Identities, Histories, Immortal Beings and Corporate Individuals

            The struggle of the last 500 years has been, in part, the struggle over the nature of identity; what is an individual or a person and who has rights and who does not hasve rights and why?  Is the King, state or corporation an individual or a person? Are Indians, Africans or Chinese human beings with rights, or are they beasts of burden that Euro-Americans can exploit? Are people commodities or merely numbers a system of statistical exchange? Are Kings better than 'commoners'? Are caste systems 'objective'? Does money define who is a real person and who is not, or who has prerogatives and who does not? What is the role of education, religions or beleif systems in forming persons? Who has the right to vote? Who has rights and who is denied them? Why?

            The role of transcendent individuals implied in these questions continues to be paramount.  It is amazing that transcendent individuals continue to be considered anything other than fictional entities. But since they are, I must consider this question here. As we shall see, when Robert  Oppenheimer saw the first atomic explosion he thought he had become like a Hindu god. Himmler thought, when watching Jewish women die in the gas chambers, that he served a 'higher power' and a greater self, which he identified with Hitler and the Ayran nation. Locke's notion of property likewise was a justification for the inequity of the 'freeman' verses the slave, and helped create the atrocities of the slave trade. Free men were all of a largely homogenous class of superior people. Oppenheimer, Himmler and Locke all had a notion of a supreme self, or of an ascendant individualism that they served or identified with. All of these concerns raise the question of the nature of the individual and what defines him or her or it.  The history of the idea of the individual is itself a complex matter that concerns the creation of regimes of knowledge/power. Who is or is not considered a "person", has historical results as to who will have power and who will be denied it, who will be considered part of history and who will be outside of history.

            For instance, there are the Three "Persons" of the Trinity, which represent the standard of legitimate personhood in the Middle Ages.  The medieval conception was largely a Platonist construction which defined personhood in relation to an abstract, otherworldly ideal- unreachable, pure, a mystery beyond ordinary comprehension. One became a person by adhering to Christian dogma, serving the Church or following the King, whose personhood was defined by divine right. Monks denied their actual, physical person to take on the 'spiritual' personhood of Christ. Those who followed the King were persons with an identity only to the degree of their wealth and submission to princely authority.  Everyone else, more than 90% of the population, was a serf, slave  commoner or pariah. They were more or less expendable, chattel, mere servants of powers and the system of knowledge that justified them. The Medieval concept of personhood thus helped create enormous inequity, injustice and suffering.

            The "person" of Christ was the ideal of the Middle ages, to which ordinary people had to submit, through the church or the state. The Lockean ideal of the person, in contrast, only concerns those with wealth and land, neither slaves, Indians, women or servants were persons. Nevertheless, 'persons' are still defined by abstract sytems of categories, far above ordinary people. The Lockean ideal of personhood, like the medieval conception also created enormous inequity, and contributed significantly to the atrocities of the slave trade and the invasion of Native lands.

             More recently the Supreme Court decision of 1888 defined personhood in unique terms, the consequences of which are still with us today. The Court stated that: 

a private corporation is included under the designation "person" in the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment...the great object of the corporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men". [1] 

 The 14th Amendment was intended to give equal rights to African Americans, but was used instead to give corporations  superior rights for themselves at the expense of ordinary people, especially African Americans. Howard Zinn writes that "of the 14th Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910 nineteen dealt with the Negro, 288 dealt with corporations".[2]  A law that was intended to give rights to minority persons was used to deny these rights and give increased power to corporations, which are not persons at all. The Supreme Court stated that "the great object of the corporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men".  Thus the Supreme Court created, in the cases that spurred on these words, the idea that corporations are Supreme Individuals.  Corporations are thus given a superior identity, over and above ordinary men and women. This is of course a convenient fiction, not too different that the notions of the 'person of Christ' or the divine right of Kings. Indeed, the notion of corporate personhood is a development out of mythological figures like Christ, as well as out of concepts of 'divine right', as the latter developed into abstract conceptions of property, quantity and ownership. These concepts created an hierarchical system of determining superior rights for some individuals, at the expense of other, lesser, individuals.

