Thoughts on the London riots

Sometimes I wonder if I should be on Facebook at all. A few days ago I earned a measure of unpopularity for joking on the death of Amy Winehouse, the poor little lamb who was young, rich, famous and beautiful and decided to kill herself with drugs (and apparently it's not funny that her most famous song is "Rehab"... we all know how that goes). Now, I'm fighting against myself not to put up sardonic responses to all the Facebook updates on London riots (and oh, there's plenty... it seems that all of England has gone on a Facebook marathon since the riots began). Possibly the only thing that really holds me back is the fact that I'm not there in person.

The two most popular types of comments are a.) "The situation is awful! [and/or] These rioters are EVIL!!!", and b.) the understanding, liberal, left-wing position, saying that these people are themselves the victims of society, and that we should consider how our governmental system has excluded the very people who are now threatening the rest of us.

For a change, I can't bring myself to like either position. As for the first, to say that rioters are "evil" simply mirrors the action of the rioters, but from the other side. They 'condemn' the shooting of that kid by burning up cars, as we'd expect from people of their social class, and other strata of society 'condemn' the rioting by writing angry status updates on facebook and moralising on newspapers, also as we'd expect from people of their social class. Each to his appropriate means of expression, each feeling self-righteous from their club. Ho-hum. (Furthermore, there *is* the irony of the situation... "Senseless violence puts me in such a rage!" For serious, every time I see those images on TV I want to go out and break stuff...)

I empathise with the 'understanding' position no more than I do with the first, but for different reasons. I simply don't think that this situation is amenable to political readings. While the Conservative government (and most governments in general) is formed of racist bastards who'd willingly drive their societies into such a crock of shit that it would be worth burning the whole thing down, it's not directly related to these riots.

This is not to say that the riots express no political sentiments, much less that they will have no political repercussions. But the way an event such as these riots occurs is determined by a conflation of variables which find their roots all over the place, not just in society but also in individuals and in the environment. More importantly, the way these variables interact is not something we can interpret, determine or control; it is inherently unpredictable. And for this reason it cannot be linked directly to any governnment or political party, present or past.

I know this view will be unpopular, because it's the kind of thing that politicians can so readily use to cop out. Unfortunately, there's no other view that rationally accounts for these events. If there were, these views would also be able to make reliable predictions; instead, all they can do is backwards-rationalise. And that's useless, because it can be done both ways - it's just as easy to say that this happened because the police were never allowed to use force properly, and that if they could shoot on the protesters it would solve it much more quickly, as it is to say that the rioters are the victims of a sick system.

These concerns are exactly what led me to go back and study some mathematics, with the distant hope of getting a degree in the discipline someday. There is a branch that describes precisely these phenomena, and it is called chaos theory. It's connected to the riots for reasons well beyond the fancy name.

Chaos theory deals with systems where (apparent) disorder reigns (in mathematical terms, it's called nonlinearity). It sketches a few ideas, including the collapse of a linear system into nonlinearity, which is what just happened in London, and something else called "sensitivity to initial conditions." The latter principle perhaps best explains why the events in London cannot be traced purely to a political metanarrative.

If a system possesses sensitivity to initial conditions, then micro-changes in the initial settings will translate into macro-changes later down the line. This means that even a small event has the potential to have enormous effects, changing everything in the way we expected things to go. Since it's obvious that interpersonal relations of all kinds (including society itself) make for a nonlinear system, because otherwise they could be predicted and understood very easily, it means that you can't possibly control the direction of history, even on the short-term. This is simply because there will always be some small event that escapes your control and ends up having gigantic consequences.

The murder of Mark Duggan is just such an example of a micro-event (all due respect to the Duggans) leading unpredictably to macro-consequences. There is no linear connection between the murder and the riots; if you repeated the event in similar conditions, it would never lead to the same consequences, nor would these riots ever repeat themselves in this form for an analogous murder (or for any other reason). It is no exaggeration to say that without Duggan's murder, today we would not be having all this mess and all these status updates. Nor these disputes and vitriol neither. Nor is there any point in blaming anyone - the police, the government, the culture - for the fact that Duggan was shot. It was itself an unpredictable event determined by a combination of variables which could never have been accounted for and will never repeat themselves (that said, the cop still has to be sent to jail).

And so for all of the good reasons there may be for hating the Torys, these riots aren't one. No-one could have controlled this. No-one could have predicted this. No-one could make it happen again. Some events are just beyond our control. Some systems will just unavoidably collapse, and there will be nothing left for us to do except picking up the pieces.

Past all these questions of linearity, there's another reason why I can't take the Facebook updates seriously, and am instead impelled to make cruel jokes about them. You see, the fact is that I don't respect the media by which the news of them are being reported. This is the reason why I allowed myself to joke on Winehouse's death: because it's no-one's death. No-one knew this girl. No-one had ever even seen her. And yet there is a general expectancy that we should express sympathy, even show reverence. Sympathy to what? To a television monitor? (Think Lady Diana, but with a prettier voice). This is what the media do, and it makes me ill. We live in a world where we know more about the lives of rich people living in other countries than we do about our own immediate neighbours. We sometimes fight and compromise real friendships with real people over our opinions on these electronic ghosts or on their films or on their football teams.

