Thoughts on Obama's farewell talk and the construction of a common world

Obama's farewell talk

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/obama-farewell-address-president.html

This is a talk for the USA audience but it had so many things for a non USAan to think about.



As I heard it and then read and reread it, I was very much aware of the influence of the way I have understood Latour's "Modes of Existence". I thought: How taugh it is to stand between Trump and Obama. For the position that I hear Obama taking is not very soothing: there is one Rationality (perhaps tainted in each of us but then revealed in full brigtness when people come together and discuss the issues) and there are Facts provided by Science. Rationality + Facts = Practical problem solving firmly based in Reality.This is the great gift of the Elders that USAns have tapped on , in the most pure form. It is Universal and is universally vulnerable: It eather flows and dominates the whole world or it is under the future danger of a vicious attack from foreign autocrats.

I wander. Who controls Reason? Rhetoric is now the servant of Rationality (and what about "first principles"?) . What kind of [MOR] motion is assumed? (it sounds like a mouth openning to assimilate everything). I had the feeling of overreaching to secure peace beyond any negotiation that recognizes basic truths to the other participants. As if I was listening again and again "Nobody is our equal! Our understanding is the Law!" and a rhetoric of the devide between the "USA land of peace" and the "land of war and confusion" outside the US (and thus Trump is a danger that can diminish the one true light in the world)

The anthropology of the exercion of high power in the USA

I thought that Obama was talking about the exercion of high power in the USA, and that this is something about which we will never have a good anthropology. It is one thing to follow political fights but  who will leave the little anthropological ignoramus meddle in their feet when decisions with great consequences and designs that develop slowly and partly secretely are at stake? So we assume, we infer, we guess (we, often people who have a huge distance from the experienced reality of these other people who make power decisions).

Therefore Obama's talk is a talk of self-presentation of the USA politician, rather than an account of a reality that nobody , not even those strongly involved in it, can say they really understand.

I am a foreigner (a sypatheitc foreigner though, since I have studied in the USA and USAns are dear to me) and I will think like a foreigner

[REL]. [POL]

How many religions ovetones there were in this talk! I felt as if participating in the "Church of the USA middle class". Obama was about to split into two: a) Obama the 44th president of the United States (a kind of Ascension to History)  and b) Obama the citizen, one amongst many.

He spoke about presidency as a transition rite through a continual baptism into the peoples'  common sense. He raised in front of his fellows as an exemplary USAan, a model who still is in touch with the inner heart  of simple (and not so simple) folk. He spoke like the carier of a Creed that was found out by humanity (or revealed by the Creator) and distilled 240 years ago in the Convention of the Founding fathers. He has pointed to the wolves that may come and try to tear away the precious treasure and thus called for inner vigilence. He has sent the USA youth to the nations to carry the light of the Creed throughout the world.

Change

As I heard it the talk was balancing between pointing to the need for change and soulsearching about the "essense" of being a USAan. As if he was saying: "We live in times that demand change and we can realize these changes and the future will be ours (why should the future belong to the 5% of the world population though? why should it not be shared by others except if these others dance according to the dram of the 5%?). But there are challenges in front of us and it seems that we have no common purpose and no common basic sense of solidarity."

So he proposes this as the essence of the USAns: the ability to change in order to expand basic rights, to change so that more and more are happy and productive, Its is a wonderful world. People go for their dreams, working hard and they pursue happiness and all can work out well. But the pursuit of happiness changes nature according to the level of affluence. And affluence gets scalable in very problematic ways.

I had the feeling that I was listening to a person wanting to go "back to the basics", to bring forth the continuity value he cares about, for his fellow citizens, and in the way exposing the limitations in these basics.

Accepting difference

This was a talk celebrating difference. And yet I think it was a celebration of cosmetic difference. As far as I could understand there was a very clear line:
 Rationality is One and We have found it. Negotiation is meaningful within USA. Outside USA we are the judges who determine whether foreign arguments, foreign rationality can be accpeted as the One True Rationality whose only guardians are we (the Keepers of Measure). If people think like us in foreign counties, this is the proof of the universality of our Rationality. If people do not think like us in foreign countries, this is a proof that they do not think clearly, that they oppress the people who think like us in their countries (and therefore are fully human and moral winners from the beginning)  and that they are potential enemies for us. 

There is an image that comes out of the talk that I find particularly moving. It is the image of the Representatives that come together in  an assembly and have to judge based on Law, experience in life and conscience. And there comes somebody else ( an immigrant, a refugee) and appeals to them.  One has the feeling of sacred human bonds. First it is the bonds of the Representatives themselves as they mule about what is to be done. They know that they do something exremely important. They feel they may betray ( [LAW]? [REL]?). Then there is also the bond between them and the appellant. Is this not the best audience he or she may ever hope to have?

I feel that it is this practice that manages to equilibrate the moderns against the deadly influence of what Latour calls bifurcation. Because for all the talk about separate human beings pursuing their interests and their own dreams of happines, in such an Assembly borders lower, humans hybridize, thinking and feeling gets to be distributed: a Body.

