38 thoughts on “Shorter Fiore”

1. Is there a link to your second reply, the one you mentioned in your e-mail? I can’t find it.

2. But…this is my second reply! Weird…obviously our wires are crossed….

3. That bit on cultural materialism confused me. He makes it sound like it’s the same exact thing as Social Darwinism.

   That’s not right, is it? I never thought of it as “evolutionary” per se, just “linear” (as opposed to dialectical) materialism, but I’m no anthropologist…

4. Yeah, I think he’s a little confused. I think he’s trying to say he’s a materialist and that he holds to the Darwinian explanation of religion — as opposed to, say, the Freudian explanation.

   Though it’s not really clear that he’s thought about alternative materialist explanations for religion at all necessarily. And I doubt he sees himself as a social darwinist, right? I mean, that’s a philosophy pretty thoroughly discredited on the left (for good reason.)

   It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t care much about the ideas or issues he’s raising, as far as I can tell. He figures he’s an atheist, he’s solved the problems of the universe, why should he think about what he’s saying?

5. If you want to understand what R. Fiore means by “cultural materialism,” you should read CULTURAL MATERIALISM: THE STRUGGLE FOR A SCIENCE OF CULTURE (1979/2001) by Marvin Harris.

6. I think Fiore dragged in Darwin as an “anxiety of influence” (yes, that) reference. I’ve seen him refer to Marvin Harris in arguments before, particularly in a discussion about music he had with Robert Crumb.

   Personally, I found Fiore’s piece on the South Park controversy largely incoherent. While he’s probably the best prose stylist ever published by the Journal, he also trusts a great deal to intuition, and trusting too much to intuition leads to unfocused blather.

   As for his issues with Noah, one must remember that Noah made his bones at the Journal with an attack on Art Spiegelman. Dissing Spiegelman will forever designate one as a critical bottom-feeder in Fiore’s eyes. Just ask Harvey Pekar.

   On the bright side, Noah has now joined a community of those who revile (and are reviled by) R. Fiore. His bunkies include Harvey Pekar, Ng Suat Tong, and Kenneth Smith.

   I’d say more about Kenneth’s issues with Fiore, but if one was following the Journal during that particular imbroglio, one has already read more than enough.

7. Benjamin: the problem isn’t that I don’t know what cultural materialism is; it’s that’s my understanding of it doesn’t align with Fiore’s, because I thought it was supposed to be a corrective to social Darwinism — linear materialist but not evolutionary — whereas Fiore describes it as Darwinian.

   Harris himself, in the book you reference, talks about Marx being the “Darwin of the social sciences,” or the closest thing to it, and sets up his book as a way of reclaiming Marx from the dialectitians in favor of empirical materialism.
   His point is that although Darwin cannot fill this role for social-scientists, Marx can, but only in a non-Hegelian formation. He makes this point from the start: it’s explicitly stated in the preface, on page xviii: “Cultural Materialism is a non-Hegelian strategy whose epistemological assumptions are rooted in the philosophical traditions of David Hume and the British empiricists — assumptions that led to Darwin, Spencer, Tyler, Morgan, Frazer, Boas, and the birth of anthropology as an academic discipline.”

   I understand from that that cultural materialism and Darwin share “a common ancestor” (to use the Darwinian term), but that CM is not a Darwinian theory.

   Hence my confusion: I understood Harris to be acceptable as a materialist theory of social structures by virtue of the fact that it was not Social Darwinist, whereas Fiore implies that there’s no difference.

   I don’t think I’m misreading Harris, but maybe I am. But re-reading Cultural Materialism would probably result in the same understanding I have now. If you can make the argument why I am misreading Harris and the theory is in fact Darwinian (and not social Darwinian) — I’m all ears!

8. Robert, I am a newbie, and Google is failing me. I want the details of the Fiore/Smith throwdown. Oh yes, I really do.

9. Robert, if you wanted to write up every internecine TCJ feud ever, I’d read it. Better yet, get Shaenon Garrity to draw ’em up as comics.

10. The Smith/Fiore battle was in the pages of the journal, not online, which is why it’s not googlable, presumably.

    High points were Smith referring to Fiore as “little flower” and Fiore responding by saying that Smith sounded like he was someone who was trying to be funny, but was really just angry. And not funny.

    Caro — good lord. Have you read everything?