The point that I'm not-so-subtly getting at is that the real bad guys in all this thing are not the hoodies, nor the government, nor Cameron, but the media. When I say the media, I'm referring to the entire culture of virtual communications that was born in the mid-Twentieth Century and exploded in the last thirty years. It is for the media that all of this circus is rolling. It is for the media that these people riot, and for whom we update our Facebooks (which is of course a medium). It's not just that they're most directly responsible for creating the culture and conditions in which these riots evolve (however unpredictably), it's more the fact that they *thrive* on them. The media are LOVING these riots. They love wars, terrorist attacks, serial killers, disasters. They even create them, when they can. And all the coverage they're giving to these riots now are having no effect other than to multiply them exponentially. How do you think they spread to Birmingham and Liverpool and Leeds?

Without the media's (slanted) coverage of Duggan's murder, how would it all have kicked off in the first place? Without the coverage, how could the rioters have felt backed by a political (or anti-political) agenda? Where are they looking for recognition if not in the media, since politics is currently no more than diplomacy with the media? Another Fb status contemned two girls who bragged about "showing the police" that they could "do what they want[ed]". But what and who are they putting up the show for, if not for the media?

But what the media have to do with the riots isn't really the important bit (though seeing the glee of the reporters as they 'condemn' these actions is enough to nauseate anyone). After all, there would be riots even without them, and it's not like they can be predicted anyway. What's worrying is what the media do with us. The way they lead us to interact with things which don't exist and build our relationships with/through virtual avatars instead of real people. Jean Baudrillard, a thinker who was very influential to me and one of the greatest critics of the media-world, once wrote a book entitled The Gulf War did not happen. Of course it enraged everyone, and he responded "Yes - but how many of the people criticising me have had an experience of the Gulf War any different from mine, that is to say, just an experience of media?" I'm not going to go so far as to write that the London riots did not happen, because there's going to be the odd contact on facebook who had a man shouting at him/her from a bike while walking through the park, or someone who heard a siren going through the road or saw a few broken glasses. And as I said at the outset, that's my problem with writing about something when I haven't been there in person. But most of the people who will read this text, including those in London, will have seen zero or almost zero of the riots. Their experience will be of the media - they will have seen the riots on TV, they will have spent hours discussing them on mobile phones, they will have written about it on facebook, they will have followed the news, and now you're reading of them on this blog (heh). These riots are happening on the media - and therefore they're not riots at all. They may take some resources, but they don't damage the system that truly generates and supports them, and that is now gluttonously absorbing their narrative (Live coverage too, baby!).

Above it all, I don't want my opinion and view of these riots to be shaped by the media. I don't want them to present me what they have on offer ('condemnation,' 'compassion,' 'full force of the law') and then make my choice, as though reason were a digital menu to be leafed through with your remote. I know it doesn't take the media's susurration to condemn vandalism, but think of it - without the media to show you the images, what would you condemn at all? Without Facebook, what expression would your indignation find outside of real confrontation with real people?

I realise this view is not a very attractive one, because it leads to some pretty sad conclusions. One of these, in my case, has been an almost total disenchantment with the political and communication system. I don't read newspapers or follow the news anymore, I never watch TV except for the odd football match, and I don't even feel particularly impelled to vote. This isn't just due to the fact that I can't find a political party that actually represents me (you know... one that believes sincerity is an important value?), not in England nor anywhere else, and especially not in the fen that goes by the name of Italian politics. It's an actual disgust with the institution itself. And yes, I agree that we have a moral obligation to be involved in politics - but that is exactly the point. That's what they have taken away from us. There is no involvement or engagement with politics anymore; there's only engagement with the media. To say that 'we follow politics' only describes your way of interacting with the chosen combination of media. Even when you vote, what are you voting for if not a group of specialised actors performing together for the media? There's only an economy of signs left, truths and words prostituted to the service of indifferent stage-lights that chew people up with their dreams and feelings, and then refuse even to spit them out. Thank you, but I'd sooner take exile.

Ethics -- Limit of the Christian paradigm

Consider these two verses from the Bible.

1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

2. If someone slaps you on your right cheek, turn your other cheek to him as well.

These two sentences sum up in my opinion the great contribution of Christianity to Western ethics. They sound like two separate ideas, but they are very closely linked.

"Turn your other cheek," which I shall abbreviate to the TOC principle, is another way of saying that force does not equate to moral legitimacy. (This is the opposite of the Nietzschean position of "might makes right" which I discussed in the last entry). And it is right, for the simple reason that if you're using force on another person, then you're simply doing to him/her what s/he could have done to you if s/he had greater force him/herself; and if, in his/her position, you would register the situation to be 'unpleasant' or 'bad' or 'evil', then s/he will do the same when s/he is the victim. So by exerting force, you are not removing the 'bad,' you are simply standing on the other side of it. If you want to do something good rather than bad, then you have to find a way of settling your differences which does not involve force. (Once again, this does not invalidate Nietzsche's statement, it simply offers an alternative to it; because it presupposes that your opponent is your equal, which is not necessarily the case, and certainly not according to Nietzsche).