             This legal fiction that the corporation is a person, is equivalent to the Marxist concept of the state as the Supreme Individual[3] . Both conceptions dictate a system of belief about what constitutes the self, or the individual, and both base this conception on the notion of property, which results in a theory of history as a progressive realization of power and 'truth', realized through 'history', technology and material development .  Both capitalism and Marxism are systems of class domination, though they oppose eachother on the question of which class, the rich or the workers, will dominate. This similarity in the two systems of knowledge/power results from the fact that Marx defined his ideology almost entirely in opposition to capitalism, and thus reorganizes the  concern with property  and the economic priorities of capitalism into a different political and epistemological form. Marxism merely turns capitalism inside out, without questioning the dangerous system of transcendental abstractions that both systems endorse.  This seems to be often overlooked by Marxists, as well as capitalists. I note this because while I respect Marx's creative brilliance and his desire for social justice, I cannot deny the atrocious consequences of some of his ideas; consequences which in part result from his emphasis on the collective supremacy of the state as the all powerful actor or "person" in the economy.

            The legal fiction of the corporation as possessing personhood virtually makes of the corporation an "immortal person" as some have said.[4]  I do not bring this concept of the corporation as an 'immortal person' into this discussion arbitrarily. This legal fiction, like that of the Marxist notion of the Supreme Individual,  is akin to the religious institutions of old and serves the same purpose:  it has the result of reducing actual individuals to secondary status, and elevating a collective institution into a position of arbitrary power which can then sanction benefits, punishments and rights unequally. This is evident, for instance in the Taoist-Confucian concept of the Perfect Man, or the Deified Man of Christianity and Islam, or the Avatara of Hinduism. The Emperor in China was supposed to represent the Tao, the power of the universe, the middle kingdom that unites heaven and earth, and was considered the symbol of reality as well as the foundation of all social relationships. This philosophy, in its many variations, controlled China for over two thousand years. In all these cases, from the concept of the corporate person, to the Marxist state, to the Islamic god concept, to the idea of Christ or the divine Confucion Emperor, an ideal of the state and the identity of the self is being created to justify inequities and differences.

            The concern with finality and higher and lower degrees of realization of perfection generates hierarchies of knowledge and influence and dictates standards of "purity" and criteria whereby the impure can be sanctioned or punished. The Hindu Caste system, the Chinese bureaucracy and its ties with monastic and literary institutions: the Catholic hierarchy and its ties with princes and Kings all follow upon the ideal of the Perfect, Deified Man.  Those who fall short of the perfections of power and knowledge are devalued, lesser beings; they are "sinners"; those lost on the wheel of Birth and Death; those thought to be lower on the karmic scale; those who have "forgotten" god or those failed to obey the correct doctrines, make the rquisite mopney or failed to go the right university or joined the right corporation. In our society those on the lower scale are the poor, those who do not serve corporations, institutions, science and technology.

             The theories and practices of establishing standardized and idealized identities, or ruling concepts of self, in Islam, China, India or Christian Europe thus follows a pattern. The concept of the corporation-as-individual follows the same pattern of exalting a collective ideal of knowledge/power above ordinary mortals. Ordinary mortals, whatever their conditions, alone are persons in any meaningful sense. With the corporation and its conception of itself as a 'person', ordinary individuals are not devalued so much by religious terminologies as by economic and moral ones. Sinners become "failures".  The sin of forgetting god becomes the sin of failing to work oneself up the ladder of success, influence and knowledge. Poverty itself becomes a form of 'sin'. The CEO becomes a superior being, a success, the equivalent of a saint or Lord in the medieval hierarchy. A Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft makes 13 billion dollars and is canonized by Time magazine. Little is said of those who go hungry because of his greed.

            The concept of the corporate 'individual' has it historical origin in the idea of the Church as the body of Christ; a collective fiction, which represents a power-interest reified as a symbolic person. The symbol then comes to represent an institutional power. This is a mode of social control and organization and constitutes a virtual mythology which justifies a regime of knowledge and power. Since no single individual can withstand  an individual who is a "collective and changing body of men", much less an "immortal person", ordinary individuals are necessarily demeaned and demoted by comparison. Few can withstand the power of IBM, General Dynamics, General Electric or other corporations.