    Robert, thanks for the explanation re: Spiegelman. That helps explain some things.

11. LOL, Noah, no: I was just in college for twelve years. I took a class in just about everything. Including “Darwin and Marx” which is where I read this.

    I hadn’t read all that Sam Delany non-fiction until it came up here! Or Alan Moore…

12. Noah, whatever one might think of Fiore, this is not a response, it’s a trolling post. It makes you sound like JF Ronan in his prime. It’s the kind of post that makes me not want to check HU as often anymore.

13. Some folks like to troll, some folks like to scold. Makes the world go round.

14. Ooh, good job turning it around! Next you’ll be resorting to “I am rubber you are glue,” I assume.

15. Caro, I did some checking. The Smith-Fiore feud can be found in TCJ #267 and #271. It began with Smith’s review of the works of Ivan Brunetti in TCJ #264.

    Since Fiore freely admits (in #271) to not having read Smith’s original review, a lot of it is just mudslinging (though Smith does take the opportunity to explain his position in even more detail). As for the mudslinging portion, Fiore elliptically calls Smith a fascist simpleton (a bit of backtrack later on) and Smith then proceeds to label Fiore a lying fool (my own take on the matter), a purveyor of “deformed and puerile ideas” and as being unscrupulous and self-indulgent.

    Since Fiore is not particularly interested in Smith’s piece, there’s not much engagement in the realm of ideas (except on Smith’s part – his pet topics of society, liberty and philosophy in general). The one you want to read is the Pekar-Fiore feud which is actually in Fiore’s area of expertise. He’s just dabbling in Ken Smith’s playground in this one.

16. I assumed Fiore meant that Darwinism is a materialist theory. Social Darwinism is both a cultural theory and a materialist theory. Fiore buys it. Thus, he’s a cultural materialist.

    I haven’t read that Harris book, but I’m not seeing any reason Darwinism as applied to culture doesn’t fit into that approach.

    And Social Darwinism ain’t quite what it used to be. Evolutionary psychologists can lean left, for example. It’s both nature and nurture, ferchristsake. Any leftist not acknowledging that is full of shit. But, so are the rabid evolutionary psychologists, regardless of ideology.

    And, Noah, I’m with Andrei, that’s a petty response to Fiore’s thoughtful reply.

17. Suat — phenomenal; thanks so much for the refs. You’re the second person to assert that the Pekar/Fiore clash is worth paying attention to.

    Charles — If Fiore really is ok with social Darwinism then his statement makes much more sense. Maybe even his essay as well? I still think Harris’s intent is to get around the problems with Social Darwinism, though.

    My problem with Social Darwinism is twofold: 1) Linear models just don’t account for social recursiveness. They end up oversimplifying culture. Dialectical materialism is cultural and materialist too, but it does allow for recursion.

    And 2) much more importantly — Darwinian theory isn’t a metaphor. It’s an actual scientific process, with physical, material, even mathematical mechanisms. Applying it to culture is making an analogy, not applying the theory. I find it irksome that Social Darwinists try to map it onto culture as if the materiality of Darwin’s theory itself doesn’t matter. It’s a logical error: performing an idealist analogy and calling it materialist theory.

    Harris, though, doesn’t fall victim to that error, in my reading at least. I’m not keen on him because of (1) — he is much too linear for my tastes — but he’s making a very sincere try to get (2) right.

18. And, hey, as long as we’re on the subject of miscellaneous Marxisms, Happy May Day, everybody!

19. Caro, you seem to be thinking 19th Century. Pinker could be called a Social Darwinist and doesn’t believe in a linear progress to culture. That’s too Lamarckian.

    As for recursion, there’s good evidence that biology plays a strong role in language, which presumedly came through natural selection. And since language is certainly recursive, I’m not sure why Darwinism and culture are supposed to be mutually exclusive on that front.

20. Come on, Andrei. You’re well aware that I could have been a lot meaner if I wanted to. I’m trying to live and let live here.

21. Charles, what can I tell you? If I don’t make everyone disappointed in me every so often, I feel I haven’t done my job as a blogger.

    I don’t think Caro is arguing that darwinism requires social progress. She’s saying the mechanism for change itself is too linear, if I understand her aright.