This is why the verse "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is connected to the TOC. Because both are based on the idea of an equality between two subjects, and on the need to accommodate differences in a way that is correspondingly equal to both sides, rather than unbalanced in favour of one or the other.

Just to be clear, this is not a principle that originates from Christianity. Aristotle already promoted the idea of justice as equality/equivalence in the Nicomachean Ethics, to mention but one prominent example. But I shall refer to the TOC and similar principles as representatives specifically of the Christian ethic, even if Christian doctrine and history aren't always in total harmony with them, because Christianity is responsible for crystallising them in the Western subconscious and giving them primacy. In other words, they did more to popularise and spread these concepts than anyone else. (For similar reasons, I referred to the "might makes right" principle as Nietzschean in the last article, even as I insisted that Nietzsche's actual ethics were more complex).



Even if you do not accept the idea that all humans are equal (and indeed it can only be accepted in principle, because in practice people are defined by their very differences, which are also inequalities), the Christian principle remains more than just valid - it is utterly inescapable. Atheists like to indulge in negation here, but there's no getting round the ethical preeminence of the Christian principle. This is why.

The discipline of ethics is informed by the question of how things *ought* to be. In other words, it relies on a projection. The opposite of this is how we think that things *must* be, and indeed are. The latter state of things is called determinism. (The opposition of personal projections versus determinism also gives rise to the problem of free will, which I shall not discuss here).

It is possible to favour determinism over projection (Dionysus over Apollo); and this possibility allows for the Nietzschean position, where power is favoured over morality. But as we have seen, this is not an ethical choice at all. Indeed it is *not a choice,* precisely because it is deterministic, and therefore it cannot be a projection (a choice implies a projection). Even just considering the question of 'how things must be,' or trying to understand or calculate it, is already an act of projection, and is therefore already an ethical act. This convoluted problem led us to the conclusion of our first entry, when we said that the two poles cannot exist separate from each other, and indeed both ethics and determinism coexist in us without our being able to settle on either. On, in and with this duality is formed our conscience. (And this is why Apollo and Dionysus are my choice of gods over those offered by monotheism, but that's a different story).

But as long as we're making an ethical choice or decision, it will always harken back to the Christian paradigm. We can define this either as the "Do unto others" or as the TOC, it doesn't matter - both go back to pretty much the same idea. And this idea can be expressed as follows:

Nature red in tooth and claw makes us fight. It makes conflict part of our necessary behaviour. We overpower the weaker members of our species (or other species) in our struggle for resources as part of the process of evolution. Therefore fighting is an expression of natural laws. And since nature is just another word for determinism, seen how it is just a chain of cause-and-consequence events with no *projection* in it anywhere, then the only way of making a choice which is not deterministic when faced with the possibility of conflict is by *not fighting.* Now an ethical choice is, by definition, a choice which is not deterministic. Therefore the only truly ethical choice faced to a situation of conflict is not fighting.

If you didn't fully understand the above paragraph, I invite you to read it again: in my opinion it is crucial to all moral systems and it is at the heart of Christian ethics. (This has nothing to do with Christianity as a religion; as I said, I'm using the term for convenience, but the ethical paradigm itself doesn't require the details of Christian history, theology or cosmology to be true (or not); it holds even without all of these things. Indeed it holds even if there is no God, simply by its own internal congruence. You cannot do without the Christian principle).



By choosing not to fight, you are assuming onto yourself the suffering that will necessarily result from the use of force (the alternative is to use force yourself and impose that suffering on the other). If you assume, accept, withstand the pain that the other would have to feel, you are undergoing the choice that Christ made on the cross. You are assuming onto yourself the pain of others. By doing this, though the suffering still subsists, the evil does not - because it is no longer a 'necessary' suffering, but one that is chosen with consciousness. In other words, it is no longer deterministic; it is congruent with your projection, and therefore the situation is 'ethical.' You have annihilated the 'bad' aspect of the scenario that one of the two participants in the conflict would have had to experience, if it had been resolved by a mutual use of force. You have truly done the good thing.

But, and here's the rub - even as this principle is inescapable, it is not exhaustive. Indeed there is a point at which this principle dies out, no longer becoming functional or applicable, and we shall now look at where this point is exactly. This is, really, the entire subject of this post (and it took me more than half the text to get there, so forgive me).

