Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

So, uh, yeah! Here's the political philosophy thread. Place to discuss rad stuff like first principles, Kantian ethics, and Robert Pippin. Fair game are any questions about any current political event that you think might be too distracting in a main thread (or that you simply want to articulate without worrying about people calling you names). Any conversation is fair game here, imo, but you have to be prepared to defend any assertion. And the further down the rabbit hole the better, so if you state that X principle is a priori good, then be prepared to get into a discussion about ethics and different ethical systems. I don't think anyone on this board is a professional philosopher, so obv we'll be feeling through a bunch of issues as they come up. Also! A good place to discuss actual real political philosophers and books by those people. If this doesn't get used for anything else, it'll be a place for me to post my thoughts about issues that I don't feel like get called a fascist for having, so if anyone has any interest in those thoughts, this'll generally be the place. I'm also going to be severely limiting my posting on current politics threads and stuff because - uh - fucking annoying. Anyway, have at it.

rad thread idea, and productive to have it outside of main thread imo

but man if u think it'll stop people calling u names :(

Anyway, there's actually something I want to discuss and think about right out of the gates. It's in the new Zizek book, Living in the End Times and it's a quote from Robert Kagan. I'd love to discuss the quote independent of Kagan + Zizek's personalities (tho if that's illuminating it can obviously be brought in) because I find it independently provocative. Here's the quote in question:

Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might... Perhaps it is not just coincidence that the amazing progress toward European integration in recent years has been accompanied not by the emergence of a European superpower but, on the contrary, by a diminishing of European military capabilities relative to the United States. Turning Europe into a global superpower capable of balancing the power of the United States may have been one of the original selling points of the European Union — an independent European foreign and defense policy was supposed to be one of the most important byproducts of European integration. But, in truth, the ambition for European “power” is something of an anachronism. It is an atavistic impulse, inconsistent with the ideals of postmodern Europe, whose very existence depends on the rejection of power politics... Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important... Most Europeans do not see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of “moral consciousness,” it has become dependent on America’s willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.

The ellipses are as in the Zizek text (p. 169), the original Kagan piece was published in Policy Review in 2002 and can be read in full here: http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7107 -- Something possibly to be discussed is if Zizek is using Kagan to say something different than what Kagan is actually saying.

Oh, people can call me shit here, but if someone calls me a fascist I'll ask them to explain what the term means. lol.

Another quote that's relavent:

If the postmodern world does not protect itself, it can be destroyed. But how does Europe protect itself without discarding the very ideals and principles that undergird its pacific system? “The challenge to the postmodern world,” Cooper argues, “is to get used to the idea of double standards.” Among themselves, Europeans may “operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security.” But when dealing with the world outside Europe, “we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era — force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary.” What this means is that although the United States has played the critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise, and still plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter this paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the gate. The United States, with all its vast power, remains stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving the happy benefits to others. The problem is that the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates European norms. It must refuse to abide by certain international conventions that may constrain its ability to fight effectively in Robert Cooper’s jungle. American power, even employed under a double standard, may be the best means of advancing human progress — and perhaps the only means. Instead, many Europeans today have come to consider the United States itself to be the outlaw, a rogue colossus.

I heart this thread already! oh to be young and in college again...

I was talking with a fellow former UCSC politics major awhile back and he was complaining to me about how academia has more or less reduced politics to a branch of statistical analysis, that everything these days is about polling data and test studies which made me very sad... cuz my favorite stuff was always the theory and the history. number crunching has its place, but come on.

Basically, to just begin to unpack this quote - this has been on my mind a lot, and it's the question of whether a certain amount of outdated State struggle is essential to preserving and furthering what Kagan calls the Kantian paradise. We understand what that means, I think, the unyielding ethical moment. Kant posits that ethics are evaluated action by action as a general rule -- would the world work if everyone did this action? And if it wouldn't, it can never be done ever. This is unyielding -- Kant's on the Supposed Right to Lie for Philanthropic Concerns discusses the case of a murderer asking you where his victim is. Kant says you can refuse to answer him, but you can't lie to him, because lying is never ethically appropriate (even if necessary to mediate some greater struggle -- the moral decision is always pure on its own). The Hobbesian struggle is definitely much more murkier. Kagan is suggesting here that you can have this Kantian paradise, but only if the Hobbesian decisions are being handled by someone else. So -- is this so?

Btw, ftr, the Cooper being quoted above is Robert Cooper's The Breaking of Nations: Order and chaos in the Twenty-first Century

This is not a philosophical point, but I'm not sure about the claimed "diminishing of European military capabilities relative to the United States". France for instance has lots of nuclear weapons, & the state is quite in support of this. At the air & space museum I visited just outside Paris a few weeks ago---a public museum, mind you---had an exhibit celebrating France's nuclear arsenal, with decommissioned nuclear missiles on display, & quotes from all the recent French presidents proclaiming the importance of France having a nuclear option separate from NATO. So while it's true that the USA can out-occupy foreign nations (to the extent that the USA can do this at all), the French are pretty confident that they can nuke the fuck out of whoever poses an "ultimate" threat.

