Category Archives: Politics

Frye and Tomkins on Democracy and Contempt

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In a review of 1984 when it first appeared, Frye writes that the real value of the book is that the author

gives us a terrifyingly clear impression of what we don’t want for either ourselves or our children. Mr. Orwell doesn’t tell us what to fight for, but he gives us a terrifyingly clear impression of what we should fight against. And what we should fight against, according to him, is not Russia or China, not Eurasia or Eastasia, but the evil tendencies in our own minds, our own weak and gullible compromises in a contempt of law and a contempt for truth. (CW 10, 143)

What is it exactly if not these evil tendencies, driven by contempt, that have given the Harper Conservatives permission to compromise their consciences, to lie, deceive, break rules and the law, cheat, conceal, refuse to answer questions, de-route all democratic process, and generally engage in vindictive attacks on perceived enemies and malign and smear honest public servants who inconveniently speak the truth? The great psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tomkins–like Frye, a genius with a grand theory–postulates that at the heart of contempt is a drive auxiliary that acts like an affect and which he calls “dissmell.” Dissmell is clearest in the sneer, the raised upper lip directed at another, as if other people smelled bad and were not fit for human consumption.

Tomkins points out that in a democracy contempt (which is unilateral dissmell combined with anger) is rarely used (Tomkins calls it the most unappealing affect), because it undermines the assumption of equality and solidarity with others. It is however a central affect in authoritarian and hierarchical societies, where dominance and superiority must be communicated by rejecting and distancing “malodorous” others. Contempt, as Tomkins neatly puts it, is the mark of the oppressor.

In contrast, shame is the affect central in democratic societies, because shame does not sunder the interpersonal bridge: it is not unilateral and only functions when there is already an affluence, a closeness and fellow feeling that is impeded in some way but with only an incomplete reduction of enjoyment or interest. Shame implies an identification with others, and a wish to return to the good scene of communion with the other. Contempt, on the other hand, insists on an unbridgeable distance from the other in the first place, so that there is no good scene to return to. There is no identification with the other. It is a very handy affect if you want to lynch someone, or cheat them out of their life’s savings, or if you are just part of an oligarchy that wants to avoid uncomfortable feelings of guilt (moral shame) for the misery that has been inflicted on the rest of the human population.

Compare for example, the facial display of Dick Cheney with that of Barack Obama. As far as I know, Cheney’s prominently raised upper lip is not due to any physical paralysis of any kind; it is an expression of dissmell. It is hard to imagine a sneer like Cheney’s coming over the features of someone like Obama. So when you have a leader of a government, Stephen Harper, who treats his own fellow citizens with dissmell it is best to be suspicious and wonder about the fate of our democracy.

But as of yet too many Canadian voters seem inert, immobilized, unconcerned with the erosion of democratic institutions and processes, and it is this very situation the Conservatives count on in a fear campaign directed at everybody’s pocket book.  Harper’s government is a perfect example of what Frye calls, in an essay on democracy which I will quote more fully below, a “managerial dictatorship.” Its primary model is a corporation, and thus it is naturally in conflict with democratic principles and processes. The only principles the Conservatives uphold are the rights of Canadians to own unregistered deadly weapons and to pollute the environment in the name of the economy. But, to lift a phrase from Thoreau,“whether we should live like baboons or like men seems a little uncertain.”

In contrast to the current inertia of voters is the famous reversal in the 1993 election when a negative Conservative ad ridiculing Jean Chrétien’s facial paralysis turned the election around on a dime, leaving the Conservatives, by the time the dust had settled, with only two seats in the country. It was an encouraging moment. It was uplifting to know that the voters could say so loudly and clearly that such a mean and ugly attack on a fellow human being and citizen is just not welcome here, thank you very much.

The following paragraph is from an essay Frye wrote in 1950, an essay he wrote for The Varsity, the student newspaper at the University of Toronto. He is not speaking in affective terms, but the antithesis he speaks of is the same:

All governments whatever must be either the expression of the will as a minority holding autonomous power, which is able to impose that will on society as a whole, or the expression of the will of the people as a whole to govern themselves. In the former case there is an antithesis between a ruling class and the ruled classes; in the latter case there is no governing class, but only a group of executives and public servants responsible to society as a whole for what they do. The latter conception is the democratic one.  (CW 11, 235)

“Democracy,” he goes on to say, “ is thus essentially the attempt to preserve law and order in society which has superseded the primitive and outmoded idea of ‘rule.’” We now have a government, of course, that seeks the very opposite: to rule as a minority and actively undermine the preservation of law and order in its own house: the House of Commons. Our House, as Michael so rightly puts it. The Conservatives have been found in contempt of parliament, guilty as charged of obstructing parliament and undermining democracy. Consider this paragraph from Frye in the same essay:

Anti-democratic social action, of the kind intolerable to a democracy must necessarily be in the direction of withdrawing information and action from the community as a whole. It is a contradiction in terms for democracy to tolerate a conspiratorial coup d’etat aimed at the restoration of the old idea of a professional ruling class. (236)

I can’t think of a better way of describing the threat that this country faces right now.