             The fact that the mythology of the 'corporate individual' has arisen out of England, and primarily in America, since 1865 indicates a number of troubling realities. First it shows how fragile and easily subverted democracy is. The United States, which claims to be democratic, in fact is largely controlled by hierarchical corporations, who largely control and direct Congress and the Presidency, through their wealth, their ability to create systems of lobbies and patronage, their control of the media and of political campaigns. [5]  The disparity between official rhetoric about democracy  and the fact that democracy has been railroaded by corporate interests results in the necessity of continual dissembling, propaganda, or what Chomsky calls the "Manufacture of Consent". The rich minority must convince the duped majority that they have a democracy, when in fact, they don't. Actual individuals, ordinary people, suffer from these inequalities, and are deprived of rights to varying degrees, depending on their status in the hierarchy of corporate selves. The lowest order in America is the 'homeless', closely followed by 'single mothers', 'people from the third world' or people from 'developing', that is exploited, nations, all of which are defined, falsely, as failures who have not met the standards of the propertied patriarchy. These are more or less equivalent to the lower castes of the Hindu paradigm, except that the mechanism that rules inequality in America is only partly heriditary. The US has largely replaced caste and class determinations by blood with determination by money. These social inequalities, often resulting in exclusion, starvation, higher disease rates, infant mortality or atrocity accompany  the inequality of rights and the stratification of society into those who accept the 'higher truths' that define the fiction of corporate personhood, and those who do not.

             The impulse to immortality, as Lifton has observed, is often, if not always, a bid for power. The drive for immortality, like the "Midas touch" of mythic lore, is the drive to be the exception, unlike other humans, and being exceptional to have special rights, prerogatives and privileges not accorded to lesser humans. The lust for immortality like the lust for gold, and the two are related, create divisions, inequalities, suffering and death for those not chosen, not elect, not wealthy. Marx's notion that the "ideas of the ruling class in every epoch are the ruling ideas" [6] seems accurate, but this must also be true of Marxist ideas.  The drive to be an 'immortal person' is not restricted merely to the capitalist or religious will to power. Marx fell under the same spell and it is this that gives his ideology a religious flavor and Marxists their proselytizing fervor.            Nevertheless Marx may well be right that  "It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness", at least in some cases.[7] Yet it cannot be denied that ideas have consequences that considerably alter human and natural history and life. The question is: how to avoid totalistic systems of knowledge and power, and how should one understand life and consciousness such that basic natural and human rights for ordinary persons are not infringed. Neither Marx nor the capitalists answer this, nor even discuss it in any serious way. Nor do I have anything but inquiries, without certain answers. But the issue must be considered. It all depends on how life is assessed or measured by thought, or by how truth or belief determine or resist power and culture. History, and thus human health or suffering, issues from all these conflicts and resolutions.

            In both Marxist and capitalist histories, history itself becomes an enabling discipline that explicates the goals of liberty and salvation, while at the same time it teaches those who fall short of the goals of history that they are failures and unwanted members in the fraternity of those who are successful, who have climbed the hierarchy of progress, identity and improvement. History becomes merely the ideological mirror that reflects, uncritically, the norms and standards of the larger society, however chaotic they may be, but does little or nothing about the deeper causes of suffering.  The supposed 'neutrality' and 'balanced views' of many historians is merely a cloak for indifference to the suffering of people that surround them in the present.  Since even history can be subverted to serve regimes of knowledge/power, one must look beyond histories to the plight of those that suffer and judge history from their point of view.

            'Inclusive' histories tend, even when they do not intend to, to go the way of a recent General Motors sponsored history of the American West, which stated in its program that individual lives of different minority groups in America were like "trails" and the "individual trails they followed eventually merged into the single path of Manifest Destiny". As if all 'trails' lead to GM and the World Bank.  The notion of inclusive histories or multicultural-identity history tends to include everyone as contributing members of one great historical purpose: Chinese, African Americans, Italians, Native Americans, Mexicans, Germans, Mormons, Irish, English, Argentineans and Haitians all working toward the one great, international corporation of democracy, Free Trade and unvversal science.  But this is a mistake: history should not have transcendental incorporation as its goal, but the protection of individuals of whatever nationality, race,  or economic status against corporate entities, states, religions, sciences, elites and classes.

            The multicultural view of history, in most of its forms, does not quite leave the older paradigms of Christian, Hegelian or corporate transcendentalism and teleological purpose. Identity history or the history of discrete groups, is still basically a corporate model of history, since it advocates human rights only in terms of a collective group and not in terms of each and every individual.  While multicultural histories are vastly preferable to the elite histories that reigned before the 1950's and still largely reign today,  there remain problems with this approach. The function of history, in multicultural and minority studies is to draw up people by the bootstraps,  and teach them how to perfect themselves and achieve personal salvation through knowledge and intellectual improvement.  But a view of history that sees individuals as members of a corporate group, is still laboring under illusions that arise from the corruption of present democracies, with their tendencies to marginalize individuals in favor of corporate entities, Political Action Committees (PACs) and the like. History in this sense becomes a veil or a fire through which one must pass on the way to a purified vision of human progress and the attainment of co-equal superiority. Superiority is still defined by corporate elites, to which minority groups must aspire and assimilate to be 'successful'.