I consider myself very ignorant of European Union politics but in general those quotes ring true to me... I maintain a deep suspicion of Europe's ability to successfully deal with its many internal ethnic divisions, however, and wouldn't be surprised if those one day erupt, yet again, to ruin this "post-history" paradise that Kagan describes.

x-posts

Kant's on the Supposed Right to Lie for Philanthropic Concerns discusses the case of a murderer asking you where his victim is. Kant says you can refuse to answer him, but you can't lie to him, because lying is never ethically appropriate

yeah i never had any time for Kant tbh

Ok, to reduce this question to a recent event: We all agree that sending predator drones to suspected terrorist homes feels icky. And yet, possibly someone needs to be sending those predator drones so that other countries can condemn sending them. I believe what Kagan is positing is that if you don't send drones, you will simply have to deal with war and terror yourself. So the United States emerges as this military power and sends the predator drones in (and even makes jokes about it at White House Correspondent dinners -- because this is now who we are in the world, this is our job so-to-speak), and then Europe can be a location that can afford not to send predator drones. It's a very provocative argument! On one hand, I want to say that no one needs to send predator drones, that the Kantian model can be embraced across the board. But there are real issues of coercive violence that aren't addressed by Kantian morality -- who asserts Western positions + values if no one uses coercive force? (Obviously assuming that Western positions + values are worth asserting, but I'm certainly willing to hear an opinion that says that they are not worth asserting.)

I don't understand that reference - why doesn't the murderer know where his victim is? or is it that someone has stated the intent to murder the victim and is asking you where to find that person? If so, I don't really have a problem with Kant's response.

The way I learnt it in undergrad is that the murderer knocks on your door and the victim is hiding upstairs. He asks, "Where is the victim?" You can refuse to answer, but you can't say, "He went that way," and lie. Because lying is wrong on its own, even if it might save the victim's life.

You are aware that a murderer is seeking the victim (xp)

also I think it's BS that "Europe" (whatever that means) wouldn't send in predator drones if they thought it was worth it. There's just a much different political/economic calculus over here. I.e. I don't think the differences are about morality as much as they are about dollars & euros (& yuan & yen).

A more provocative example: Acc. to Kant you cannot steal bread to feed your family, or steal anything to do anything good (so by Kant's extreme definition, stealing leaks to release them and save lives is wrong because theft is wrong).

Prob with Kant applied to real-world is that every action or chain of action from every angle all th way down will eventually have some Kantian 'wrong' in it, surely?

One thing a friend of mine was suggesting the other day, that I also thought was really provocative, is that Europe actually supports most American military action around the world, they just do so hypocritically -- demeaning it in the press while simultaneously supporting it in the UN and sending troops to areas like Afghanistan. There was a big controversy a few years ago when the German public discovered that the German army was much more involved in Afghanistan than the German people had been told. There's definitely a sense, I think, of: "You go ahead and do it and we'll protest."

Europe being the govts or the , y'know, the people as a whole, Mordy?

That's a good question, I don't know the best way to parse that.

One thing that I think isn't acknowledged by standard American leftist critiques of the war is that there is vast participation across the Western spectrum -- Germany, Italy, Canada, the UK, Spain, etc, etc all have troops in Afghanistan. Not the amount that the United States has sent, but there is a wide agreement that there should be Western troops in this country at the moment.

Definitely something worth discussing is the relationship in a Democracy between a government and a people -- it could be argued, I think that the relationship between a people and a government is a lot like the relationship between the United States + Europe. The government does things we find distasteful, but that we understand is necessary, and then we complain about it so that we can continue to live in a more Kantian bubble, even while giving support to those actions (by allowing them to continue!). Or, maybe we don't allow them to continue, but the people are so alienated from governance that we don't see a way of changing it even if we'd like to.

I'd certainly agree with you to some extent if you were referring to european govt support/tacit agreement- but not if you were referring to the continent entire (not that the continent entire really makes any decisions in a historic sense anyway i guess)

xp yeah that comes into the area we're talking bout here i think- our govts do things we don't agree with and the US do things that our govts don't agree with but it's maybe a question of outsourcing agency/complicitness to those willing to do the dirty work.

this is all in theory btw cos fuck an afghan campaign

I think we're touching on, what I understand is, the dominant question of political philosophy today, which is legitimacy. What kind of legitimacy does our government have? If you believe that when it does things we don't like, it actually does so with our tacit agreement, then you'll come up with a different concept of legitimacy than if you believe we've been alienated from the governance process entirely (which reads to be as a more Marxist critique?).

I don't believe in the 'tacit agreement' line- beyond that it gets complicated for a Friday evening.

There's another thing I really want to discuss too and that I think is really constantly going on in the background in ILX -- which is what our relationship is to the other citizens in the United States. There's constantly this sense that we're a community apart (the intellectual left-wingers) from those who are apathetic, or are actually antagonistic to questions of human rights, etc. There are problematic politics at the very root of that dichotomy. If nation states are communities performed on mythical levels (an idea I buy into fully) then we suddenly need to drag in issues of Otherness (Lacanian and Levinasian) to deal with these people we occupy a country with and with whom we disagree. Who are they and is the most productive reading that we disagree with them? It might be way more productive to read our disagreements as performing broader questions and concerns -- when we get caught up on who is right and who is wrong we may be missing that the discourse itself is producing ideas and conversations. I have some examples in mind (in particular how racist slave-owners basically forced the emancipation of slaves by seceding when they could have simply kept their shit to themselves and perpetuated slavery -- the dialectic actually produced progression, even tho at the time those people were horrific human beings, their actions directly lead to emancipation).

darraghmac, you don't believe that citizens give tacit agreement to their governance? Is it because you think they're alienated by the State? If so -- I think this is really productive to follow-up on and push against. How do you read Democracy in the United States in that light?