    I generally agree with Caro that applying Darwin to social and cultural matters tends to end up looking fairly reductive and speculative. For one thing, the very problems of survival that are the basis of Darwinian theory are less definable when you get to a cultural level. Lungs are developed in order to breathe air. What is religion developed in order to solve? You can come up with answers, but they’re going to be a lot less no-nonsense than “breathe air” — and once you’re unmoored from the particular material biological solutions that Darwin was trying to address, you are, as Caro says, in the realm of analogy rather than anything that looks like science.

22. It’s just that seeing random mutations that happen to interact with environmental constraints (which change, too) as linear progress is a mistaken version of Darwinism. If Darwinism is appropriately applied to culture, the same randomness should apply (this was not what someone like Spencer or the eugenicists did). Thus, one need not be a hard-right fascist to buy into social Darwinism, and there are many conservatives who hate evolutionary psychology. Having said that, I don’t buy into the view any more, perhaps less so, than you or Caro. It’s just that I don’t think it fair to tar someone like E. O. Wilson with eugenics.

23. Most social darwinists in the 19th century were capitalists, not fascists, I think. The Economist is actually still really into explaining human behavior through Darwin; it seems like when I was reading it their science section was always about “hey, you can explain women’s preference for wealthy men through Darwin! How bout that? Economics rules!”

    I think it’s fair to see Darwinian evolution as linear in the sense that it’s very outcome based. It relies on random variation, certainly, but that randomness leads, through natural selection, to outcomes related to environment in a fairly straightforward way. It’s linear too in that there’s really a single mechanism, natural selection, which explains all outcomes. Hegel’s idea (which I think Caro is arguing for) of dialectics and synthesis, where culture comes out of culture and can combine in different ways over time for different reasons, seems less linear than Darwin, where the means and methods are always the same.

24. When it comes to linear historical progress, I don’t think any Hegelian has room to criticize the Darwinists.

25. One of the reasons I just said “too linear” instead of a more specific term is that there are a whole lot of ways in which I meant it: all of what Noah said above, plus — probably most importantly for your comment about mutations interacting with the environment — the fact that any evolutionary theory is concerned, overall, with changes over time, and time is linear.

    It’s not that there’s no nonlinear selection in the mathematical sense of linear — of course there is. I think it’s supposed to be the most common kind of selection, although it’s empirically fairly tricky to quantify. And it’s certainly not “linear progress,” with all the teleology that entails. It’s just that evolutionary models are highly directional in a way that structuralist models are not. They are ultimately concerned with origins and genealogies.

    But I really still think the linear issue is less important than my #2): Social Darwinism, by my measure, is always a misnomer for the analogy reason. It’s not the politics I’m objecting to; it’s the terminology. You really can’t apply Darwinian processes to society, because Darwinian processes act on genes. The gene is the unit of natural selection. Application of the concept of natural selection to anything other than a gene isn’t Darwinism; it’s an analogy. Because a scientific theory is not a philosophical model: it is a mechanism.

    Genetic selection, biological selection on the gene, is a zero sum game: Given two alleles in a Darwinian environment, one allele will best the other one. Their interaction does not transform them. You can get a synthesis of point traits within an organism, but you can’t get a synthesis of the alleles. No properly Darwinian theory can ignore this fundamental physical mechanism: it must occur in all Darwinian explanations.

    Proper Darwinism applied to culture would thus end up defining culture as an “effect” — an outcome — of genetic properties of either the individual or the population. That’s a very limited model.

    Yes, traits in a biological population become part of the environment, but the “in-scope material” is still genes. The unit of culture is not the same material unit as the unit of natural selection, and there’s really no convincing analog to Mendel for culture that does not demand significant changes to the processes of selection. Memes are just as “Idealist” as anything in Hegel. They’re not physical units that can be analyzed by crystallographers. There is no reason to even hypothesize that they would follow strictly Darwinian processes and the reality is that they don’t, because they aren’t governed by Mendelian laws.

    So this also is where the linearity problem again becomes important to me. Unlike biological evolution, culture does not move directionally over time. Culture aggregates. Culture is not a zero sum game. You do get synthesis; you get back and forth. Time is not a mandatory variable. Cultural origin stories are myths, not empirical observations. The physical past is residual in a way that can be studied using scientific mechanisms. But the cultural past is imminent.