             But the problem with this is that such a view of history is displacing the real problems of the present onto an idealized goal of future attainment.   The present world is thereby devalued further and the problems in the present world exacerbated by the unattainable perfection of the future. Those in the present who are considered inferior, like the poor, the homeless, African Americans, Third World peoples, Native Americans, the poor, dissidents, homosexuals and others, who do not conform, have to be sacrificed for the larger cause and the future goal. Or, if they do achieve parity and status with the corporate elites that marginalize them, they have thereby contributed to the system of power and inequality that they originally were protesting. Inclusive or Identity histories merely end in assimilating to and perpetuating the same system of oppression that caused the protest and motivated the desire for inclusion.

             Identity histories of many diverse kinds seek to remove the supposed stigma of the victim.  But victimization cannot be escaped by a psychological maneuver. The dead remain and the violence of their deaths remains and those who caused the deaths need to be questioned. By removing the victims and asserting that the dispossessed and marginalized are "agents in their own history", the ethical vacuum of the powerful remains unquestioned.  Certainly they are agents of their own history, but  only to the degree that the 'white' history of the conquerors is seriously brought into question. The  History of the 'Western World' and of the Euro-Americans should be more widely questioned. Other cultures must likewise be questioned as to their power, their abuses and the knowledge that justified their injustices. By advocating the causes of the victims of history, or by trying to prove the strength of their resistance to oppression, their autonomy and equality with their oppressors, blame is removed from the victimizers, who then do not have to face their complicity in oppression and murder. The Native Americans did not have a "new World" as a recent historian claims, and to pretend that they did, or that the slaves and the Plantation masters were somehow equal, is a grotesque falsification. One cannot pretend that slaves were equal to their Masters, or that Native Americans somehow had their own "New World" to enjoy as a result of the Invasion of America. Recent social histories have tried to advocate in this way, and the procedure is false and misguided.

            The creation of a global identity is meaningless unless there is an attempt to make human rights its basis. Multiculturalism, for the same reason, is meaningless unless it serves human rights. There have been attempts to postulate a "transcendent unity of the religions", which merely is a form of  globally intellectual colonialism that co-opts ideologies and histories into a universalistic will to millennial power.[8]  But there is also a parallel attempt to create a Transnational consciousness, via the business and transnational network or the ideology of New Age aspiration to the "one world".  Transnationalism, like the idea of a transcendent religion, or a universal science, are basically religious structures, or 'neutral' fictions and myths, which serve a system of knowledge/power. The only response to these new visions of global Manifest destiny, in my opinion, is a rigorous concern with protection of human rights everywhere.  Human rights appear in opposition to systems of knowledge/power. Human rights offers hope against the globalization of power and knowledge.

              The myth of 'globalization' or what is euphemistically called the 'global village', is a new form of the doctrines of Western superiority and Manifest Destiny. It  is a neocolonial form of imperialism that has both a  cultural and a political-economic component. Multicultural or Identity histories are justified by basic doctrines of human rights, such as are enunciated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Amnesty International. But the deeper question is not about the conflict between the Western attempt to create a global mono-culture and the multicultures that struggle to survive under the onslaught of the corporate mono-culture.  Rather,  there is an attempt to create a version of multiculturalism that subsumes minorities and cultures under the increasingly global ambitions of a transnational  corporate mentality. In this view, cultures are merely spokes in a wheel that serve the central force and direction of corporate power and transnational science. This form of multiculturalism, which is quite subtle and pervasive,  is akin to the transcendentalist histories of the 19th century, but much more sophisticated and seemingly inclusive. It is a subtle mixture of Marxism, Free Market capitalism, ecological Darwinism and Manifest Destiny.

            The simple, rather than the complex, reason that the American, French, Russian and Chinese revolutions failed, producing enormous atrocities, is that each of these cases,  the Revolution ceased to serve the human rights of individual human beings, and came to serve abstract conceptions of national or corporate identities instead. Robespierre and Napoleon subverted the French Revolution by identifying themselves as transcendent individuals. Napoleon said, "I am France and France is me". Certain of his intellectual purity, Mao killed untold numbers of people in the Hundred Flowers campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution of the 1950's and 60's. This tendency is still present with us. For instance Bill Clinton recently called America the "indispensable nation", implying that other nations where somehow dispensable.