 

“The Spread of Palinism”

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Political Science student Awish Aslam, ejected from a Harper rally by Conservative Facebook creepers

Andrew Sullivan takes note that Palinism has spread to Canada via the Harper regime.  It’s a disturbing development. Using the RCMP (!!) to eject people from a Harper rally because Conservative operatives discovered they had posted pictures of themselves with Michael Ignatieff on Facebook is unacceptable on all levels.  It means, in the first place, that citizens are being spied upon and vetted for political purposes with the assistance of our national police force, which is horrifying.  It means also that those who do not make the cut are not (using Harper’s term) “real Canadians.”

Harper needs to be taught that even though a sizable majority of Canadians have never voted for him, he is nevertheless prime minister to all Canadians and is answerable to every single one of them.  He also needs to be reminded that he’s not the boss of us.  He’s our servant.

 

Frye on Blake and Money: “The cohesive principle of fallen society”

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Blake’s “To Annihilate the Self-hood of Deceit,” 1804-1808

Whenever we are tempted to believe that our current economic disparities and injustices are just the way it has to be, Frye in Fearful Symmetry takes on the money economy from a prophetic perspective:

Money to Blake is the cement or cohesive principle of fallen society, and as society consists of tyrants exploiting victims, money can only exist in the two forms of riches and poverty; too much for a few and not enough for the rest. La proprieté, c’est le vol, may be a good epigram, but it is no better than Blake’s definition of money as “the life’s blood of Poor Families,” or his remark that “God made man happy & Rich, but the Subtil made the innocent, Poor.” A money economy is a continuous partial murder of the victim, as poverty keeps many imaginative needs out of reach. Money for those who have it, on the other hand, can belong only to the Selfhood, as it assumes the possibility of happiness through possession, which we have seen is impossible, and hence of being passively or externally stimulated into imagination. An equal distribution, even if practicable, would therefore not affect its status as the root of a evil. Corresponding to the consensus of mediocrities assumed by law and Lockean philosophy, money assumes a dead level of “necessities” (notice the word) as its basis. Art on this theory is high up among the nonessentials; pleasure, in society, tends to collapse very quickly into luxury and affection. (CW 14, 82)

“The Canada We Have Failed to Create”

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Paul-Émile Borduas, “Leeward of the Island (1.47),” 1947, National Gallery of Canada

At the end of The Modern Century, Frye speaks of a

genuine America buried underneath the America of bustling capitalism which occupies the same place. This buried America is an ideal that emerges in Thoreau, Whitman, and the personality of Lincoln. All nations have such a buried and uncreated ideal, the lost world of the lamb, and the child, and no nation has been more preoccupied with it than Canada.

He then goes on to mention Tom Thomson, Emily Carr, Riopelle, Borduas, and of  Pratt and Nelligan, as well as the novels of Grove and artists and writers he sees as constantly in search of that ideal, that “something to be found that has not been found, something to be heard that the world is too noisy to let us hear.”

If there is a genuine Canada, it seems all the more elusive today. It is hard to believe that the cynicism and dishonesty of the current government has had, if we are to trust the polls, so little impact on a disturbingly large part of the electorate. Elsewhere, with reference to the inability of the NDP ever to garner enough support to win federal power, Frye pithily observes: “Principles make voters nervous, and yet any departure from them towards expediency makes them suspicious” (CW 12: 644). We can only hope that the current government’s venality and contempt for democracy, not to mention the wishes of his fellow citizens in the name of “stability” and a spurious economic expediency, will create enough suspicion to defeat Harper once and for all.

