On Method: Technique

Ideally I want to get it right. To present an accurate and authentic representation of reality as I see it, to the greatest extent possible in a single life. "Ideally" is doing the heavy lifting here though. The end goal is to get it right, but the process itself involves the resignation that the end goal will never be reached. That resignation is part of the method, and more specifically, part of the technique. 

You wont find here something that resembles the capital "T" Truth, but a process which is the constant cultivation of a particular way of thinking, a cultivation that involves constant repetition and exertion. I might be inspired, or have some idea stuck in my mind and so I write it up and it gets elaborated and left to sit. 

Then I'll move on and continue reading, listening, watching, experiencing, and living, and then things will change as new information and ideas come in, and I have new experiences. I'll read and listen to news and history, watch media, play games, play music, read the writings of others, consume theory, read scientific literature, listen to mystics, have mystical experiences, engage in physical labor and craft, engage in social activities, eat good food, drink good beer, and on and on down the line of experiences, and within each experience there may be something interesting to grab into, and then that too goes into the analysis. And so I write it up again. And then go do it all again. And then write ever more after that, again. 

And then when something gets written down, and sits, and is represented back at me, I think on it further, and then can qualify it and further advance the analysis. It kind of reminds me of woodworking, whether we are talking about doing things by hand or by machine. You make the rough cut first, and then advance progressively into finer tools and techniques as you get closer to a finished form. 

You discriminate the needed materials, a tree is felled, and an approximate size of the log is sawed for what you need. The log is milled by a big bandsaw, or else split by hand, and then it is roughly cut with saws or axes, and then planed or smoothed out with broad axes, draw knives, carving knives, and so on, with smaller and finer tools handling the detail work until the final sanding and finishing. 

And then you have something that is finished, but not perfect. It might have flaws, possibly glaring ones, or you might just have another purpose for next time, and then the whole process is begun again from the beginning, again and again, and it gets better in smaller cycles in the form of finer elaboration within the method, and it also gets better in larger cycles, in the form of experience and further mastery of the whole method and related techniques. 

Back to the writing, a blog is actually a great medium for this; something in between a journal and a standing work. I mentioned attempting some sort of work sometime. Maybe one of these days, but it will be a different beast.  

This way of thinking and doing though is appropriate (in my opinion) to an increasingly chaotic world. You build huge crystalline ideological cathedrals when the foundations are relatively stable, and you can repeatedly elaborate some sort of continuous structure based on the confidence that you can pick it up and resume it in its previous shape. 

But when everything is in the process of crumbling and transforming, with dominant structures of knowledge and living crumbling along with them, there is a widespread notion of disintegrating certainties and faiths. And so one way to cope with this is to place stock not necessarily in the structure, but in the process of continually reproducing structure, retaining a flexibility to do it all again, and do it well, if it all falls apart. 

We're in good company here. You see this instinct in the Cynics and then in the Stoics in a war-torn Greece, preaching of letting earthly possessions and commitments go in the ruinous aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, or in the Buddhists with their colorful sand art which they would wipe away after they were finished, starting anew. And I could go on with countless examples of countless mystic practices in particular, which flourish in chaotic times of discord. 

And though it seems pretty rough out there now, we're just getting started. 

Democracy

So I've characterized mass public political participation as something arising in the context of modernity, which eh, yes and no, and we need to elaborate on this. 

For example, what about Athenian democracy? Or Roman republicanism? 

We're trying to describe a larger narrative, with an aim to trace the trajectory of events spanning thousands of years. As such there are always exceptions, such as the practice of popular political participation in the ancient world. Oftentimes the exceptions offer the most illumination. 

Even in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, it could be observed that the Athenians did democracy better than many modern societies, for better or worse in that time. Though they were collectively steering themselves into ruin, accounts of that time reveal that their society had an incredible level of self-criticism and freedom of expression, even in the depths of the war, with poets and playwrights expressing compassion for their enemies and sharply criticizing their society's policies and tendencies. 

At the same time, democracy, or at least the performance of the image of democracy, is something much more widely practiced and situated in the modern context. We could draw from an analogue here: the historical development of capitalism. 

Markets, credit, money...these things have existed at least as long as civilization, and capitalism itself has winked in and out of existence here and there, such as in Renaissance Italy, but it did not begin to take hold as the material basis of society until the 1600's or 1700's or so. And capitalism existing now is a different beast than what it was when it was just getting started. 

Just as Athenian democracy was something else entirely, and our mass democracies now are oftentimes derided as charades dressing up the rule of oligarchs. That's another story for another time. 

Political and Economic Cultures

To get back to that snapshot of the Byzantine Empire and its relationship to oligarchs, now is the time to flesh out that picture a little more. Chiefly, we'll do this by describing in brief the political and economic culture of the empire at the time. 