            Life and rights precede knowledge and abstractions. Lives and rights must be preserved before any concern is made about who believes what or what knowledge reigns. Life is more important than thought. Thoreau defines more exactly what I mean here. "the progress form  absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward respect for the individual". He does not mean the corporate individual, which is a fictional entity, an abstraction and part of a civil religion. He means " a step toward recognizing and organizing  the rights of man... the individual is a higher and independent power from which [the states] power is derived". [9]This puts individual human rights above any group, state religion, corporation or ultimate collective purpose.. Identity and social history are still acting as if it were only groups that matter, [10] While this is important in a time when corporate groups rule nearly everything, the necessity of individual human rights should not be lost sight of.[11] Chomsky summarizes the views of the John Dewey and Bertrand Russell as well as, presumably his own in a way that complements Thoreau's concern.  The aim and meaning of human rights 

to quote Dewey, [is] the belief that the 'ultimate aim' of production is not production of goods, [and thus profits] but 'of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality'.  The goal of education, as Russell put it, is to give a 'sense of the value of things other than domination', to help create 'wise citizens of a free community' in which both liberty and 'individual creativeness' will flourish and working people will be the masters of their fate, not tools of     production'." [To accomplish this, Dewey writes], "Illegitimate structures of coercion must be unraveled,  crucially, domination  by 'business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda'".

Without these changes one cannot speak of democracy but only of the "shadow cast on society by big business" [12] Chomsky concludes.

            The answer to the paradox and impasse between the false democracy that we have and the protections of human rights that are missing, it seems to me, is to turn history as it has traditionally been considered, and is still largely considered by most historians, against itself. By this I mean that history ought to be divested of its goal orientation, as well as of the deeply inbred notion that history is an inferior domain, a "vale of tears" and must therefore be the handmaiden of higher knowledge and superior powers, be these religions, sciences or political systems.  History becomes the critique of systems of power and knowledge that prevent the enjoyment of human rights, and this means it must be a critique of itself to the degree that history has aided, and still aids the violation of human rights. There are no supreme individuals, 'collective bodies', or symbolic and immortal persons. There are only human beings, each unique and each with rights. Life must precede systems of knowledge.

            Questioning knowledge/power is not science, nor religion, nor history, nor is it philosophy, but it never strays far from any of these. It is not "history from the top down",  nor "history from the bottom up", insofar as these classifications imply a fixed linear hierarchy of knowledge and power.  Insofar as 'top-down'  or 'bottom-up' history reflect transcendentalist ambitions, they are both questionable, though it is mostly the former and not the latter that  seeks to impose unilateral interpretations, at least in non-Marxist nations. But even in Marxist nations class consciousness and the historicist prejudice of the inevitability of progress create divisions and exclusions that mitigate against human rights and democracy.

             But in either case, the analysis of knowledge/power can be seen as a kind of  leveling idea that refuses hierarchy without glorifying another form of power that would rebel merely for the sake of rebellion. Neither 'majoritarian' nor 'minoritarian' notions of identity and status can mitigate or excuse violations of human rights. [13]Human rights is more than knowledge, more than power and it is the sine qua non without which neither rich nor poor would have any identity. Limiting that which limits human rights is thus a logical result of democratic and enlightenment doctrine which has yet to be applied and which cuts across the political, ideological and epistemological spectrum.

             Questioning knowledge/power is a kind of intellectual street cleaning, and while it may value the street cleaner more than the Executive,  it does not devolve into denial of anyone's democratic human rights. Or perhaps this simile is too narrow. Questioning knowledge/power is to question those that put thought before life, belief before existence, the head before the body and the heart. Or perhaps questioning knowledge/power is an attempt to unravel the intellect itself in an effort, necessarily a somewhat blind effort, to come closer to an understanding of  what is simple and basic in life. The relation of what people know to what they do is always complex and can never be exhaustively described. Mysteries remain, not of the religious sort perhaps, but of the ordinary kind; mysteries of the problems of  life, nature, suffering, dying, creating and the joy of existing. The basic question is: what constitutes personhood, and what is the mind, and how do theories and practices resulting from these distort or create histories and social inequalities: how can the way one thinks about history and life be changed  so as to decrease the possibility of human suffering, limit the power and wealth of the powerful, curb the harmful practices of knowledge and spread the availability of rights and liberties for all?

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