The other thing, no less disquieting than the first, that the epidemic has caused to appear with clarity is that the state of exception, to which governments have habituated us for some time, has truly become the normal condition. There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought for that reason to declare a state of emergency like the current one, which prevents us even from moving. People have been so habituated to live in conditions of perennial crisis and perennial emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition and has not only every social and political dimension, but also human and affective. A society that lives in a perennial state of emergency cannot be a free society. We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “reasons of security” and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity.
That older generation that endured the Spanish flu, now long gone, was not ill-informed. People in that era were attended by medical professionals who fully understood the spread of disease and methods of quarantine. Unlike us, however, that generation did not want to live under Satan’s rule, not even for a season. They insisted that man was made for life, not death. They bowed their head before the storm of disease and endured its punishing blows, but they otherwise stood firm and continued to work, worship, and play, insisting that fear of death would not govern their societies or their lives.
I find this convergence quite interesting, and wish I had the time to trace the intellectual genealogy that led a post-Heideggerian, quasi-Foucauldian continental philosopher and a traditionalist Catholic to make precisely the same argument. Reno’s contemptuous dismissal of the value of “physical life” echoes Agamben’s “purely biological condition,” his famous concept of “bare life,” while Reno’s attack on “a perennial state of fear and insecurity” echoes Agamben’s “perennial crisis and perennial emergency,” his equally famous “state of exception.” (One common ancestor, I think: Carl Schmitt.)
But for now I’ll just note that perhaps the strongest obvious link between them is indifference to the truth of their historical claims. What Reno got wrong about the American response to the Spanish flu I mentioned in an earlier post; for a refutation of Agamben’s claim that a sense of emergency in plague time is a new phenomenon, see, for instance, this post by my friend and colleague Philip Jenkins, and Anastasia Berg’s critique. When the facts get in the way of the narrative, print the narrative. ...
Comparing a contemporary traditionalist Catholic take (a la Reno) on the covid 19 situation to Agamben is ... interesting ... . Jacobs floats the idea more implicitly than explicitly that we live in a strange time when figures on the religious conservative side of our era so readily recapitulate arguments made by Marxists in a previous century.
Having done some comparative reading in Theodor Adorno and Roger Scruton I would venture to say that paradox is not only not very irony these days but practically seems to be a norm.
Something else Jacobs has written about lately is:
https://blog.ayjay.org/motte-and-bailey-and-coronavirus/
A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of land (the Bailey) which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible and so neither is the Bailey. Rather one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.For my purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents a philosophical doctrine or position with similar properties: desirable to its proponent but only lightly defensible. The Motte is the defensible but undesired position to which one retreats when hard pressed.
Scott Alexander has done a great job of explaining the widespread relevance of the motte-and-bailey tactic. And it is a tactic that is getting a heavy workout these days, especially from certain parts of the Christian Right (especially its Catholic-integralist, nationalist-fundamentalist, and snake-handling Baptist wings.)
...
Alexander writes, “So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement” — or perhaps a statement that’s widely accepted in your social circle — “so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.” And that’s how it goes with the Ours-is-not-a-spirit-of-fear crowd too.
...The "motte-and-bailey doctrine" seems less like a doctrine and more like a tactic, although of course it should be mentioned that in geopolitical policy a doctrine generally works out in tactics and strategies but I digress. As a rhetorical tactic, whatever "motte-and-bailey" pans out to be seems weirdly familiar to me after a decade or so of observing how people like Mark Driscoll have wielded social media.
But I wonder if the "doctrine" as it plays out in social media depends on social media "reach". To be plain, Mark Driscoll can imply by way of those rhetorical question titles that, ironically, more often can appear in the blog posts of watchdog bloggers, that in asking "Was Nebuchadnazzar demon-possessed?" in the title the answer has to be "yes" or the blog post would never have been written in the first place. "Did abuse happen at Church X under the leadership of Pastor Y?" in a watchdog blog context is very often simply an uncertainty gambit that substitutes for what a journalist would report as "Allegation of abuse at Church X under the leadership of Pastor Y".
No comments:
Post a Comment