The Modern Century was published in 1967, the year of Canada’s centenary. Whatever ensues in the upcoming ballot, the eloquent words of the closing peroration are worth keeping in mind over the next weeks:

One of the derivations proposed for the word Canada is a Portuguese phrase meaning “nobody here.” The etymology of the word Utopia is very similar, and perhaps the real Canada is an ideal with nobody in it. The Canada to which we really do owe loyalty is the Canada that we have failed to create. In a year bound to be full of the discussions of our identity, I would like to suggest that our identity, like the real identity of all nations, is the one that we have failed to achieve. It is expressed in our culture, but not attained in our life, just as Blake’s new Jerusalem to be built in England’s green and pleasant land is no less a genuine ideal for not having been built there. What there is left of the Canadian nation may well be destroyed by the kind of sectarian bickering which is so much more interesting to many people than genuine human life. But, as we enter a second century contemplating a world where power and success express themselves so much in stentorian lying, hypnotized leadership, and panic-stricken suppression of freedom and criticism, the uncreated identity of Canada may be after all not so bad a heritage to take with us.

Our House

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The mace of the Speaker of the House of Commons

Stephen Harper, one week into the campaign, has said he needs a majority government to end publicly-funded party subsidies based upon votes received in the previous election. This would open the gates to the Conservative-friendly corporate financing that has ravaged the American political system and flooded Congress with eager shills whose only agenda in government is to make it unworkable. The shrugging off of public interests to corporate ones has also promoted the anti-government demagoguery in much of what passes for political discourse in the U.S. — five minutes with Fox News or talk radio is enough to get the full effect. Such a conglomeration of interests is a monster that devours money and excretes confusion and fear: and it’s not the tip-top tier of society that ends up covered in shit or is reduced to eating it.

This is one of many reasons Harper should not have the majority that his entire time in government seems to have been designed to win. Public financing has insulated the Canadian political process from the purchase of politicians who regard their constituents as patsies to be tricked out of voting in their own interest every election cycle. Many Canadians no doubt regard the nihilist antics of the American right with horror. It’d be a mistake for them to think it can’t happen here.

Like the Republicans Harper emulates, he’s not a conservative. Edmund Burke was a conservative. Benjamin Disraeli was a conservative. John Diefenbaker, sponsor of the Canadian Bill of Rights, was an excellent example of Canadian Tory conservatism. Those who claim the title these days are actually corporatists who have, in a single generation, degraded the notion of “citizen” to “consumer.” Citizens have hard-won rights. Consumers, on the other hand, are always in danger of being stripped clean by insatiable commercial predation. Adam Smith knew it. We have no excuse not to know it too. We’ve been living with the fact of it long enough.

How much more do the most privileged among us need? They’ve already denuded the working class of the little it possessed and are now moving in on the middle class, whose labor has earned it zero percent of the wealth it has generated for the last thirty years. So exactly how much more do they want? There is evidently never enough, no matter how much there is for them to take. It’d be satisfying to say that this kind of greed can only consume itself, which it certainly does. The problem is that it only consumes itself after it has devoured everything else.

That’d be us. But the single advantage we still possess is the knowledge that, whatever Stephen Harper may think government is for, the House of Commons belongs to us. It is not Stephen Harper’s House. It is our House. We are only required to maintain it by deciding who gets to inhabit it and who does not.

Conservative Scandals

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Conservative senator Doug Finley: charged with election law violation, along with one other Conservative senator and two Conservative operatives. The charges are serious enough that they are facing jail time.

A partial list from Lawrence Martin:

Just recently, we had the document-altering scandal featuring International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda, who appears in the House of Commons for Question Period but refuses to answer questions on the matter.

Just recently, we had new revelations in regard to the government’s so-called integrity commissioner, the one who received 228 whistleblowing complaints and upheld not a single one. She left with a half-a-million-dollar severance package – and a gag order to go with it.

Just recently, we learned that the office of Immigration Minister Jason Kenney used ministerial letterhead to raise money for the Conservative Party. We’ve also seen a contempt of Parliament motion brought against the government for its refusal to disclose basic information on the costs of crime bills and on corporate profits. And we’ve seen the Conservatives release attack ads of such questionable quality that they were withdrawn.

Just recently, The Canadian Press reported that, in the tradition of l’état, c’est moi, the Prime Minister is insisting that “Government of Canada” nomenclature be changed to “the Harper government.” Some wag suggested the PM might want to change his own name – to Stephen Hubris.

Just recently, the PM appointed Tom Pentefountas as vice-chairman of the CRTC. Mr. Pentefountas comes equipped with two qualifications: his close friendship with the PM’s director of communications, and zero experience in telecommunications.