I don't believe that there is always tacit agreement in the actions of govt- I probably believe that the machinations of govt allow for enough delay in 'feedback' (ie changes of govt by the usual means) to allow this not to matter most of the time.

re Democracy in the US- I don't! Just sitting here in western europe enjoying the concepts tbh

There's obviously a lot of stuff to sort through about the value of various kinds of representative systems, and I think many people probably feel like two-parties need to pander to the broadest interests and can't represent more niche, or fringe, positions (that a parliament, for instance, could give representation to). Of course, this cuts both ways, and many European countries have fascist or nationalist parties with representation today in their parliaments and governments.

Speaking of, a New Yorker article about how "special interests" may actually not be a bad thing for a democracy from 2008. I haven't read it in awhile but I found it really interesting at the time and I'm up for discussing it with anyone who is interested: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/08/11/080811crat_atlarge_lemann

Teaser:

“The Process of Government” is a hedgehog of a book. Its point—relentlessly hammered home—can be stated quite simply: All politics and all government are the result of the activities of groups. Any other attempt to explain politics and government is doomed to failure. It was, in his day as in ours, a wildly contrarian position. Bentley was writing “The Process of Government” at the height of the Progressive Era, when educated, prosperous, high-minded people believed overwhelmingly in “reform” and “good government,” and took interest groups to be the enemy of these goals. The more populist Progressives liked having the people as a whole decide things by direct vote; the more élitist Progressives wanted to give authority to experts. But Bentley, who seems to have shared the Progressives’ goal of using government to curb the power of big business, rejected such procedural tenets. In Chicago terms, Bentley was the rare Progressive intellectual who believed, in effect, that the machine had a more accurate understanding of how politics worked—how it always and necessarily worked—than the lakefront liberals did.

omg, haven't read it yet, but serendipitous!

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/political_philosophy_and_the_left/

what are "western values"

I think generally it means like the Enlightenment project

ex-ilxor of the ancien regime josh k favorited this recently

http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2010/08/conversation-opening-salvo.html

good post!

This is an interesting and provocative argument (I think!) and one that I bet a lot of ilxors would disagree with me about. From Steve Poole:
http://unspeak.net/justice/

It is worth pausing to admire Obama’s masterful rhetorical conflation here of two different conceptions of justice. One sense of “justice”, of course, has to do with courts, legal process, fair trials, and the rest. This has to be the sense invoked in Obama’s reference to the desire to bring Bin Laden to justice. In this spatial metaphor, justice is a place: implicitly, a courtroom, or at least a cell with the promise of process. (Or even, in extremis, Guantánamo Bay, still not closed, where indefinite “detention” or imprisonment is Unspeakily palliated with the expectation of some kind of tribunal.) To bring someone to justice is to put them in a place where they will be answerable for their alleged crimes. To be answerable in this sense, it helps to be alive.

But it is quite another sense of “justice” — meaning a fair result, regardless of the means by which it was achieved — that is functioning in Obama’s next use of the word: the quasi-legal judgment that justice was done. On what sorts of occasion do we actually say that justice was done? Not, I suppose, at the conclusion of a trial (when it might be claimed, instead, that justice was served); rather, after some other event, away from any courtroom, that we perceive as rightful punishment (or reward) for the sins (or virtues) of the individual under consideration. (Compare poetic justice.) The claim that justice was done appeals, then, to a kind of Old Testament or Wild West notion of just deserts. What, after all, happened between the desire to bring Bin Laden to justice and the claim that justice was done? Well, Bin Laden was killed. He was not, after all, brought to justice. Instead, justice (in its familiar guise as American bombs and bullets) was brought to him.

I disagree! I think the point of "legal justice" is to create a civilizational context to perform actual justice. The problem with vigilantism isn't the vigilantism. The problem is that it undermines the civilizational context. We have established these institutions and agreed to live by their laws. So we set up these hierarchies by which to establish (legislate) and enforce (execute) said laws. But its roughly a facade that, when it does its job, keeps stuff running smoothly. But the truth is always that the context is itself invented and so easily undermined. (That is, side point, why limited government Republicans are idiots. It's no feat to have no governance, just look at all the countries that can't manage it. The feat is governance.) What's one way of undermining it? Attack a civilian populace. One of the primary (and maybe the most fundamental) reason to establish these governances is to help protect us. When you kill a bunch of civilians, you have undermined the very state of the facade. The only appropriate response is using the State's monopoly on power to stop the bleeding. You actually can't use the tools of civilization to plug that hole bc the hole challenges those very tools. That's why (I think) we inuit that we can't really try ppl like Bin Laden. He declares that the entire state enterprise is invalid. In that context, executed him in court or executed him in the battlefield mean exactly the same thing. Except the later reforms the context and the first one doesn't.

(Maybe.)

Anyway, the point being that there aren't two kinds of justice. There's just the one kind of primordial justice and the particular way we funnel it through society. I think I'm actually arguing two distinct things here and I believe one is more provocative than the other. So plz take issue with one, both, or neither.

...two different conceptions of justice. One sense of “justice”, of course, has to do with courts, legal process, fair trials, and the rest.

I agree with Mordy that Poole fails to establish his thesis that we carry around two "conceptions of justice". His invocation of courtrooms and legal process does not establish a fully-formed conception of justice, so much as a context within which we expect to find a just conclusion to a conflict. Justice itself is not legalistic, but an idealized state where conflict is resolved in favor of the superior right.