Something surprising in our philosophical tradition, at least in my experience, is how rarely people have acknowledged the proportional aspect of ethics - by this I mean that it is valid in different ways at different scales. Perhaps seduced by the (typical) Apollonian unitary dream, most of the writers I've read work under the assumption that what is right for one person will be right for ten people, and also for the whole of society. Plato is especially guilty of this, as he projects in the Republic a whole ideal society working in the same way as one ideally virtuous individual - and he seems to think this congruence makes his theory particularly full of merit. Indeed, this is the common idea behind an ethical principle: that it should always be true, no matter what. (This is the trap awaiting all proselytes of Apollo... though there are no ethics without Apollo, on the other hand if you follow him too far, he will lead you to this flattening out of differences and these universal generalisations which remove the practical uses of ethics in the first place).

In reality, ethics are every bit as relative as space and time. The great difficulty when it comes to morality is understanding how it changes when the variables of a situation, and the number of people involved in such a situation, change. I don't think a law can be found that solves this problem (for reasons that I may or may not expound on in a third post in this series). But the relativity of ethics is unquestionable, and it finds an excellent expression in the problem of war. If you transpose an argument from between two people to between two nations (or vice versa), you will see that the parallel does not hold when looking for solutions, simply because the responsibilities involved are different, as are the means of interaction. The fact that it may be right, for instance, for one of the men to solve it by punching the other in the face, doesn't mean that one of the nations is entitled to declare war; because in this case the result wouldn't be just a bruised cheek, but people actually dying. Conversely, if it's wrong for one of the men to solve the dispute by killing the other, it doesn't follow that it's wrong for one of the nations to declare war; because the nation losing the war isn't "killed" as a nation, though it may be impoverished.

The parallels between individuals and nations simply do not carry over. The same is true for the rapport between individuals and smaller groups of people, or between city-states and nations.

One film that illuminates this relativity wonderfully is Seven Samurai, one of the greatest movies ever made (if not the greatest). It tells of a village recruiting Samurais to defend themselves against a band of brigands - a small-scale war which reproduces, in its epic three-plus hours of sword-clashing and dialogue, the entire spectrum of ethical choices from those of the lone individual to society's as a whole, and the way they interact and clash and come together in the same historical moment. It was the first work of art that convinced me that, for all of my extreme pacifism, war can indeed be right in certain circumstances.

Seven Samurai

It should be noted that questions of scale and measure also come into play when considering not just the relation between two opposing agents, but also the potential consequences of their actions. What do I mean by this? I mentioned that the only ethical choice when presented with a conflict is *not fighting,* but that is under the condition that the consequences of the conflict will be equal for both the participants (in the same way that it presupposes that they be equal as human beings). But if you're engaged in a dispute with someone and you know that if you lose, you get killed, while if your adversary loses, he is only deprived of his car, then of course you would be justified in exerting force to solve the conflict. This is an example of the limits of ethical principles - while they're universal on paper, the 'equality between subjects' that they necessitate is almost never actualised in the real world. Ethical principles are an Apollonian projection, and Apollo is always a fiction. This is why there is no 'ultimate morality' of the type that religious people so often call for.

Suppose, then, that you postulated a scale for ethics. The ethics that apply to only one individual are level one. For two to five individuals it's level two. For six to thirty individuals it's level three. And so on. (These numbers are hypothetical - the actual ratios cannot be determined numerically, or if such a thing is possible, I have no bloody clue how). Morality changes and has different rules depending on which 'level' you're at.

The great limit of Christian ethics, then, is that *they only apply to level one.* Christian ethics are inescapable as individual ethics. As long as you're alone, they apply, and are in fact impossible to confute. There is no other choice you can take that is right, but the choice of Christ. But as soon as you enter a situation involving a larger group, they fail to apply. For instance, if you marry and have children, and an individual comes over and starts harming your wife and/or kids, you are not only justified but compelled to stop him, by means of violence if necessary. This seems intuitively obvious, and it is easy to explain by our principles, too: by applying the TOC on your wife and kids, you allow the suffering to subsist on someone who cannot or does not assume it - and therefore the 'evil' remains. (Unless the wife and kids themselves ask you not to intervene - in which case they are assuming individually the TOC, but while this could be true of your wife, it cannot apply to children). And so you *must* fight. Fighting is the right thing to do, and turning the other cheek is the wrong one. The Christian paradigm fails.

This does not delete the contribution of Christianity to our ethical systems. Not at all. But it does put it into perspective. The ethical system proposed by Jesus Christ is individual, not collective. Individual and collective ethical systems are two different things, and Christ has nothing to say or teach on the latter. It would not have been the right thing to do, for instance, if Churchill and Roosevelt had applied the TOC at the national level when faced with Adolf Hitler. Despite my own loathing of violence, an ethical system claiming that violence is always evil is simply not adequately nuanced - and therefore flawed. It is, at best, an Apollonian fiction.