Yet this is the cure, we outside the USA (or outside the strong modern countries more generally) are not allowed to partake. Our deciding bodies are pushed around, bribed, threatened, lured with personal gains. The more things get to be capital, the more our Representatives are not allowed to have spine. (of course this is always done in a moraly impecable way). We are not allowed to decide on conscience, to have blessed assemblies. We are not allowed to learn. We are not allowed to experiment in rationality (why experiment in rationality when Rationality is One and others have already found it?)

And therefore what is left for the rest of us, those outside the exceptional USA, or the exceptional country A or country B, is either to become "endlessly failing students", always immitating but never really learning, or  somehow hope to  become the next  "state" of USA importing the right mental software, or   to be constructed as "lacking" as "second hand human beings" (which we deserve morally, if our rationality does not qualify in USA standards)

A uniting call and its contradictions

Although the speach is adressed to USAns , I feel that there are themes that could be considered as calls for a global political agreement. Like a part of a negotiation that one could read between the lines.
There is the appeal to the Enlightenment ( the "essential spirit" of USA presented as "born of the enlightenment") that may be dear to the Continental Europeans. There is the appeal to hard work and inventiveness and dignity and the respect of the Elders (the Founding Fathers) that could be an appeal to the Comfucianly inspired Chinese. There is the reference to the Creator  that basically underwrites the one true Rationality, as an appeal to the religious. The exaltation of Science as the Good News that may appeal to the sceptics.
There is an appeal towards the middle class and one towards ordinary citizens. There is an appeal to all kinds of "deserving minorities"

But how can all this bill be paid? It seems that the hope is that it will be paid by Education. I am very sceptical that this can be done. Throughout the talk creativity, inventiveness, industry are the means by which humas are exaulted. But these are characteristics that order people and  it is questionable if Education can massively create the kind of New Man/Woman for the USA that Obama hopes for (the Man/Woman who is able to survive the onslaught of automation and get out a "deserving winner").

Moreover  a world where Change is the King (as presented by Obama), is a world of intense evolutionaly pressures, a world of "fight of the fittest" with the fewest bars (One has the sense that Chinese are pushed along this way and then they are presented as some kind of danger for all, having being good students). It is a  way to pass the time from birth to death, but some of us may not find it very wise or appealing. (maybe a source for a variety of Hell?). Will the majority of students be willing to follow through a suitably reformed Education and make USA children the deserving leadership of the world?

Finally such skills are horizontally distributed in different countries. If I am an immigrant, a creative and productive immigrant and see the fellow USAn's child burdened with all kinds of fanciful "problems" while I know that "in the old country" there are all these bright lads who would do infinitely productive things, if they only were given the opportunity to come to the USA, would I not feel that it is "fair" that a permutation could be done between these "ungrateful good for nothings" and the "bright lads" over there? How could that be conductive of a USA patriotism that includes the less "exceptional" person?

The message I get is that in case Education does not manage to deliver the goods that are demanded of her in the USA, then we go for a many tiered humanity, ordered on the basis of mental prowness. In a wolrd of environmental and populational preassures one wanders about the kinds of ideas we are lead towards.

A much more "conservative" call

Finally I feel like saying: Enough with this hype! About the exceptional USA, with its exceptional future and its exceptional young generation full of potential and good will and its unique position in guiding the whole world. Whether in Obamesque or in Trumpesque it is too much.

And it seems to me that Latour's call for politics in Gaia (though at this point uncertain and hazy) leaves more breathing space for the rest of us. It does not have all the solutions and it does not have this hype and its seems more fitting to the human measure. I used to find his call for "constructing a common world" a little bit peculiar, but I find it now a much better image , in the following sense: Latour says at some point in the book that we do not really know what a body is. A body is not a company. A body is not just the realization of a blueprint.

I am thinking that our bodies are repeated exercises in playing out again and again (like this music that repeates and yet it is slightly different each time). And each body ends up having deep roots, extending in space and time, and the contituent cells are not just a pile up of separate entitites. Each one has a very long history and horizontal connections and they are of different kinds, and even in the same body they compete and they cooperate. So I understand "contructing a common world" in a similar way that cells construct a common body (they construct it now and they have a very long history of gradullay bringing it into being).

Perhaps more generally we are already experiencing the construction of a common world, as this matrix in which we live and that the Theory of Evolution was a first attempt to push forward a much more detailed account.

I feel that such constructions can include me and people of my kind while the Obama construction of a common world sounds to me more like the equivalent of a developmental plan in the Amazon basin.

According to me the real challenge for this view is the political coexistence and the "construction of a common world" by great existential traditions, inspired by the history of the Modern interlude, but not under the rule of the secular religion of Enlightenment.

For example I can sympathize with Tariq Ramadan when he talks with Mehdi Hasan (http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2014/03/political-islam-failed-20143814278619177.html                 25:30  -26:55). But I can also think: is there any place where different existential traditions coexist, without at least one (even a secular religion) having the upper hand?. To return to the talk, this is the kind of gift I would like to contribute to leave to my children.