So, basically I think Mordy's critique gets right at the weakness in the argument and exposes it.

that kagan book discussed upthread is total dogshit, even if the excised quotes are reasonable enough

I want to get my friend a good 'intro to political philosophy' book for his birthday that isn't boring? Anyone know one?

it's not really an intro, but i highly recommend Robert Pippin's "Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy" which is very accessible to new philosophy readers and has the advantage of feeling very current.

http://themonkeycage.org/2011/05/internet-cynics-and-enthusiasts-both-have-it-right/

The experiment’s findings confirmed this prediction. Members of the Internet group were 15 percentage points less likely to believe that the election was conducted fairly and impartially. They were also 12 points more likely to believe that the recount was conducted unfairly when compared to the control group. However, relative to the control group, members of the Internet group were also 11 points less likely to vote.

This suggests that—although the Internet may have provided better information about the integrity of the election—this supposed democratic boon may carry a negative side effect. In this case, it appears that Internet users who became more aware of electoral abuses, seemingly also became less likely to believe that their vote mattered. After all, the belief that an election is not being conducted fairly can produce two very divergent responses: some people may respond by protesting and taking to the streets, while others may simply throw up their hands and stay home. Perhaps, then, both Internet cynics and enthusiasts have it partially right.

I don't know about this 'both have it partially right' piece but I do think the idea that awareness can have a deleterious effect on participation is really interesting, esp when it becomes a feedback loop where the fewer the # of people participate politically the greater the potential for corruption/abuse to occur (less eyes watching, less engaged dissent, etc) which in turn turns more people off to the process and ultimately you reach a stage where it is completely corrupt and ppl are completely apathetic (and only something radically revolutionary could break that particular stalemate). I also wonder if this is the process that the United States is currently engaged in.

Does anyone here have a recommendation for an article (etc.) making a secular case for the contemporary Western welfare state? I'm especially interested in such arguments that bear on the USA, as opposed to Europe, but really anything'll do.

Oh, & I should add that I'd prefer moral arguments, not economic or technocratic arguments.

I can't think of one off-hand, but if I do I'll post it. Your question does remind me, tho, that I'm looking for either an article or colorful chart that shows standard of living in the US over period of time ending fairly recently (closest I found was something ending in 1998).

can you really separate moral arguments from economic/technocratic arguments?

Sure you can, for example I'm pretty sure that Bismarck's early adventures into social care weren't based on a belief that it was the morally correct thing to do.

You can read a bunch of contemporary arguments defending the Poor Law in the 18th Century UK because it protected social stability, too.

Bismarck's welfare state might not have been 'social care because helping people is the right thing to do' but there was still a higher level reasoning of 'doing this will lead to what I believe is the best outcome for society'. same w/ the poor law defenders.

I mean someone supports economic philosophy XYZ because they believe it leads to the best outcome for society (or the best outcome for themselves, and there's some reasoning where society will ultimately benefit, or society doesn't matter. but you can't remove morality from this.)

there were people who made arguments for the Poor Law from morality but there were people who made solely "this will keep the rabble quiet" arguments, in the same way that I know of very few contemporary arguments in favour of Germany's early welfare programme that weren't "undermine the Bolsheviks/keep the State strong". I don't think those are the kind of moral arguments that Euler is talking about? or really that they are moral arguments at all in the usual sense of the word "moral"?

it's not really an intro, but i highly recommend Robert Pippin's "Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy" which is very accessible to new philosophy readers and has the advantage of feeling very current.

― Mordy, Tuesday, May 10, 2011 10:33 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark

the best means of preserving the State is a technocratic argument. it can easily be divorced from any reasoning about what is right or wrong in an ethical sense, which isn't the same as saying that technocrats and economists don't also have ethical sentiments beyond their work, hard as that is to imagine.

I'm saying that 'this will keep the rabble quiet' people still had some moral/economic system they believed in, and this logic apparently didn't break it.

I get that euler is probably talking about a different type of moral argument, I'm just saying that there's a moral system behind any economic system and I don't think you can isolate them.

likewise the technocratic 'but does it work irl?' side can't be ignored either - it doesn't matter if you can reason w/ pure philosophy that it's moral for the government to give everyone in the country 1 million dollars.

I mean someone supports economic philosophy XYZ because they believe it leads to the best outcome for society (or the best outcome for themselves, and there's some reasoning where society will ultimately benefit, or society doesn't matter. but you can't remove morality from this.)

― iatee, Sunday, July 31, 2011 7:00 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

i basically agree with the last part, but not the first. i don't think policy is decided for purely economic *or* moral 'reasons'. rather: economic imperatives, political imperatives... morality is in there somewhere sometimes.

xp i'll def check out the Nietzsche book. he's such an excellent writer + fun to read which is so rare for philosophers at his level

i think what euler wants is an argument for the welfare state as an end goal & one that's good in itself, as opposed to an argument for the welfare state as a byproduct of a "successful" state, or the welfare state as "good for [stability/peace/the_market]" instead of just good

I think the moral vs. technocratic element basically comes down to, is this decision grounded in something "outside of" the positive existence of the state—which normative or moral commitments would (presumably) be, through the appeal to "human rights" or w/e

I don't think you can detach that from economic thinking when the welfare state is an economic concept xp

i don't think policy is decided for purely economic *or* moral 'reasons'.