The conclusion that I'm driving at is similar to the one with Nietzsche in the previous blog post. I'm not making an absolute conclusion either way. I'm not saying "the Christian principle is wrong" (or right). I'm saying we need it, and we need to study it and learn (from) it, but no more than we also need opposing ethical systems - including the (apparently incompatible) Nietzschean one. If we are to face the world, with its infinity of different situations and challenges, then we need an equally flexible moral understanding of it. "Flexible" doesn't mean that we can do whatever feels most convenient according to the situation. It means that it accounts for both the Apollonian and Dionysian poles in our psyche, both ideal and compromise, both ethics and power, both purity and experience, both what ought to be and what must be. We must know how to stand firm at the right times, and how to compromise at others. Neither the light nor the darkness are the answer to anything, for both leave us blind; it is only in the balance between the two that the human being is realised.

Ethics -- Does might make right?

Read this quote:

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian.

Here is a succinct synthesis of Nietzschean ethics. Nietzsche's claim was that morality does not exist, and only power equates to legitimacy. The powerful are therefore legitimised in crushing the weak; as he puts it in The Antichrist, 'the weak must perish.'

Nietzsche's propositions have always been controversial, because our own sense of empathy insitinctively rebels against this notion that the weak should be killed. There's also the historical association with Nazism, which seemed to apply this rule (albeit under the non-Nietzschean assumption that the Jewish race represented 'weakness').

Our instinctive revulsion, however, is not enough to disqualify the statement. Questions of what is right and wrong must be subsidiary to the greater question of how our moral systems stand when confronted with power. For it is indeed true that historical law subverts moral dictates all the time. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, or as soon as the situation makes immoral acts advantageous, men will be known to choose the option which leads to greater power (or the exercise thereof). While morality (or the advantages of morality) rests for its application on the condition of power not being abused, power does not rest under any condition posed by morality. If men can exercise power under the endorsement of moral law, then all for the better. If they can't, they will do so without that endorsement or absolution. In this sense, it is true that power is a more important concept than morality.

But the question of whether power equates to moral legitimacy deserves greater attention. It is more often subject to gross simplifications and misinterpretations than to accurate examinations. (For one thing, such an assertion is itself a moral projection, and not an exercise of power, and therefore it is inherently paradoxical. But it is not the deconstructionist line of thought that I'm interested in today). I would argue that the 'synthesis' I have quoted above is an example of such a simplification, and it is therefore untenable, at least in that form.

Does might make right? Let's run this statement through a few historical and/or hypothetical scenarios.


Was Rome justified in invading Carthage and razing it to the ground, slaughtering all its inhabitants and even spreading salt on the ground, that nothing may grow of it again? Any Christian would answer, no. Nietzsche would say, yes. The very fact of their greater power over the second greatest civilisation of the world gave them the right to eliminate them. The statement may seem repellent at first, but at least it is equanimous: if the Carthaginians had been the most powerful, they would have had moral legitimacy in razing Rome to the ground. No bias is allowed, no questions of taste or culture or religion apply. History is the only judge.

Weighing up consequences is an act which does not come into the equation. It *does not matter* that Rome went on and civilised Europe, building roads everywhere and advancing science and engineering, literature and art (or, on the other hand, reducing thousands to slavery and indulging in gladiatorial horrors). These are all retrospective considerations which depend on the original exercise of power. The act is neither redeemed nor condemned by its consequences - both because these consequences, while conditional to the original act, are not inherent in it (things could have gone either way, depending on other, non-quantifiable factors), and also because the act is its own consequence. To judge the act by its posterior developments means to defer the moral judgement, not to proffer it.

This also means that the 'evolutionary' argument is null. Defendants of the Nietzschean statement sometimes argue something like this: "The weak must die and be replaced by the strong, so that the strong can use their strength for their great deeds, and thereby advance all of humanity. If the weak are not allowed to die, we never step forward, and a civilisation becomes mouldy, decadent and corrupt." I say it is an evolutionary argument because it can be synthesised like this: "the weak must die for the good of the species." Indeed this is exactly what nature does, killing off the weaker members of a species so the species as a whole is fortified. The argument that humanity works or should work according to the same principle, while cruel, is not wholly irrational. But it is not relevant to an application of Nietzschean ethics. As I said, if we judge the act by its posterior developments, we are not judging the act at all. This is not to apply Nietzschean ethics to an act, it is only to rationalise it. From the Nietzschean perspective, a killer is justified by his power, not by the later politically correct application of it. (Nietzsche would also argue that it is the original exercise of power which produces the cultural milieu and the moral standards which then justify the exercise which led them into existence).

The issue of the Roman destruction of Carthage cannot be judged by questions of right or wrong to the extent that these considerations are immaterial to the act itself. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong, power takes its own path anyway. Morality fails in the face of power.


Does might make right? Let's examine the question further. If a man kills another in a desert, is the act of murder justified by the very fact that the first man has the power to execute it? Again, the Christian says no, and Nietzsche says yes. Again, we are appalled by Nietzsche's statement, but we have no argument to propose against it: our considerations remain immaterial before the act itself. History *does not care* about what we think is right or wrong.

