Please skip the first two paragraphs of this review if your interest is more directly the historical subject and contents of book itself which is a highly readable page turner.
Renegade Philosophy:
Thaddeus Russell does not present us with a fully coherent philosophy, theory or ideology of the renegade, there is no idea of Renegadeness in this book. There is no fully worked out position of what it means, or the conditions necessary, to be a renegade or renegadette. I believe that the struggle of the renegades is against the preexisting hegemonic ideology of the status quo. The status quo ideology is the euphemistically called ‘the system’. The ‘system’ is the process by which material relations between things and technology govern social relations between people, where social relations are worth only as much as their exchange value. The system itself creates the renegades and their struggle for autonomy and emancipation. The renegades are, at best, a loose coalition of free thinkers that dialectically collide with the ruling ideology. There is a presupposition of renegades as a cohesive social class that informs most of the pejorative critiques of renegades. They are maligned with such opprobrium as rebel, whore, gypsy, malcontent, misfit, unpatriotic, antisocial, etc. That of the renegade is a real subjective position that attempts to break free from artificial oppressive categories in search of new universality. Social relations are the basis of all social wealth and the renegade if the transhistorical figure who stands to judge and transform the extant social hegemonic ideology. Is it so difficult to identify the renegade of today? The renegade is not an arbitrary historically contingent construct but a deeper non-negotiable identity; it is the consciousness of the alienated outsider from within the ‘system’. Within a constantly changing and churning social construct, renegadeness is the only permenant condition looking for a new foundation.
Madness and Weirdness Demonstrate the New Excellence:
At least with this book, the renegades at last enter the conversation. A renegade being anybody outside the norm as defined by the extant power structure, social consensus, cultural paradigm, i.e., the ‘system’. Exclusion can no longer be a condition of possibility for the mainstream discourse. Is humanism a word of inclusion or exclusion? I do see the influence of Focullt in this book, social madness is the new growth industry in America leaving us with the choice of joining the gone mad or the go mad.
The Book Itself:
The Hidden Past of America:
From Colonists to Citizens, was it worth it?
There were two wars fought at the founding of the U.S. The one with which we all are familiar – the one for independence from Britain which is mistakenly referred to as the American Revolution when it was no such thing. This war is better described and more accurately classified with the sobriquet of The War of American Independence as Thaddeus Russell presents it in the text. The real American Revolution was really a form of counter-revolution. A revolution for uptight prudishness and authoritarian puritanism. In an odd irony, it was the sacrifice of Dionysian personal liberty, enjoyment, ‘happiness’ and a carefree lifestyle that was necessary for the Apollonian redefinition of liberty to mean political responsibility and economic obligation. Christian asceticism became a precondition for citizenship. This is how we come to repress ourselves. The anti-personal freedom revolution and the ‘good news’ of the work ethic gospel was afoot. The liberated culture of the colonies was overcome by the conformity culture of the new country. Or, from a different perspective, we can say that reckless self-indulgence gave way to some much-needed self-control as the founders taught the first generation of American citizens the habit of virtue. In any case, work was converted from a merely an instrumental means into a virtue and with it, the constant injunction to be virtuous. From here, it is a short move to the absurd idea that there is virtue in suffering. There is no higher dimension of truth that emerges from suffering.
The real American Revolution was the one in which Americans learned how to become their own oppressors and deliver themselves into the “bondage of citizenship” as Thaddeus Russell aptly puts it. That is, we learn how to become “enemies of our own freedom”. Personal liberty was traded for political responsibilities and economic obligations. Self-rule and self-support require discipline and a great deal of work to maintain as compared to the carefree, hard drinking, free loving hooligan/hooliganett and renegade/renegadett colonists who were obligated to become responsible citizens. Democracy and capitalism are in many ways the enemies of personal freedom. We become trapped into systems and institutions that become oppressive while being told that they are the institutions of our freedom. This is why our culture has become subtly repressive, our political rights offer us false freedoms with a significant accretion of obligations while our economic liberties provide us with meaningless choices from that which is all the same with the accretion of financial burden. However, it is so hard to see the repression when it is disguised as self-mastery, a dystopian world where we are told “Arbeit macht frei” (work sets you free). This is the genesis of the culture of restraint and the work ethic. Keeping people careworn and hardworking enough to distract them from true personal liberty is the key to maintaining the institutions and order demanded by democracy and capitalism. Freedom has been redefined to mean self-discipline and self-denial. Work may indeed be the only means to sustaining existence, but this does not mean that work is a virtue. This false conflation leads to the mistaken belief existence itself is a virtue when it is merely a fact.