Agreed, although I'd argue that some considerations tend to trump others when it comes down to getting politics done. But I was talking about arguments in general and there are plenty of pro-welfare arguments from political philosophers and others which don't foreground moral considerations, even if they're floating out there as some unspoken other.

xp

I don't think the Welfare State is a purely economic concept.

but what you or i think is immaterial to the question which was "have some people argued for it from morality without bringing in other reasons?"

this is like saying 'is the number 4 good'

the welfare state only exists in the context of an economic system. whether that system works irl (technocrat) and whether that is the 'best' system (economic philosophy) can't be removed from the discussion.

what does the 'welfare state' mean in the context of an amazon rainforest tribe? nothing.

xp yeah I agree, that's one of the things that keeps doing my head in whenever I try to post

still tho I think it should be possible in practice to separate "arguments in favor of expanding social welfare provisions on the basis of economic efficiency" (e.g. Keynes) from "arguments in favor of expanding social welfare provisions because failure to do so would leave citizens inadequately cared for" or w/e

(where "expanding social welfare provisions" could obviously also be "maintaining at a given level" or "not cutting back", etc, depending on context)

right, but keynes ultimately believed that economic efficiency would lead to greater good for society.

for the individual iirc

i agree you can't really have a moral argument for the welfare state without addressing the rest of the political-economic system

xxp "ultimately", sure, but along the way everything is framed in terms of an amoral analysis of the tendencies of a capitalist economy—business owners are asked to go along with it not out of some altruistic desire or obligation to help their fellow man, but because it will help avert (a certain type of) economic crisis!

(I mean I guess you can say that "the economy ought not collapse" is a moral stance, but hopefully it's an uncontroversial one...?)

I don't think the 'along the way everything is framed in terms of an amoral analysis of the tendencies of a capitalist economy' matters. there is a moral belief system behind the logic of capitalism and the 'along the way' is not objectively amoral. those businessmen would say they're creating wealth and jobs for society and it's morally wrong to prevent that.

if you remove political-economic considerations then how would a purely moral argument differ from that for almsgiving or any other 'social' altruism?

max is right, I would like arguments for having a welfare state that aren't just "it's stimulus!", that make a case that it's a morally good thing to collaborate under the aegis of a state to ensure the common welfare of fellow citizens via the redistribution of wealth.

Arguments that a welfare state protects the state sit in a middle ground, since "the state" is a moral structure inasmuch as it has the legitimacy to dispense justice & thus protecting it could be a moral end in itself...but also could be stand-ins for "we need to preserve the present economic status quo & this'll do the trick".

Yeah, a welfare state is an economic structure, since it involves transferring wealth. But it's a moral structure too, & I want to see what kind of secular case can be made for it as a moral structure. I get that the case is gonna depend on which society we're talking about; the "social imaginary" of the USA is different than France, etc.

again, I don't think you can isolate that moral structure.

I mean you can say

"if we are to agree that political-economic system X works irl and is the 'best', what's a moral argument for a welfare state?"

otherwise how can we argue about the moral structure of whether the gov't should give poor people $ if we don't agree on the real world effects of the gov't receiving/spending money and poor people receiving/spending money?

I think we can take for granted that some basic degree of wealth is necessary for the good life: enough for food & shelter at least. Let's add health care also. How much more do we need to know about the "real world effects" of having the wealth necessary for those transferred by the state?

Of course in taking for granted that such wealth is needed for the good life, I don't mean to assume that it's self-evident that everyone is entitled to the good life, if even only on other people's dime. That's exactly what I want to see argued for.

real world effects:

a. does gov't wealth transfer XYZ ultimately (after all short and long-term effects are factored in) lead to more economic growth for the country?
(are we assuming that more economic growth is an inherently good thing, if we already have reached the basic degree of wealth?)
b. does gov't wealth transfer XYZ ultimately (after all short and long-term effects are factored in) lead to a fairer share of wealth?
(are we assuming that a small gini coefficient is an inherently good thing? why?)
c. if we have to make a decision between a 'rising tide' vs. smaller gini coefficient, what's the point where we'll sacrifice one for the other?
d. does the economic context affect the morality of wealth transfer XYZ? (is it moral for greece to increase the size of its welfare state today?)

wrt a: no, we shouldn't assume economic growth is an inherently good thing.
wrt b: fairness is a moral concept.
wrt c: I'm interested in arguments that decide the "point" on moral grounds.
wrt d: I think morality doesn't apply to democratic nations as a whole, but only to individual agents.

It's not shocking that so many classical economists were utilitarians.

c. you can't decide that point on moral grounds without agreeing to an economic framework and working out the math. you can plot that trade-off on an graph, put your finger on it and say "there, that's the moral point" but the graph first requires an agreed-upon economic framework.
d. then how can you discuss the morality of an economic concept?

and b. yeah I prob shouldn't have used the word fair, that term already assumes something. I meant 'smaller disparity'.

I think that if you are asking 'why should...' anything, then you are asking a moral question. All of the arguments for the welfare state (or any other kind of state) are moral, because you have to decide on a goal, and why that goal is better than any other. For us in general? We all know why the welfare state is better - fewer people starve, die of unnecessary illnesses or exposure due to homelessness, Whether these are worthy ends is, of course, a moral argument.

fewer people also starve, die of unnecessary illness etc. thanks to the wealth gains from free markets

wrt c: sure, fix some economic framework & ask what's the right action given that framework. I was thinking of this as less "first principles work" than "given current economic reality, what's the best secular moral case for a welfare state?"

wrt d: we're being asked to pay taxes in order to support our welfare state. is our participation in that transfer of wealth morally permissible? obligatory? optimal?

alternately: is participating in that transfer conducive to the good life?

