IDEOLOGIES Susan Sontag, American philosopher. AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS, 1990, p. 173. Such token appeals for mass mobilization to confront an unprecedented menace appear, at frequent intervals, in every mass society. It is also typical of a modern society that the demand for mobilization be kept very general and the reality of the response fall well short of what seems to be demanded to meet the challenge of the nation-endangering menace. This sort of rhetoric has a life of its own: it serves some purpose if it simply keeps in circulation an ideal of unifying communal practice that is precisely contradicted by the pursuit of accumulation and isolating entertainments enjoined on the citizens of a modern mass society. The survival of the nation, of civilized society, of the world itself is said to be at stake--claims that are a familiar part of building a case for repression. 2. EMPHASIS ON SOCIAL ORDER ENCOURAGES OBSESSIVE SOCIAL CONTROL Susan Sontag, American philosopher. ILLNESS AS METAPHOR, 1990, p. 76. Order is the oldest concern of political philosophy, and if it is plausible to compare the polis to an organism, then it is plausible to compare civil disorder to an illness. The classical formulations which analogize a political disorder to an illness--from Plato, to, say, Hobbes, presuppose the classical medical (and political) idea of balance. Treatment is aimed at restoring the right balance--in political terms, the right hierarchy. The prognosis is always, in principle, optimistic. Society, by definition, never catches a fatal disease. 3. SOCIAL ORDER AS A RATIONAL VALUE RESULTS IN SOCIAL CONTROL Susan Sontag, American philosopher. ILLNESS AS METAPHOR, 1990, p. 77. Machiavelli offers an illness metaphor that is not so much about society as about statecraft (conceived as a therapeutic art): as prudence is needed to control serious diseases, so foresight is needed to control social crises. It is a metaphor about foresight, and a call to foresight. In political philosophy’s great tradition, the analogy between disease and civil disorder is proposed to encourage rulers to pursue a more rational policy.
Susan Sontag, American philosopher. AIDS AND ITS METAPHORS, 1990, p. 145. So indispensable has been the plague metaphor in bringing summary judgments about social crises that its use hardly abated during the era when collective diseases were no longer treated so moralistically--the time between the influenza and encephalitis pandemics of the early and mid- 1920’s and the acknowledgment of a new, mysterious epidemic in the early 1980’s--and when great infectious epidemics were so often and confidently proclaimed a thing of the past. The plague metaphor was common in the 1930’s as a synonym for social and psychic catastrophe. Evocations of plague of this type usually go with rant, with antiliberal attitudes: think of Artaud on plague, of Wilhelm Reich on “emotional plague.” And such a generic “diagnosis” necessarily promotes ahistorical thinking. A theodicy as well as a demonology, it not only stipulates something emblematic of evil but makes this the bearer of a rough, terrible justice.
Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens--and real diseases are useful material. Epidemic diseases usually elicit a call to ban the entry of foreigners, immigrants. And xenophobic propaganda has always depicted immigrants as bearers of disease (in the late nineteenth century: cholera, yellow fever, typhoid fever, tuberculosis). Baruch SpinozaBaruch Spinoza was born in 1632 in Amsterdam. He was the middle son in a prominent family in Amsterdam's Portuguese-Jewish community. As a boy, he was undoubtedly one of the star pupils in the congregation's Talmud Torah school, as he was noticeably intellectually gifted. It is possible that as Spinoza progressed through his studies, he was being groomed for a career as a rabbi. However, he never made it into the upper levels of the curriculum. That is because at the age of seventeen, he was forced to cut short his formal studies to help run the family's importing business. Then, on July 27, 1656, Spinoza was issued the harshest excommunication ever pronounced by the Sephardic community of Amsterdam; it was never rescinded. It is not known for certain what “monstrous deeds” and “abominable heresies” that Spinoza is alleged to have committed. But there is little doubt that Spinoza was already giving utterance to ideas that would soon appear in his philosophical treatises. “In those works, Spinoza denies the immortality of the soul; strongly rejects the notion of a providential God -- the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and claims that the Law was neither literally given by God nor any longer binding on Jews. Can there be any mystery as to why one of history's boldest and most radical thinkers was sanctioned by an orthodox Jewish community?” By all appearances, Spinoza was content finally to have an excuse for departing from the community and leaving Judaism behind, it did appear that his faith and religious commitment were gone by this point. Within a few years, he left Amsterdam altogether. ETHICSWhile in Rijnsburg, Spinoza worked on the “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,” an essay on philosophical method, and the “Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being,” an initial but ultimately interrupted effort to lay out his metaphysical, epistemological and moral views. His critical examination of Descartes’ "Principles of Philosophy" was completed in 1663; it is coincidentally the only work he published under his own name in his lifetime. By this time, he was also working on his philosophical masterpiece, what would eventually be called "the Ethics." However, when Spinoza began to witness the principles of toleration in Holland being threatened by reactionary forces, he put the work aside to complete his “scandalous” Theological-Political Treatise, published anonymously and to great alarm in 1670. It is part biblical study, part political treatise. “Its overriding goal is to recommend full freedom of thought and religious practice, subject to behavioral conformity with the laws of the land. As virtually the first examination of the Scriptures (primarily the Pentateuch) as historical documents, reflecting the intellectual limitations of their time, and of problematic authorship, it opened the so-called higher criticism.” For Spinoza, what is most important is the Bible's moral message, “its implied science and metaphysics can stand only as imaginative adjuncts for teaching ethics to the multitude.” Though Spinoza discreetly identifies God and nature, one of the opinions leading to his excommunication, he writes in a more orthodox vein, even as he denies “the genuinely supernatural character of reported miracles.” It is much debated whether this demonstrates that those who now read the Ethics in an entirely secular manner misunderstand it, or whether Spinoza was adapting his presentation not to the masses, but to conventionally religious intellectuals of his time. It was among these intellectuals that Spinoza wished to promote tolerant liberal ideals. “The study of the Bible is designed to show that there is nothing in it which should sanction intolerance within Judaism or Christianity, or between them, and to illustrate certain political facts by reflections on Jewish history, such as the desirable relations between Church and State.” Spinoza's political theory owes a good deal to Hobbes’ idea of a social contract, as Spinoza derives a more liberal and democratic lesson from it. “The Ethics is an ambitious and multifaceted work. It is also bold to the point of audacity, as one would expect of a systematic and unforgiving critique of the traditional philosophical conceptions of God, the human being and the universe, and, above all, of the religions and the theological and moral beliefs grounded thereupon. What Spinoza intends to demonstrate is the truth about God, nature and especially ourselves; and the highest principles of society, religion and the good life.” Despite the great deal of metaphysics, physics, anthropology and psychology that take up Parts One through Three, Spinoza took the critical message of the work to be ethical in nature. The ethics attempts to illustrate that our happiness and well-being lie not in a life enslaved to the passions and the goods we ordinarily pursue, nor in the related attachment to superstitions that pass as religion, but rather in the life of reason. To clarify and support these broadly ethical conclusions, however, Spinoza must first demystify the universe and show it for what it really is. This requires laying out some metaphysical foundations. 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