A liberated culture that allows for enjoyment of life and the democracy/capitalism hegemony do not necessarily mix. The unfortunate admixture of puritan asceticism and republican virtue produced a tyranny of prudish pretension. From the new Enlightenment empire of reason comes the “temple of tyranny” - where the rigors of a different type of freedom, that of political choice and economic creation are honed and honored. This is a place where pleasure, freedom and the ability to enjoy pleasure without guilt is banned because freedom has been redefined to mean responsibility and obligation. This is what Thaddeus Russell, with perspicacious insight, refers to as “the repressive logic and American freedom.” Democracy and capitalism are rigorous and demanding, the choices and freedoms they offer are really pseudo-choices and false freedoms. Obligation and sacrifice are the unspoken dark side of democracy and capitalism. There is something to be said for the pre-liberal democracy and pre-capitalism joys of life without the industrial discipline compelled by these ideologies. At their core, both ideologies, democracy and capitalism, rest upon making people dependent on their own labor for their survival; to create wealth but not enjoy it. Hard times should be redefined as our current austere lives of hard pseudo-choices, unrelenting responsibilities, within a contradictory culture. This can all be summed up as puritanical ‘bourgeois oppression”. Democracy and capitalism breed a restrictive and burdensome social order antithetical to an alternative of worry-free state of human flourishing.
The Renegade Liberation of Women, maybe:
There was great trade-off; that of [freedom found in slavery] for the [slavery found in freedom], the greatest inverted perversion of freedom took place with the injunction to freed slave women to live as “free Christian woman.” The irony in this should be obvious. Certain liberties are obviously curtailed with the new status of being ‘free’. It was the quintessential renegadettes, the prostitutes, not yet introduced to the virtue of freedom, that won the sense of emancipation and independence that women enjoy today. Go figure, they had to prostitute themselves to free themselves from female servitude and make it possible for women not to be prostitutes. Such emancipation and independence could never have been won by the prudish, puritanical, proper church going Christian ladies from within the prison of a patriarchal religion. Taken for granted today, and owed to the prostitutes of old, is the liberation of the body, behavior and style as well as economic liberation and independence. Make no mistake about it, the prostitutes were women of business. They were the first to break the glass ceiling and cross the color barrier. Prostitution evolved into the sexual freedom enjoyed by both men and women today. But ironically, modern feminism has taken the opposite track and has gone back to the notion of social virtue as the best course for women’s liberation. Thanks to the enterprising business women in the world’s oldest profession as well as the modernizing/moralizing social reformers who ended legal prostitution, the women of today can now prostitute themselves in a new way, on an equal basis with the men, to a culture demanding the crass commercialization of all ideas, the crude commoditization of all values and the caustic conventionalization of all people. How much more liberation could one desire? Hmm, which liberation is worse I wonder.
But the story does of the heroine renegade does not end here. After the oldest profession was once again driven underground, and if the prudes and puritans had their way, the minimum amount of wealth needed to sustain life would be the maximum amount of wealth allowed. We were all to be kept securely within the prison of the Protestant work ethic. We can, in part at least, again thank the regrade women for doing the dance to break the chains of organized religion and clumsy tradition; who had the courage to be ‘bad girls’ and break the work-to-live and live-to-work Sisyphean cycle and show us the dangers of having fun. The consumer revolution of the twentieth-century was thus begun; away with the self-appointed guardians of public morality who tell us that an improvement in the human condition is wasteful spending.
Hail the Imported Renegades:
The Irish Renegade:
Lacking enough domestic renegades to keep, or put, the great American republic on track, there was a need for the importation of renegades from Europe. The first of which to tap dance and slang-talk their way into America were the Irish for whom we can thank for showing us the benefits of breaking down the racial barriers to social, cultural and personal relationship advancements that is, until they became fully indoctrinated and ‘Americanized’.
The Jewish Renegade:
Semitic people out of Africa twisted their way into America, really? At least this was the initial mistaken perception when the Jewish renegades first arrived in America. Meanwhile, the Jews, for what it is worth, thought that they were white Europeans. In truth, these were intellectual renegades bringing a much needed does of critical thinking to America as well as management expertise to the business, casino management, and to the skill of being a renegade. The Jews crossed color barriers and social lines to make deep and lasting contributions to American art, literature, music, social thought and of course science that are too numerous to list here. Lucky for American that rallying cry of "On To America" echoed through the Jewish community in Germany as early as the nineteenth century.