Well, if we assume that reducing death, illness, homelessness etc. are worthy goals then the question becomes socio-economic: Does our current course of action help us achieve these goals. Free markets do help in this process, to a point, but a stage is reached (a long time ago) when it becomes an obstacle to these goals. Either way, we always have to first decide what we want from life, what a society or government is for. Then it's just statistics.

'given current economic reality' - I mean, there is no easy or absolute 'economic reality', there are drastically different ways of looking at macroenconomic data and there are very different lenses with which people look at it. and even those have changed drastically over the last decade. 'fix some economic framework' isn't easy or quick - and in the process, you've already included a certain moral framework.

basically I think economists are the moral philosophers you're looking for

By "current economic reality" I mean our present economic practices: how we trade, etc. My proviso was there to indicate that I'm not envisioning some kind of reductio against Western capitalism.

xp absolutely not, they are as I said earlier mostly utilitarians, & that's the kind of technocratic reduction I want to avoid.

Who would be a deontological economist, some of the hardcore Monetarists or Adam Smith types?

idg technocratic as a bad word. I mean it's used to describe mcnamara types, but in a strict sense, why is a technocratic view of things reductionist?

I'd say anyone approaching this subject without realizing how much of it is political-economic is being reductionist.

Well, if we assume that reducing death, illness, homelessness etc. are worthy goals then the question becomes socio-economic: Does our current course of action help us achieve these goals. Free markets do help in this process, to a point, but a stage is reached (a long time ago) when it becomes an obstacle to these goals. Either way, we always have to first decide what we want from life, what a society or government is for. Then it's just statistics.

if, changing nothing else, we decided it was illegal to charge more than $1 for a prescription in america, the immediate effect would be very, very good socio-economically, as millions of people would have cheap access to medicine. the long-term effect would not be entirely good. you can't isolate these actions from their effect on markets.

i feel as if iatee you are saying that all political or economic arguments are founded on a fully-examined set of ethical beliefs? is that correct or what am i misunderstanding?

euler do you think there's a religious argument for the welfare state?

no, not always full-examined! but it makes more sense to examine the morality *behind the system* than a specific concept within it.

why is a technocratic view of things reductionist?

Here's why. Take the following passage:

if, changing nothing else, we decided it was illegal to charge more than $1 for a prescription in america, the immediate effect would be very, very good socio-economically, as millions of people would have cheap access to medicine.

Being "good socio-economically" ≠ being good. That's the reduction I'm trying to avoid.

I was responding to "are worthy goals then the question becomes socio-economic"

max: yeah, I think so, in classical Catholic writing on social justice for instance.

it makes more sense to examine the morality *behind the system* than a specific concept within it.

is that a kind of abstract morality belonging to or residing in the system itself then?

Euler, are you looking for a non-utilitarian argument for the welfare state?

NV: that would be great! A secular non-utilitarian argument.

the long-term effect would not be entirely good. you can't isolate these actions from their effect on markets.

No, I agree with you. I think we're making the same point. So the decision to immediately charge $1 for meds would end up not fulfilling our criteria for a good economic policy.

(because if we're going to have any impact on the current austerity programs in the West, we're going to need arguments that don't simply have sectarian appeal.

basically, I think this is a great question: is 'clearly defined form of keynesianism xyz' moral? y/n

moral analysis of a welfare state will be an inherent part of that discussion. and 'how should a welfare state operate' is included in that model.

I agree, iatee.

i have real difficulties with secular, deontological ethics. where do you begin to draw the authority for your "ought" from?

so maybe we don't disagree much!

but until you pick and very clearly define your keynesian economics xyz / whatever else - which involves economic logic of some sort - I don't think you can approach the welfare state. it doesn't exist as an approachable concept without that context.

xp

Sure, iatee: but I don't think that's the end of the task. Transfers of wealth within such an economic system is what needs to be judged as moral or not. I'm happy to fix such systems & ask for each one, if that transfer is moral, & then vary the systems & ask those questions again. We could treat those systems as a parameter & see how the morality of the welfare state varies for each such value.

xp to NV: Kant says that "oughts" derive from the nature of rationality. That's pretty wacky too.

yeah i get what Kant says

okay I gtg but I will try and make this point quick:

I don't think you can construct an overarching economic logic from the bottom up - from judging the morality of a billion individual acts. the economic logic ultimately has to be overarching and so while you can maybe 'judge' the individual acts moral or not moral, the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important.

xp to NV: yeah; my impression of the "state of the art" today is that no one really gets why rationality itself should be the ground of morality & so neo-Kantians like Korsgaard are working on grounding morality on autonomy, which Kant mentions in accord with the categorical imperative ("treat people as ends not means to ends") but whose connection in the texts is not especially.

what i'm getting at seems to relate to your idea that states can't be "moral" in themselves. i agree to the point where i wd argue that systems of economic organisation aren't "moral" and that an individual's political beliefs have to be founded on something other than morality.

xp to iatee: not sure what you mean by "the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important" but I think we're just failing to communicate properly a bit here.

ok, NV: the hard thing for me is to see where an individual's beliefs about what she ought to do are "political" & where they are "moral".

a big part of the problem is that we can probably agree on a very broad deontological morality that is pragmatically true for the vast majority of people. eg. it is wrong to kill another human being (except in defence of yourself or a third party). as soon as i apply that kind of ethics to the political sphere, i get into a hugely difficult argument about how my actions contribute to the state, whether states' actions contribute to killing people, what would be the best kind of state to avoid killing people etc.

the sheer multiplication of individual contributions to the functioning of a state makes an uncomputable system of consequences based on individuals' ethical choices, it seems?

and i'd argue that the same near-chaotic system works to exclude utilitarian moral decisions too.