But let's imagine further. The murderer walks a little more into the desert, and encounters a third man. This third man is a brigand and even stronger, and he kills the murderer. (This is not an act of 'justice' motivated by law or revenge; imagine that this third man were simply looting the first). Again, from the Nietzschean perspective, this brigand is justified. But here's the catch: this system can go on indefinitely. The brigand can himself encounter another brigand who is even stronger and be legitimately killed, who in turn can encounter another stronger and more legitimate murderer, and so on. Each time, the killer in the desert can encounter another killer who is stronger than him, and each time he can get killed. And according to this logic, the new murderer will always be right.

This is important because there is never a final point, there is never a last man who is right, because there can always be someone more powerful. In theology, the chain would stop at God, which ironically supports Nietzsche's system: God is the ultimate right, simply because God is the ultimate power.

The defining aspect of power is that it is quantifiable. It may not be *measurable,* because there are no scales for it, but it's always a question of 'more' or 'less' of it. The more power you have, the more you achieve supremacy in your conflicts, and therefore (from the Nietzschean perspective) the more right you are. But the amount of power you can have goes up, theoretically, to infinity. There is never a point where you can stop and say, *this* is right.

Now this is important in light of how morality, at least traditional morality as we always understand it (including major philosophy), works. Here is a quote presented to me by Jack Hudson:

If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgements conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.
Francis Schaeffer. How Then Should We Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. 

Personally I disagree with the statement, and I wanted to discuss it, but I never found the time. This is not the occasion either, but it provides some important grounds for reflection. The writer is of course a Christian, and in this type of moral theology, one inevitably postulates what he calls an "absolute" moral standard. For our purposes, what matters is not the question of what such a standard is, but the fact that the projection/conception of morality requires an "absolute," a terminus, a final point.

What I am driving at is that morality is inherently Apollonian. I have discussed what Apollo and his counter-part Dionysus are in greater detail, in this article. (I must have linked this a thousand times, but that's because it is important). The point is that Apollo is THE absolute. Not just in morality, but in everything. Ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, whatever. The conception of an ideal, any ideal, is a projection of Apollo. Platonic forms, for instance, are an example of Apollonian projection. Utopian texts, likewise. Nietzsche knew this, of course - he was the one who first established the Apollo vs Dionysus duality, after all.

In the Apollo vs Dionysus duality, there are no right and wrong. Both deities provide for representations which can be right or wrong in the traditional senses according to the circumstance, and always in relation to each other. A Dionysian movement destroying or corrupting what we perceive to be an 'absolute' good will be understood as evil, while a similar movement liberating us from a totalitarian Apollonian principle (as Apollo, for the good or for the bad, is always inflexible), will be seen as something good. Blasphemy would be an example of evil Dionysus, while the hippy movement would be seen as good Dionysus (depending on the perspective, you could say the opposite, too, and this proves the point).

Worshipping Dionysus. But folding over to become Apollo.

I think it can be agreed that ethics, whatever the culture or the philosophy behind them, always require an Apollonian projection. Everyone points towards or at least implies some final good, an ultimate referent by which to legitimise their actions. This referent is carefully elaborated in moral systems, though such a referent is false (as all Apollonian projections are false, or at least illusory, and no more in our grasp than Platonic forms). It is false because it does not apply in the real world. It only serves as that real world's referent, to lift a mirror to it and let it pass judgments on what is right or wrong.

Now the issue with power-based ethical systems, which I have so far been referring to as Nietzschean systems, is that they are quantifiable. Greater or lesser degrees of power. Since there is never a point where you can stop and say *this* is right, there can be no Apollonian projection in power-based ethics, and therefore no right (or wrong). This invalidates the claim that might makes right. The original quote by McCarthy falls under its own argument. Or, alternatively, it invalidates the idea that there are such things as right and wrong at all (which was Nietzsche's contention). There is no ethical justification behind power. If you are applying power, you are neither right nor wrong.

The claim that 'might makes right' is therefore bullshit, and it can be laughed into ridicule when anyone propounds it so simplistically. It is true that moral systems exist as temporary, frail projections which are brushed away according to historical whim, and they have no absolute referent to return to. But power is no such absolute referent either (and it cannot be mistaken for one), because it would have to be posited as an Apollonian value, and there can be no such thing as an Apollonian projection of power.

This is not to claim that morality does not exist. Instead, what (I think) I am saying is that power and morality are two separate concepts, at once interdependent and incompatible. Power is understood only as the ability to transcend moral law (for all law is moral law), while morality exists only as the negation of power. The question of whether might makes right is a confusion of terms - if you speak of one thing, you are instantly negating the existence of the other. Even Nietzsche did not claim that 'right' and 'wrong' in this sense did not exist - what he did claim was that they were fictional constructions. And they do exist, and even matter, AS such fictional constructions. Power is not a fictional construction, but precisely for this reason, it cannot be conceptualised, much less invoked as a moral scaffold. The moment that you *speak* about power, you are outside of the practice and exercise of power.