Yes, political and economic culture. I mentioned that the Byzantine Empire was highly centralized and preferred to keep a tight leash on its oligarchs, whereas the United States liked to let them run amok. This description of empires in individualistic terms does have some provisional functionality, as their "interests" roughly track with very general tendencies specific to their character. 

But underneath those provisional designations are vastly complicated societies full of a multitude of individuals, all interacting with each other and with the outside, occupying complex gradients of power that are exercised when those individuals interact with each other in concert as factions or economic blocs for various purposes. 

The character of these interactions could roughly be described as a given society's political and economic culture. As is the usual case with this sort of thing, we can turn to an example in which the Byzantine empire was in a period of transition, which illuminated the boundaries and tendencies of a culture that was undergoing strain under dramatic change. 

When the Byzantine re-expansion really got going in the 900's - after an intensely lean period of contraction and hardship, and relations with its neighbors re-normalized, and the Arab expansions abated and were beaten back - the empire began to rely more heavily on oligarchs (or magnates) for military conquest and territorial reacquisitions. This budding relationship bore fruit when Nicephorus (of the prominent magnate family Phocas) was crowned emperor after the abrupt death of emperor Romanos II. 

Due to his popular reputation as a military legend, who had beaten back Arab forces and taken back various territories lost over a century ago, Nicephorus seemed an obvious choice as emperor and was elevated by his army. Interestingly though, it only took a couple of years for the body politic to completely reverse this opinion, perceiving him as an outside intruder and ejecting him in a sense as a foreign body. 

This was due in large part to the Byzantine political and economic culture at the time. A lot of the power behind the empire was situated in the civil services and the Constantinople-based aristocracy, who were well-accustomed to the concentration of power in the empire's court in that city, through the central tax system and the networks of distribution taking place there, and this was a system cultivated over hundreds of years within the city walls by necessity of a long period of fraught survival, engraving a distinct political and economic culture peculiar to the empire. 

The sudden re-expansion of the empire's boundaries was, without qualification, a good thing materially for the empire, with its population enjoying a growing prosperity not seen in quite some time. However, at the same time, that re-expansion was experienced as a trauma as the forces driving it touched down within the empire's existing political and economic machinery, clashing with it. 

Outside of the walls of Constantinople, Nicephorus and his army were worshipped as heroes for their brilliant conquests of surrounding regions, but once within the walls of the city and serving as emperor, the story changed dramatically. It didn't help that Nicephorus was clumsy as politician and ruler, unable to transfer his military brilliance to the role, but what ultimately did him in were the discontinuities he brought to the existing culture as harbinger of the changing economic and political climate. 

Nicephorus' reforms were perceived as highly disruptive to the existing centralized court system, with his presence and his outside ties redirecting the reciprocal flow of wealth and favor distribution to the army and his magnate family and associates. At the same time, he was incurring heavy taxes on the populace in favor of resource-intensive military aims, redirecting resources to his army. He was also alienating the church by attempting to insert a warrior ethos into the prevailing Christian theology of the empire. 

Ultimately, his reign suffered a coup which culminated in his assassination, a scheme that was advanced and succeeded based not only on factional support for this bold transgression within the regime, but also on the notion of his unpopularity as ruler and the perception of his foreign quality by the body politic. This was confirmed after one of the coup conspirators, Nicephorus' nephew John I Tzimiskes assumed the throne and was accepted as ruler. 

Tzimiskes continued on the family's rule, this time as a better politician than Nicephorus was. Curious, you can see the shift in phase of the empire's political and economic system, eased through by an assassination and usurpation of the throne by another family member as the traumas of the shift settled, like timber cut and shaped to fit a joint.  

To summarize and generalize this, a society's political and economic culture plays a large part in where power flows, in what way it is legitimated, and how it is exercised, which places real constraints on the shape that society takes and how it operates. This culture can change very slowly over time, or it can transform very rapidly through the course of violent trauma, catastrophe, and broad-based convulsions, but it often takes the latter set of extreme circumstances for those really big and dramatic changes. 

Even the powerful and supposedly autocratic Roman emperors (the canny ones that could keep their power anyway) would pay careful attention to public opinion, such as when announcing and testing policies, engaging in public works, and putting on games, triumphs, and other spectacles. Because they knew that their rivals were also paying attention, watching for signs of mass displeasure, which was taken as weakness and an opportunity to strike. 

This was one manifestation of what is commonly called the "writing on the wall," or the visible manifestation of those invisible relations and forces that can determine the fate of powerful people. 

The Changing Nature of Violence Pt. 2

Now to turn to violence in the modern era. I've realized that to get to the critique and make sense of it, I've got a little more ground to cover first. I think setting things up a little better will be worth the effort, and the critique should roll out a little more smoothly too. So bear with me through some backgrounding and then we'll finally get to the critique and possible futures. 