Wondering why utilitarianism is out of the equation here, and if you're similarly down on other forms of consequentialism eg Rawls' theory of justice. Deontology is a non starter imo.

xp to euler

xp to NV: yeah, those are in particular problems of representative democracy, since my main political act in such a system is my vote for/against people who will make the decisions of the state.

your main political act in a representative democracy needn't be your vote tho. you could have a moral imperative to become actively involved in a party for example.

xp to ledge: I accept the usual objections to utilitarianism, but more importantly I think it distorts what we're doing when we reason morally into a type of calculation, which closes off lots of considerations that ought to be part of moral deliberation: what particular people mean to us, for instance.

xp to NV: sure, you could choose to become a representative yourself. I've been thinking a lot about that recently, kinda thinking we all here should run for office (no idea how reasonable that is to do in the UK; in the USA it's totally doable)

xp to iatee: not sure what you mean by "the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important" but I think we're just failing to communicate properly a bit here.

even given the constraints I gave earlier (we start ot w/ "let's assume political-economic system x"), if we put 'the welfare state' in a glass box, look at it and conclude 'this is a morally good thing' and then put 'lower taxes' in a glass box, look at it, conclude 'this is a morally good thing' - well, I'm not sure what the usefulness of that exercise was. they don't operate in glass boxes, they operate as parts of the same system.

bigger picture: I don't think you can analyze an economic object that operates in a utilitarian system from a non-economic, non-utilitarian POV. non-utilitarian economic systems and economic logic exists. in theory and in history and in the world today. but 'the welfare state' as we understand it, and as matters to america in 2011 can't exist without that framework.

so if you're gonna say 'okay, I'm gonna accept utilitarian ethics as a framework for how the economic world operates because it's pretty hard to build a comparably sophisticated model - *however* - after accepting that, I'd like to make future decisions using 'ethical system XYZ'.

sure, then you can pick your overarching (utilitarian...) political-economic logic based on 'ethical system XYZ' and if that includes some sort of welfare state, then you can manage cost-benefit decisions of that welfare state using 'ethical system XYZ'. I think there is some room for that...

I've got a question I wanna throw at you guys. It's a rhetoric question. There's this rhetoric move where you are explaining why somebody did something bad. For example, "he killed that woman bc of his deprivation + impoverishment" or, "they flew the planes into the twin towers bc of united states support for israel and military bases in saudi arabia" or "they conduct terror attacks because of settlements in the western bank." You've probably heard many examples of this - basically a cause is assigned to a particular condemned action. Now when you use this trope, you tend to say (to disavow condoning the action): "I'm not justifying [attack/murder/whatever], I'm just explaining the context for it. But the distinction between contextualization and justified has never been properly unpacked for me. In a real rhetorical sense, what is the difference between a justification and a contextualization? Doesn't context provide justification?

Which is to say: If X caused Y (which is the contextualization assertion) how can you simultaneously assert that Y is independently worthy of condemnation and also that X is a cause for it? If X caused Y, then X is entirely to blame. Y is just the consequence. Justification is inherently packed in. Now you could argue that X provides a space for Y to occur in, but that Y is independently caused. But lots of things provide spaces for other things to happen in and you wouldn't say that have any culpability at all in those things happening. For instance, packed subways can give cover for perverts to rub themselves on victims, but packed subways have no culpability for that action. If you said, "let's understand why this person was victimized -- it was because the subways were allowed to become packed," people would rightly protest because we understand that action Y has to be individually fueled and context X cannot explain it. However with this hot topic political discussions, we do talk in this way. We simultaneously try to assert that X can explain Y, but that Y is also at fault on its own merits. How do we reconcile this (apparent?) rhetorical paradox?

depends on who's making the rhetorical move - at its basest, this argument totally is "X caused Y" and the "i'm not justifying" is made in bad faith. but i think most people don't believe in a hard causality of human action. in that case, the argument is closer to "without X, no Y, but X is not sufficient cause" i.e. the arguer is suggesting that altho moral culpability resides in the perpetrators of Y that culpability is diminished, not disappeared, by event X. and this applies in lots of legal areas i think, when we talk about "mitigating circumstances". those circumstances tend not to excuse a crime but to diminish the severity of punishment because they claim a partiallly causal trigger.

(in yr subway argument nobody sensibly wd claim that conditions which allowed the crime to take place where also partially causative)

(incidentally i think i do believe in hard causality but i have no choice)

It's interesting bc the claim X caused Y is never accompanied by the explicit claim that Y's culpability is diminished, and in fact I will often see that rhetorical move made w/ the simultaneous claim that Y's culpability is in no way diminished, which, I think you're agreeing, is paradoxical.