So morality and power, at the heart of the most important conflict in ethics, are simply expressions of Apollo and Dionysus - the ultimate duality. Apollo is moral law, and Dionysus is the uncontrolled breaking thereof. Apollo is projection, concept and representation, Dionysus is pure immediacy and actualisation.

Usually the moral debate that I have been expounding on is framed in 'either/or' terms. You'll find idealists who claim that morals do exist (whether theologically based or not), and cynics who claim that morals are an invention and all that exists is human nature and instincts (or other expressions of power and determinism). Inbetween, there's a whole array of intermediates, people who believe that morals are relative or contextual, those who believe that morals exist but are too often corrupted, and others.

And yet the 'either/or' position doesn't hold. Both morals AND power exist, as the concepts which allow for each other. To remove one is to remove the other, and yet to promote one is to negate the other. If you defend power as the source of legitimation, you are already, inescapably making a moral statement; conversely if you defend morals, your arguments hold no weight face to the dynamics of power and ultimately mean nothing. And yet to promote the one is also to negate the other: if you invoke power, you are saying that morals are irrelevant and do not exist, while if you invoke morals, you are claiming there's a higher authority than power, which negates the idea of power in the first place.

This is the typical, interdependent structure of Apollo vs Dionysus dualities, and what I've just been writing about is the way that it expresses itself in the discourse of ethics. It certainly doesn't stop there.

Though I've re-iterated the importance of the A vs D tension in our ways of thinking, I'm sorry that I could not reach a more conclusive statement. I had originally set out to find a better type of closure, but there is none. There is, at best, transcendence of both the concepts of power and morality. To understand how they depend on each other and influence, determine our thought, is to go beyond both. Ethical systems which do not 'go beyond' in such a way, which do not recognise this ongoing duality and tension, are to me obsolete and of no interest, at least until I find a text that proves me wrong.

Two notes in closing. Firstly, if this is at all in question, none of what I've been writing invalidates or goes against Nietzsche's claims. This was never intended as a 'riposte to Nietzsche' or something like that, and this is because the guy's arguments were so much more than simply 'might makes right' (his antagonists usually reduce his philosophy to such a statement, which means not to read him). His ethics were actually based on the subtler, almost wholly intellectual principle of destroying Apollo and embracing Dionysus, as part of a cyclical historical process (this is the most puzzling aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy to me... I don't understand why he values one God more than the other, instead of recognising the positive and negative aspects of both). The identity that we assume by engaging with such an historical process is not that of the superman (again, ever so easily misinterpreted). Instead, the superman is the unconceivable telos at the end of the cyclical process of history; the reward of our studies in the humanities (the "above-man"); that which gives meaning to our struggle, but which we cannot conceive precisely because it is beyond our struggle (and inasmuch as it is non-descript, non-conceived, it is not an Apollonian projection). In Nietzsche's vision, we are fulfilled and find meaning in our strides towards the superman, not by actually becoming it. The superman does not really *exist*; he's not some tangible chap, or some real agent in history like Alexander or Napoleon. The superman is a myth, and if there can be such a thing, it is a myth of the future.

The second note is this: so much for my notion that "I'm not interested in the deconstructionist line today"! What I've spelled out has very much to share, and certainly owes very much (if not everything), to deconstruction. Apollo and Dionysus may never have been deconstructionist tropes, but this idea of interdependent and simultaneously incompatible concepts certainly is. I guess I'm going to have to give Derrida his dues, after all the jazz on Nietzsche. Though he certainly couldn't write half as prettily.

How to Outdrink ...OTHER POPULATIONS

I close this series with a roll-call of populations who are too easy to beat for them to deserve an entry in a tactical manual, or whom I do not know enough to discuss. Mediterranean countries in general can be trusted to yield poor drinkers, even with their own beverages. Spaniards are easy to outdrink as long as you can tolerate their scandalous cocktails (google the Calimocho and see if you're not retching... frankly, their vulgarity is second only to that of the Americans. It's hard to believe they're Mediterranean at all). Greeks have some strength with liquors, being trained with Ouzo, but little else.

Italians, I hate to say, are pussies. I had two Italian drinking fellows in Paris whom you can see in the photo above, and despite their enormous good will, neither could take a solid night of drinking without vomiting like a hurricane. Today, one of them is married and has retired from the drinking arena, while the other is still practicing how to down one litre of beer. I've seen him do it only once, and he ended up leaping towards the balcony and vomiting on the freshly washed laundry of our (English) host. The funniest thing is that he didn't even succeed in his endeavour, as he left just a finger of beer at the bottom of the pub, meaning he failed by the thinnest margin possible. I wish I could say these two guys are the exceptions, but they're actually among the better men I've known. If you drink in Italy, you're outdrinking by default.

The most powerful force that I know by reputation alone are the Eastern Europeans. Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Croatians and so forth are said to be phenomenal drinkers by everyone I've ever asked, but I've never had the chance to take them to task. I've tried Palinka, which is the typical Romanian drink, and frankly I thought it was disgusting beyond description. Apparently Romanians slaughter themselves with that by the hour. I suspect that the Eastern European style falls somewhere inbetween that of their two circumpolars, Germany and Russia, and no doubt that makes for an awe-inspiring combination in principle. But I've never seen it put in practice, and for all I know, they may have weaknesses no more difficult to exploit than their stylistic forebears.

