Posted By BillHeise on October 12, 2009

Michael Moore has a new film. I love Michael, particularly his early films and his hilarious television show TV Nation. Watch this clip and you’ll see what I saw in the 1990s. He’s not a guy who was against George Bush and for the good old days of Bill Clinton.

I’m not saying that he doesn’t have good ideas in this film. He does, and Roger Ebert explains some of his best ideas here. But he has gone over the deep end with this one. He’s calling on the American people to call their love affair with capitalism off. Apparently, he thinks it is just another ideology, as opposed to what most Americans think: a system grounded in the reality of everyday life. There’s only so much pie to go around, and I need to get mine before you take yours. This makes capitalism a system, and not an ideal system, but the best system we have yet found to deal with the realities of the world.

Hegel

The problem with Michael Moore is that he is working in a system that is dominated by the philosophical principles of Hegel. You know, it was Hegel’s idea that people have one imperfect idea (thesis) and then another culture or generation has been corresponding ideal which fixes the weaknesses of the first idea (antithesis). This system is imperfect, as well, but out of the two springs a more perfect synthetic ideal (synthesis).

By stepping back, out of the system, he becomes like the philosopher Hegel, a man who has more firm beliefs than the individual who hungers after petty bourgeois (read material) things. The only problem with this system is that even if you turn it over, as Marx did, you still get a system in which you become better than someone else simply because you refuse to believe in what they do.

This idea has a long history in Western thought. For instance, it operates when imperialist Westerners reach the shores of them teach their “superior” cultural values (weapons use, Christianity) which quickly replace their more “primitive” ideas.

This is, in my opinion, a ridiculous position to hold. Not because I’m a relativist but because for all I know Western values are better than primitive values. After all, how many Westerners to address back into the more primitive state. ( yes, there are people that do this, but not a lot. And there never will be a lot.) It comes down to making firm judgments in a relativistic environment. On what basis can we make such judgments? In the modern world the answer has frequently been none at all. But with no firm basis on which to hang our judgments, why shouldn’t we become predators on our weaker neighbors? Hanging on to the legacy of Hegel allows us a certain moral freedom in making judgments while also allowing a great deal of restraint.

But who knows that the thesis idea is not morally correct and that its antithesis is not morally evil? This was, in my opinion, as well as the opinion of 30 million dead in Russia and 60 million dead in China, when the world overthrew the old order in the name of Marxist revolution for more a more rationally ordered and stable bureaucratic system of communism. It was supposed to redistribute wealth equally. It actually simply redistributed wealth [“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”] and simply killed those who dared to disagree. The death toll, which was high under the old regime, were launched into the stratosphere under the new communist dictatorships. By what measure was this system any better?

The disconnect between idea and the reality here needs to be addressed, but Moore is not interested in that. He is interested in being the antithesis to the flawed idea (thesis) of capitalism. And it is flawed, deeply so. The points at which I agree with Moore’s portrait of America have to do with the inequity of the capitalist system. But agreeing in principle and acting in reality are two wholly different things.

Kant’s World

Such positions can only be held if they are metaphysically true, and yet, since the beginning of the modern world, people had a reaction towards metaphysical positions like the one that Michael Moore is holding. The moderns tend to reject metaphysics outside of ourselves, instead following Kant inward for metaphysical presence. Kant made it possible for 200 years to believe that we had solved problems that had eluded people for centuries. (It’s all inside me!)

But in the more recent modern day, what some would call the postmodern day, people started to question their beliefs than anything in the humanly-created world (as opposed to the natural world) could be tied back to nature. And, having clipped the string that ties the minds to nature, the human world has been liberated from any obligation to tie itself back to the natural. “By this action we are free,” says the existentialist philosopher. “Existence precedes essence, and this means that we create our world rather than tying it back to any natural order.”

This is the system that guides our life in America today. It is not a natural system. It is not a system that will endure forever. And this means that the system we know today will not be around tomorrow.

But what should we do? For the idealists left among us—and I would say that that’s most of us whether rich or poor, left or right—the only thing we can do is to try to better our future.