Also recently, four Conservatives, including two senators, have been charged with breaking federal election law.

There’s more.  Make your own list.

Quotes of the Day: Stephen Harper

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Actual photo

For non-Canadians, here are some observations from Stephen Harper after the defeat of the government on Friday for “contempt of parliament” (video after the jump):

*Canadians don’t care about the wording of bills in Parliament.

*The Canadian public care about their economic well being and their standing as a country in the world.

*Coalition governments are illegitimate and unprincipled.

All of these assertions are, of course, wrong.  The first is consistent with the finding of contempt of parliament, which also apparently extends to the people it represents; the second is a half-truth at best, and what it leaves out amounts to a lie of omission; and the third is absurd on its face — our mother-parliament in the U.K. is currently home to a coalition government. Besides, Harper’s minority government is about as corrupt as a government with so short a lifespan can be. A government actually representing a majority of the people would make a nice change.

Jonathan Allan reminded me today of this quote from Frye, which we’ve posted before and is much closer to the truth.  We’re not angels, but we’re just principled enough to make a difference:

Then again, Canada has had, for the last fifty years, a Socialist (or more accurately Social Democrat) party which is normally supported by twenty-five to thirty per cent of the electorate, and has been widely respected, through most of its history, for its devotion to principle. Nothing of proportional size or influence has emerged in the United States. When the CCF, the first form of this party, was founded in the 1930s, its most obvious feature went largely unnoticed. That feature was that it was following a British rather than American tendency, trying to assimilate the Canadian political structure to the British Conservative-Labour pattern. The present New Democratic Party, however, never seems to get beyond a certain percentage of support, not enough to come to federal power. Principles make voters nervous, and yet any departure from them towards expediency makes them suspicious. (CW 12, 643-44)

(Thanks to Lyla for the tip.)

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“A second-rate socialist country”

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Rick Salutin in his column yesterday recalls that Stephen Harper as Leader of the Opposition called Canada a “second-rate socialist country.”

Canada isn’t second-rate or socialist. The comment only reveals how second-rate are Harper’s own political reflexes and how ignorant he is of Canadian political history. It also tellingly betrays his rolling-boil resentment of everything east of his imagination’s westerly orientation: when he says “second-rate,” or “socialist,” or “country” for that matter, he is obviously not thinking of Calgary or Fort McMurray.

It’s hard to believe that Harper has anything valuable to teach us about what it means to be Canadian. His government has more citations for contempt of parliament than any previous government in the last one hundred and forty-four years. This is not sitting well with older voters who have a respect for this country’s institutions that he does not share.

Frye, on the other hand, is in a position to teach Harper about conservatism and what it means in the Canadian tradition. In the Preface to The Bush Garden, for example, he observes that our “national emphasis is a conservative one, in the lower-case sense of preserving the continuity of political existence.” In this sense, Harper is not really a conservative in any meaningful way: like the Republicans, whose political operatives he hires and consults, he is a radical partisan who wishes to break our longstanding social contract of mutual support and replace it with commercial values. And, like the Republicans and others who pass themselves off as conservatives, Harper behaves as though the already advantaged can never have enough, while everybody else already has too much.  Too much, that is, of what only a genuinely conservative commitment to citizenship can provide, such as education and health care, as well as institutions intended to operate independently of a hostile political environment, such as the CRTC and the CBC — and, of course, parliament itself. When Harper attempts to rebrand the Canadian government as the “Harper government,” he exposes who he is and what he wants. He shows little desire to preserve “the continuity of political existence” beyond personal political ambitions that always display a strangely aggressive contempt for any opposition. He appears not to understand that the permanent institution of Canadian government isn’t the same thing as the temporary presence of a “Harper government,” or that they should never be confused. That — more than Michael Ignatieff’s twenty-year-old-taken-out-of-context-private-citizen’s-opinion on the design of the Canadian flag — may be the measure of whether or not he ought to be prime minister.

Apartheid

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s8xkjG8bx4

BBC report on the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in February 1990

South Africans voted in a national referendum to end apartheid on this date in 1992.

Frye in one of the late notebooks links apartheid to the pernicious synthesis of religion and political doctrine:

The worst governments are those with double ideologies, where a political doctrine is backed by a religious one, as in Iran. Israel is better, but I’d hate to have to live even there. But South Africa’s apartheid is buttressed by a remarkably dismal Dutch Reformed creed, and fifty years ago the word “Christian” in the name of a political party meant “Roman Catholic Fascist.” (CW 6, 91)