What we have is centuries upon centuries - and for that matter millennia - of the evolutionary change of civilization. The rhythmic rise and fall of empires did involve a perpetual, cyclical turning over of seasonal ideologies: beginnings of cultures, growth arcs of cultures, maturities of cultures, declines of cultures, deaths of cultures, and then rinse and repeat. But over time there was also an accumulating strata of long arc ideologies, supported by surviving and transferrable traditions, knowledge bases, technologies, cultural and economic innovations as power shifted from declining cultures to ascendant ones through trade, spoils of warfare and plunder, transfers through absorption and domination, and so on. 

And as values held by rising empires grew into their logical conclusions in time and space, and then corrupted as those empires declined, and then the inversions of those values were weaponized by a given empire's enemies and rivals, that cyclical process of transformation was also taking place over a more stable civilizational baseline that was evolving and changing over longer frequencies as well. 

Wealth accumulation - and power accumulation for that matter - has a sticky quality to it. It is much better to acquire such things than to lose them. And what we do see is that knowledge and wealth can be systematically destroyed when the powers wielding them weaponize them to hold their power, until the indefensible can no longer be defended and those things are lost, or otherwise transferred to another power. And then whatever remains is tenaciously clung to, and is fiercely utilized by the recovering or ascendant powers to reach back to the perceived high watermark of civilized society, and then to surpass it. 

What all of this has to do with violence is the following: part of what makes an empire an empire is the seemingly paradoxical collective presence of both the glorification of and reliance on violence and a simultaneous abhorrence of it. This is because violence is quite costly and tends to produce manifold uncertainties and stresses. As we see with a simple blood feud, if you kill an enemy or rival, those connected to the departed will single-mindedly pursue revenge and try to kill you or those connected to you, and the cycle can continue for a long time.  

Deaths in the collective mean diminishing labor power and the loss of resources, often in unpredictable ways in the course of war, which beyond the deaths themselves (which are bad enough) can occur immense additional suffering and even endanger the integrity of a society if the damage is great enough. And besides, there is the additional factor of the natural violence of the surrounding environment, say in the climate and the geography and wildlife and availability of food and so on, to take into account too.

The accumulation of power is often pursued so that this violence can be meted out to one's enemies and rivals and to one's environment so as to influence the totality of those things so that they are not meting violence back on you. Nevermind that the asymmetry of this relation leads to growing contradictions and tensions that produce serious problems of their own, because after all the rest of the universe has agency too. But the empire game goes on today and its players perpetually believe that they can win for good. 

Because after all, no one actually likes violence - despite the bucket-loads of it going around historically. It is well and good to mete it out, but to have it done to you is quite the other thing. And the tendency to engage in it tends to produce its augmentation, increasing the frequency and presence of it, which increases the chances of it spilling over and back onto you. The game of empire is the pursuit of having this cake and eating it: of inflicting violence without having it touch you. Of utilizing fire without being burned. But I think I've belabored this point enough.  

The accumulation of power then is greatly prosecuted through the accompanying accumulation of wealth, which is partly done through the division of labor in a society. Mirroring an empire's relation to the outer world, violence is also meted out on its own subjects to maintain its particular shape and power and position of its rulers, however the same problems of utilizing violence still exist here as well. And successive generations of rulers after rulers have dealt with these problems in different ways as they've learned and as their societies have evolved, with a general trend observed that soft power is more stable in the long run than hard power, the former being won through legitimacy and the distribution of benefits and spoils to ensure compliance of broad swathes of the population. 

This becomes ever more important as wealth is accumulated and distributed through a collective. With more wealth means more propensity to retaliate against violence, and it also means higher standards of living and so higher levels of expectations of lifestyle and treatment. Collective wealth makes a society stronger, but it also raises the bar for legitimacy as well. 

Now, as detailed in the historical processes above (processes both cyclical and linear, and so spiraling) wealth and energy utilization has gradually accumulated over the centuries until it exploded in the industrial era. And unsurprisingly with that explosion and mass urbanization and the dramatic raising of living standards, the bar for legitimacy has vastly raised alongside these things, with historical attacks on institutions of slavery, capital punishment, colonialism and imperialism, nepotism, unjust and harsh labor conditions, and so on accompanying the advancement of ideals of the universalist rules of law, human rights, democratic participation and enfranchisement, and the rest of it. 

Now, human nature itself, it is argued, has not changed all that dramatically, and whatever human nature may entail, we can see with our own experiences and observations that the formation and maintenance of empire, permeated through with the impulse to ceaselessly expand and dominate and assimilate rivals and detractors, is still well underway to this day, which directly contradicts the universalist human rights ideology that confers legitimacy on contemporary governance. Our ruling elite today have quite the act to follow: to indulge their nature as rulers to continuously expand and augment in power, while at the same time maintaining the legitimacy and goodwill that secures a widespread situation of that power on their subjects. 

In the next part, we'll be able to finally get to a critique of those contradictions and tensions and see where they might be leading us.