I hear Scandinavians are very habitual drinkers, to the point that alcoholism is a real problem in their country. I can say no more of them, since I've only been to their countries by sea (and therefore by day), and there was no opportunity for duelling. Australians are supposed to be decent too. They were banned from the Oktoberfest a number of decades ago because a group of them got so drunk that they pimped a column of buses and drove them wildly around the city. Apparently they're allowed into the city again, these days, so either they've calmed down or they're better at subterfuge. It's a shame I won't be meeting them in Munich this year. Any major or minor drinking culture I have not mentioned goes beyond the stretches of my knowledge and their entry into this manual is left to volunteers.

With that said, I am done. Good luck to those willing to try the sport, and to anyone looking to engage me personally, come and get your ass grilled! As long as you're not Irish or Scottish, I have known and owned your type. Believe it.

How to Outdrink the SCOTTISH

You can't.

How to Outdrink the IRISH

I don't have the slightest fucking idea as to what the best way of going about this is, because the Irish are among the very worst beasts you can be confronted with when indulging in this type of sport. They can take beer like it's orange juice and they're fucking animals with the liquors, too. As if their physical abilities weren't terrifying enough, they are also deceptive in appearance: Irish people tend to look harmless, generally being small and/or thin, with nerdy-ish haber-dashery, stuff like glasses or even ties, and a friendly, subdued demeanour. It is all guaranteed to lead you astray. My one attempt at challenging an Irishman involved a bottle of Famous Grouse Whisky and it ended with me being carried home on his shoulders while I babbled to one of the ugliest girls I've ever known how she was 'the nucleus of the universe' or god knows what. The next day I woke up to find most of my bathroom encrusted with vomit, most notably the shower-curtains, a pong which is best left undescribed, and a sense of illness which had something terminal about it. I also found... no, I shall not say what else I was forced to endure that morning. There's some things I'm not ready to disclose to the public.

The experience has put me off challenging other Irishmen since, so this may account for my lack of preparation on the subject of how to outdrink them. I think the best thing you can do is not to bring liquor into it, and especially Whisky, since they own that shit. Guinness is probably best avoided, too. A very careful preparation is required and a full stomach, because you can be sure the conflict will last until late. Territorial considerations may be of help. I think bringing your opponent to an open party, a heavy-handed disco or a gig could come to your advantage, since they strike me as more sedentary drinkers, used to staying in pubs or house-parties during the rain. But this is conjecture, not fact. Also, I've never experimented throwing wine at them, nor have I seen how they take the weed / alcohol combo. Certainly one to try, and I'm looking forward to any results anyone has to share.

Other than that, if you get entanglend in a challenge with one of these potato-eaters, all I can do is wish you good luck.

How to Outdrink the DUTCH (Guest Entry)

I didn't want to leave out the Dutch, but regrettably I know almost nothing about them as drinkers, because any time I'm there I spend my time getting pancaked on weed like there's no heaven, and the alcohol gets kind of put aside.

So I've asked a friend of mine, an Englishman who resides amid the Oranje, to share his wisdom with us. With many thanks to Adam Walker, here's the wiki on how to outdrink the Dutch!


An explanation of the Dutch diminutive suffix –je i.e bier = beer, biertje = small beer. The dutch always drunk biertjes and this fits in with the national obsession of “gezeligheid” = good company, cosy surroundings, consuming lots of biertjes and little bits of cheese and sausage because all small things are, per definition, gezelig.

Gezeligheid (the act of being gezelig) however, is not just an atmosphere but also a set of behavioural rules, i.e. the acts of being gezelig. Of this set of rules, included is the act of consuming lots of biertjes. Importantly though, the act of consuming beer should not interfere with any of the other rules of gezeligheid. These include stimulating, vigorous, conversation on relevant, contemporary and mutually interesting subjects (1). The combined act of consuming biertjes en masse and maintaining the conversational requirements is considered to be the height of cool.

The result of this is that one cannot simply “outdrink” the dutch. One must simultaneously out-debate one's opponent. One must push them into the back waters of conversation with one’s puncturingly penetratingly insightful political, historical, social or economic points of view until the opponent is left baffled and wondering what more books he can read, where he can travel to, what newspapers he can peruse in order to compete with this new force which he is presented with; wistfully bashing off round after round horse-killingly strong arguments while sucking the foam off another biertje. One must stun your opponent into silence, a silence characterised by awe and self-doubt in which the only act is to quietly drink, until the opponent falls off his stool.

There is no way that you can get the dutch to play a drinking game or engage in any sort of boisterous activity which involves getting pissed. This goes against the rules of gezeligheid. Out drinking the dutch is a biathlon contemporary applied intelligence and drinking stamina which none should undertake lightly.