    The “cultural environment” does not only operate in biological time. Nature and nurture are both real, but only nature follows Darwinian processes. And only nurture has collective, cultural memory.

    So ANY and ALL social applications of Darwin will be an analogy. (Some evolutionary psychology is not subject to this critique insofar as psychology these days equals “brain biology,” which is pretty far.)

    Now, I don’t mean to say that no interesting insights can be gained by making the application, or even the analogy. Analogies are very heuristic. But in general, what is missed in social darwinist models is that once you make that analogy, without a material mechanism, they are equally heuristic to any other model for understanding culture. Social Darwinism isn’t any more scientific than Marx, and it’s less rigorous. So throwing out Hegel and Marx because they’re not “empirical” is a logical error, a failure to recognize the difference between science and philosophy.

26. I should say that evolutionary models are EITHER concerned with origins OR genealogies: by which I mean they’re either paleontological or genetic. And paleontology, insofar as it’s evolutionary, must be consistent with genetics…

27. I’m not a Hegelian myself; I actually tend to think that historical processes are best analyzed individually through looking at particulars, rather than through philosophical totalizing theories — or maybe “in addition to” theories would be a better way to put it. I think you have to be very leery about saying “culture works like this” or “religion works like this” without talking about a particular culture and a particular time.

    But…what are your problems with cultural darwinism Charles? Are they along the lines of Caro’s, or is there something else?

28. Noah — I don’t think what you’re saying is at odds with a Hegelian model: one of the reasons I so strongly prefer the dialectical model to the empirical one is that dialectical processes are not self-similar: saying history and culture overall are dialectical does not require every single moment of history or every single bit of culture to be dialectical. You can choose whether to pay attention to dialectical elements at any given moment or not without losing any rigor.

29. I also do, to Charles’ last point, prefer the term post-Hegelian to Hegelian, largely for the reason he gives. I could make a similar distinction between Darwinian and post-Darwinian too, but there just doesn’t seem to be as much there, since current biological Darwinism is pretty fully consistent with Darwin’s original observations and hypothesis.

    Also, oy, I misspelled immanent. Sorry ’bout that.

30. Caro, could you explain how it is that the dialectic can be used for some phenomena but not others without using rigor? I have no idea how that works….

31. Let me put it back to you as a question: what is philosophically in opposition to the dialectic, the approach to understanding a thing that would not be dialectical?

    Whatever you answer, my answer is then going to be: but the very kernel of the dialectic is the unity of opposites, the idea that the thing and its opposite are not discrete but elements of a whole. Each element can obey its own internal logic at the same time as it is subject to the logic of the dialectic. So [insert your non-dialectical method here] is merely one element of a larger dialectic, a larger dialectic which may or may not be interesting or helpful to pay attention to given the questions you want to answer.

    In other words: an empirical process can be one element of a dialectical process, but the dialectic is never an element of an empirical process. You can’t “observe” logic; it is not sense experience.

    So all I mean by rigor is that you don’t have to say, as a person committed to the dialectic, anything nonsensical like “gravity works by the dialectic.” But people who say they’re committed to empiricism generally will say that culture, language, etc. work via natural selection (or follow scientific laws, etc etc.)

32. Huh. Well, that is certainly an extremely irritating argumentative tactic, if nothing else — right up there with Freud’s “if you deny this it proves it is true.”

    Couldn’t you deny that a thing and its opposite are elements of a whole? Why couldn’t a thing and its opposite just be nonsense, or a pratfall, or irreconcilable? Or is the argument that you can think of anything and its opposite as a greater whole, therefore the greater whole exists? (Sort of an ontological argument for the existence of the dialectic…)

33. It’s not meant to be an argumentative tactic; just a Socratic way of illustrating how the definition of a dialectic allows you to claim the dialectic as a master narrative and still think non-dialectically without being inconsistent.

    Your latter point is mostly right, but it’s definitional so I don’t know that it needs to be argued…Heraclitus (of “unity of opposites” fame) is the “father” of the Hegelian dialectic, according to Hegel. Google “Hegel and Heraclitus” and you’ll see what I mean.

    You can definitely deny that a thing and its opposite are elements of a whole…but that’s not dialectical logic. I can counter that the dialectic can subsume that logic (pretty easily, since the denial is negative)…but that’s what I meant originally by not always needing to be dialectical…sometimes countering an opposition with the dialectic is useful for breaking out of a false binary. Other times it just changes the terms of the conversation and recasts the question, which if you actually want the answer to the first question can be pointless.

