I started teaching Brecht’s Mother Courage last week. To contextualize the play for the students of my general education course, to explain the Marxist and/or anti-fascist attitudes of the play, I brought in some quotes from Brecht’s essay “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties.” This essay can be found in the back of the old Grove Press edition of Galileo. Brecht wrote it in 1934, and it was published the following year in Paris. It first appeared in English in 1948.
In the essay, Brecht outlines several difficulties for the artist in presenting the “truth”; I was using it as a way to show students a connection between the alienation effect and Brecht’s anti-fascism. I focused on the following three passages:
Fascism is a historic phase of capitalism; in this sense it is something new and at the same time old. In Fascist countries capitalism continues to exist, but only in the form of Fascism; and Fascism can be combatted as capitalism alone, as the nakedest, most shameless, most oppressive, and most treacherous form of capitalism. (137)
Democracy still serves in these countries to achieve the results for which violence is needed in others, namely, to guarantee private ownership of the means of production. (138)
In our times anyone who says population in place of people or race, and privately own land in place of soil, is by that simple act withdrawing his support from a great many lies. He is taking away from these words their rotten, mystical implications. [..] In like manner, whoever speaks of soil and describes vividly the effect of plowed fields upon nose and eyes, stressing the smell and color of earth, is supporting the rulers’ lies. For the fertility of the soil is not the question, nor men’s love for the soil, nor their industry in working it; what is of prime importance is the price of grain and price of labor.
The third passage is the one, by the way, that helped me forge a link to the alienation effect, but it’s not especially relevant to this particular blog entry, just FYI for Brecht teachers/students.
It’s the first two passages that resonate with this one from Peter Thiel at the libertarian website Cato Unbound:
I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. By tracing out the development of my thinking, I hope to frame some of the challenges faced by all classical liberals today. (emphasis added)
I’m not saying that Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and the first big investor in FaceBook, is a fascist. He’s something a little different. He’s one of the contemporary techno-futurists who understands Neuromancer as a utopia rather than a dystopia, the sort of person who looks fondly back at the Roaring Twenties as a good time, and views the bust following that boom as “creative destruction,” much as the Italian Futurists viewed war as the world’s sanitation, a clearing of the slate so that we can build better. Of course those Futurists were Fascists. So Thiel is something like a fascist. He goes on to lament “the extension of the franchise to women” and the “vast increase in welfare beneficiaries,” two things that “have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
So, Thiel is basically saying that “authentic human freedom”—as in the incompatibility of freedom and democracy—is the freedom of markets, freedom for Peter Thiel. (A vision of a world full of fully-informed rational actors: you are on FaceBook because you have chosen to accept all risks and penalties enumerated in the fine print.)
So far, and unlike libertarians like Ron Paul, he doesn’t seek to realize his heaven on earth. Rather he intends to flee from the “unthinking demos” (hear Federalist 10 rattling its chains) in cyberspace, in outerspace, at sea on floating islands (of garbage?).
I’m afraid I have to leave this entry at this point. Blogging is what happens when I should be doing other things, and one of those other things is changing a diaper now, and getting to grading this stack glaring at me from the corner of my desk.