The problem with this is that through history we’ve seen people who get carried away with their ideals, rather than looking at the world as it is. Only if you think that the ideal that you’re carrying around in your head is natural should you be attempting to build it in the natural world. And this is the crux of the modern position. If the truth of your ideal grounded in nature, then you should follow it. But if it is a grounded in our arbitrary human minds, then we need to look to our minds for some ground of thought. otherwise the same principles that overtook the communist world in the Cold War will happen to our systems as well. They will collapse under the weight of their own assumptions. We can’t really have it both ways.

The Not-Even-Human Other

This causes a shift in idealism itself away from the absolute nature of truth, to a position where we do not really think that there is an absolute nature of truth. So the best we can do is to set up straw men as the antithetical other.

Michael Moore, and the idealistic and recent Nobel Peace Prize winner President Obama can only hold on to these ideals as long as there is a challenge to them. In the modern/postmodern day, this position is held by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the columnists like Ann Coulter. The Obama administration will not even grant an interview to Fox News, and they have heaped laughter and contempt on Rush Limbaugh. And they have reciprocated in kind.

In the end, both positions need an enemy. In other words, these idealist do not hold an idealistic position, out of time in the middle world between heaven and earth, at all. Liberal idealists like Barack Obama want to correct the terrors of the past based on their idealistic sense to build a better future. And they are right to do so. Conservative Rush Limbaugh wants to ground changing law in the unchanging Constitution of the past. He feels that the only obstacle was perfect vision of America is the elimination of  “Liberals.” But both of them are operating under the same Hegelian framework. Each believe that the other is wrong with all their heart and that they themselves are, if not right, subject to a higher morale that eludes their opponent.

After the 60s

The model of comity which was operational with only three television networks in the 1960s has collapsed. No one thought before the 1990s that there was much wrong with the news departments of ABC, NBC, and CBS. But in the wake of choice, the old models have broken down. Now people who want to focus on Home and Garden stuff can turn on the Home and Garden channel. The same thing is true for people who want to watch shows that appeal to women. This was the shift in marketing away from mass marketing to niche marketing. It’s a fact of life whether you like it or not.

This shift happened at roughly the same time the Berlin wall fell down and communism failed. Yet, the deep habits that we have built over two centuries of thinking about the world in Hegelian terms has meant that we didn’t allow us to give our minds over  to the new order of the world. The world changes, but we humans remain the same.

But what happens if we get rid of the Hegelian framework altogether? One would hope that people would have something else to fill up their minds with. The reality of the mind, however, is that it is slower the world than the natural world itself. We are followers of the world, not creators. Even communist governments are grasping the principles of America, as our leader is reaching out (and I would say in a philosophical sense back) to those countries who were initially unwilling to go the distance with us down the road of freedom. The cost simply became too high for them to continue to remain backward in a forward moving world.

Back to Michael Moore

So of course I agree that some level of equity should be restored the capitalist system under which the United States of America operates, but I think we should rethink the existential proposition that there are only two sides to an argument and that we (whoever we are) know the truth while they (whoever they are) are ignorant pigs you don’t even deserve the name human being because they do not agree with us in our ideals.

People like Rush are not the answer. He is simply the opposite side of the same coin. But it’s becoming clear to me that Obama, like Michael Moore, is stuck in the past with a failing notion that if only they would give in that we would be able to finally exert the power that is rightfully ours and rectify the problems the world.

It turns out the world doesn’t work that way. Rather than going back to our faulty ideals, perhaps we should abandon them and start from scratch with the notion that capitalism may be unjust (it certainly is) in trying to fix it the best way we can without abandoning it By giving it up unilaterally without the collaboration of every nation on earth to follow in our suit, we would just be giving away what is left of our already dying legacy. For it is certain that the advent of communism was born with words that declared the end of the inequality; but the ideal and the reality did not coincide. Just because Michael Moore can imagine a world without capitalism doesn’t mean it is desirable or even possible.

If you’re one of those people believe that the only obstacle in the way of your ideals is one of “them,” then I would advise you to look to yourself before getting rid of others and ask yourself whether it is not your own ideals that are out of whack with the larger world around you.

Categories: Movies, Philosophy
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