The Italian Renegade:
Out of Africa again? What could be worse than the Irish and the Jews, now come the Italians who broke down segregation barriers, like any good renegade, as they sang their way into America. They also directly violated the segregation laws while circumventing prohibition and demonstrating the strength of the market imperative when it reflects the desires of the people without regard to a moral imperative. What next, Polish immigration?
In evidence of the great American tradition of rivalry and competition, it was the depression of the 1930s that disrupted race relations by converting cooperation into competition. It was the life-and-death battle for jobs and housing brought about by the depression of the 1930s, a dreadful failure of the market order, an institutional deterministic externality, that drove the wedge between the Italian and African Americans who had heretofore worked and lived in close proximity and harmony. Add to this, the political failures of democracy that resulted in a world war along with the efforts of the Catholic Church that drove the final wedge between the Italians and the Africans. The depression, the war and the Church lent political and intellectual legitimacy to the artificial wedge driven between real people.
The Original Renegade:
Through it all, from the beginning, and with each wave of beneficial renegade immigration and generation were the original renegades out of Africa who, after being literally abducted, became the nation’s tutors as they assimilated and inculcated all would-be renegades, both foreign born and domestic. The people from Africa who taught America that what looks like madness and weirdness demonstrates the limits of heretofore accepted rationality and points the way to a new excellence in culture through diversity and variety. They energized, enriched and enabled each new cultural paradigm with which they came into contact and in so doing, created a new universality. The exaggeratedly Christian evangelical moral reform crusade and self-abnegation of Dr. King and civil rights movement notwithstanding, it was the African-American renegades that were the real pathfinders to integration.
The Renegade Government:
Which one? The New Dealers of America, the Fascists of Italy or the Nazis of Germany? Actually, all three, plus the Stalinist of Russia but then again, it does depend on what one means by renegade. Now, instead of wild freedom, hooligan behavior, hard drinking and free loving, renegade means the new dictators who were remarkably consistent with their lust after order, taste for censorship, desire of regimentation, promotion of nationalism - well-intended or not. These were anti-freedom, anti-liberty renegade governments who thirsted after crisis to justify hostility to free expression. The crisis brought on by institutional failures was addressed with the institution of more institutions prompting prudish regimentation and warm fuzzy relationships between the pre-war New Dealers of America, the Fascists of Italy and the Nazis of Germany. Mr. Roosevelt also hard a warm spot in his heart for good old Uncle Joe Stalin. Thaddeus Russell asks us to consider if WWII was not fought between ideological opponents or between ideological cousins over control.
The Greatest Generation:
Was the greatest generation so great or was it just a generation trapped? A generation trapped in the foolishness of war between states, each of whom maintained their concentration camps, their gulags, and their relocation camps. Thaddeus Russell tells us that the wartime measures of austerity and discipline spawned the greatest renegade generation, chief among them were the newest renegades, the gays and the lesbians brought together in large numbers for the first time due to the exigencies of wartime mobilization who thus achieved a new level of permanent social awareness heretofore unknown and unthinkable. This new social consciousness marched into the postwar period and, after some retrenchment, is with us today in the liberated form of gender fluidity that overcomes the imposition of incomplete binary gender classifications. The greatest generation gave us a new understanding of sexual liberation. The first gay and lesbian bars and clubs grew up near military posts. As Russell tells us, WWII was a war for freedom after all.
Ironically, with freedom came the trap of inclusion in the dominant social and moral paradigms of ‘normalcy’ and obligation. Gay and lesbian people helped American society dispense with some of its most uptight, puritanical and prudish attitudes towards sex. But with this now accomplished, the renegade liberators are settling down into same bourgeois morality that had earlier rejected them and oppressed all of us in terms of sexual practice and expression. I guess we just cannot help it, once liberated, we insist upon oppressing ourselves to gain acceptance, e.g., gay marriage, fine, but why exchange liberation from the dominant morality only to later conform to it?
Renegades Save the World:
The black-market importation of renegade American style and music undermined the strict and severe ideology of Soviet styled Socialist Realism and forced the austere overly militarized governments of the East Block to accept some level of consumerism and entertainment. Of course, the Western governments, just as anti-renegade as the Soviet Block, did not perceive the importance of renegade culture, referred to it as decadent and degenerate in the West, in shredding the Iron Curtain. Ironically, it was corruption of the socialist system through self-expression and consumption that became necessary for its survival. That is , corruption of the system became a important part of the system and functioned, for a time, as a safety valve. Ironically, the socialist systems of the East Block could not have survived for as long as they did without allowing for the existence of black markets in goods, services and entertainment represented by the underground renegades who by 1991, eventually brought down the entire rotten system of oppression just to see it replaced by a new system of oppression screaming for a new generation of renegades.
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