    But this dialectic recasting is the intellectual move that generates all those complex counterintuitive structures in everthing from Heidegger to Derrida to Zizek, and it’s the terrain that Fiore’s much-admired Harris loses when he jettisons Hegel for a “fully materialist” Marx…

34. Well, if we are dealing with analogy, it seems to me that Lamarckism is more applicable to culture…

    But relly, it’s a bad habit to try to map hard science onto soft.

    Have the echoes of the Sokal-Briquemont hoax already died down?

35. I guess the dialectic might be useful in this discussion in that Fiore is creating a binary between his stance (brave, practical atheism) and religion (which serves some purpose that its adherents know not what.) You could say (as I sort of do), well, cultural materialism must serve some purpose to, surely it and religion have more in common than not in terms of fulfilling psychological needs (this is painfully apparent in Fiore’s post), creating in-groups (ditto), explaining material phenomena in terms of some sort of over-arching theory, etc. etc.

    On the other hand…for me, I think the differences between theism and atheism don’t easily resolve into a unity in any of those ways; I’d argue that they lead to different places, and that those differences matter more than dialectical similarities. I just read a C. S. Lewis book “the Great Divorce” that maybe gets at this, where he says in the introduction:

    “Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell…in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable “either-or”; that granted skill and pateince and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error.”

    For Lewis, the final truth (and there is a final truth for him) is a binary, not a dialectic resolution of a binary. I guess you could resolve that statement into a dialectic too — but for Lewis, that would be explicitly an error (or even a sin.) He’s arguing (perhaps in part actually with Hegel in mind) that to abandon binary for unity is unChristian, and that therefore there isn’t a unity that can resolve that binary and and still be Christian (in the way a dialectic, I think, is supposed to unify opposites by retaining their logical structures, right?)

    Of course, this is strictly a Christian argument; I don’t think it would apply at all to Eastern religions….

36. I’m in agreement mostly with your first paragraph’s, but I’m suspicious that it’s not too many binaries that’s Fiore’s problem but rather too much direct causality. I don’t think he’s even aware of the binaries you pick up on (although they’re implicit, sure) because he’s only thinking about cause and effect.

    It seems to me the most telling sentence in the second piece is this: “The reasonableness of the West is demonstrated by its relative freedom from religious warfare. It is a case where a problem that bedeviled mankind for centuries was solved by human agency.”

    This idea that social problems are ever “solved” is, at the risk of melodrama, dangerous. They go dormant, conditions obtain at a given period of time when the are less of a problem, but that doesn’t mean they are solved, like some utopian science fiction novel.

    This is precisely where Fiore’s “cultural materialism” is insufficient: you might be able to explain the past in cultural materialist terms, but you will not be able to imagine how the past might “return” to inform the future, because by denying the dialectic you leave yourself no mechanism for examining how that past is immanent in the present.

    Maybe the errors of fact arise from this too: how would the families of the victims of Srebrenica feel about the notion that the West has solved the problem of religious violence, or even that Europe and “the Muslim world” have diverged in the first place? (His use of the word “Europe” to mean “Western Europe” is really irritating.) Or the European religious philosophers of the 17th century feel about secular pluralism as the cause for the advancements of Western civilization, since it ignores the religious pluralism on which secular pluralism is based? (I want to include the statement “Radical…Islam is not a remedy” here but I can’t figure out what he’s saying it’s not a remedy for…)

    Fiore thinks in terms of cause and effect rather than in terms of “conditions of possibility” and I think that’s why Fiore’s essay feels so wrong to us: he treats history as something completed, a riddle to be explained, rather than as a powerful immanent presence that we have to engage with. His inability to perceive religion as anything other than an adaptation is probably why he can’t perceive History in this way: immanence was originally a religious concept, and if you take a strict materialist approach to religion it’s hard to exhibit the forms of mind necessary for imagining things that are temporally infinite. Fiore, imagining history as as series of finite cause and effects rather than an ongoing process that he is part of, sets himself outside history. I guess that’s the binary that I see informing this piece the most.

37. Yeah, I agree with all of that….

38. “I just read a C. S. Lewis book “the Great Divorce” ”

    That’s great, I love that book.

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