My philo friend I'm talking to says that the question is the divisibility of explicability and excusability and is inherent in the question of PSR. So for Spinoza where you could reconstruct everything if you understood all the causes, there is no divisibility at all between them but for, say, Kant where there's a moment of choice, that can divide them in that moment.

causality is tricky here- I don't get that it's a X caused Y claim exactly, it seems more like it's a "without which, not" claim, a counterfactual move: if the US didn't have a military presence in Saudia Arabia, then the militants wouldn't have been so pissed off and risen up in anger about this, etc. What is hard is that all the agents in the scenario that we do live in are in the world where there was an X, so talking about those actors but subtracting the supposedly necessary but insufficient factor forces us to mutate our agents into a-US-that-didn't-militarize and Saudi-youth-who-weren't-pissed-off etc. and we don't have those ready to hand

But here we would need to unpack what we mean by cause anyway. You could talk about material, formal, final and efficient causes ala Aristotle if you wanted to get technical about it. The "guilty party" is the efficient cause, and the people bringing up the backstory are selling a retributive story about preceding events as the final cause, from which it sounds like you just demur.

To be clear, I'm not really making a claim about whether a final cause can be held responsible or not. I'm just asking whether it's paradoxical to both evoke the final cause and assert that that has no affect on the actor's culpability here and now. For example, isn't it paradoxical to say that 1. US actions in Saudi Arabia caused Osama Bin Ladin's attack on the World Trade Center and 2. OSL is entirely culpable for those actions?

I guess the trouble is that the word "entirely" would suggest that causality could inhere in a way that, in Aristotle's account, it can't, because lots of different conditions have to be met in order for an action to be able to occur, and nobody could be "entirely" responsible for the state of affairs in which one thing causes another in such a way, so the splitting of responsibility between the material or substantial conditions and the efficient conditions is such that "entirely" isn't going to be technically possible within the frame of this theory- maybe accounts of causality that grow out of a physics of matter or claims about action just aren't helpful if you're going to talk about "responsibility" in an ethical register rather than "causal"? I'm no Aristotle expert here, by the way, just a fan. As far as ethics goes, you can be responsible enough, but "entirely" loses some force when it really is short hard for "responsible enough to be described as the primary/principal actor or agent".

I think there is a difference between motivation and justification. We could take a hypothetical situation where 4 people, A,B,C, and D, are all starving. A goes to his kitchen and makes a sandwich, B sells his labour and buys a sandwich, C steals a sandwich, and D kills someone and takes their sandwich. In all cases are entitled to say, when asked to explain their actions, that 'they were starving'. But their levels of justification is different. And I think we would tend to think C was more justified than, say, E, who stole a sandwich from B just because he wanted to watch B starve. So here the 'X' stays the same but the 'Y' that results is different.

It's the formulation X caused Y that causes the problem. Hunger didn't 'cause' D to kill someone, but it motivated the act. Israel and the USA didn't 'cause' the 9-11 hijackers to do what they did, but they seem to have motivated their actions. So Y can be worthy of condemnation, and be motivated by X, without the strict x causes y formulation. Assuming we believe that what motivates an act goes some way towards justifying it then people are entitled to use background information to alter the justifiability of an action.

In fact, to use the 9-11 example, we can imagine motivations which radically alter the justifiability of the act. So in the X caused Y formulation, the nature of X shifts the nature of the act. To jump into irritating hypothetical mode: If Bin Ladin had a nuclear weapon in NY, and threatened to detonate it if the attackers did not carry out their mission (and, for some reason, they had good reason to trust him), then you might conceivably consider the attacks to be moral. If the situation in X caused Y is a women killing her husband, then it makes a great deal of difference if she did it for his life insurance or to protect herself from her husbands violent rages. The action could still be wrong (i.e. if her husband lost his job and started drinking and she irrationally assumed that she was under threat because of greater spousal violence amongst alcoholics. X) but the nature of X does alter the moral nature of Y.

Basically, I could be one of those people who might say that people attack Israel because of the occupied territories (not to have a political discussion, and It's oversimplified), but I wouldn't like someone to say that the occupation 'explains' the attacks on Israel, nor that it justifies the attacks, but I could say that the occupation motivates the attacks.

I'm sure plenty of people do say X caused Y (no idea how much they mean it), but as far as agents go, I think 'X motivates Y' makes much more sense and clears some of this up.

Assuming I understand the problem at all, and I'm not sure I do.

trying to think of a situation where the X in this is really taken to be THE cause of Y rather than one of many causal factors of Y, but i dont think that is ever the case in these constructions

the other kinda tricksy thing here is that by getting into distinctions re:contextualization vs justification, we are stepping outside of str8 formal logic so that sort of question of rhetoric is a lot harder to engage i guess

also i have a O_O level sinus headache so i make no claims to making any sort of sense at all here so

xpost

at the risk of sinking myself further there also seems to be a missing intermediary step, sort of a X caused Y caused Z, where X is a situation, Y is a mental/physical state, Z is an action taken because of/thanks to that mental/physical state - in which case there could be other Y's (just to use 9/11 other Y's could be things as lofty as choice of faith and as pedestrian as able-bodied or capable of getting to NYC on said date) and X could be more truly causal in the intended way w/o the messy distinction between justified/contextual.

oh man i just reread that and confused myself, fucking cold medicine man

Haha, sleeping pills and alcohol for me. I would definitely watch a TV show where famous philosophers debate issues under various levels and kinds of intoxication. There could be a random drug machine, the audience could vote on who it gets administered to, etc. Would be cool.

could we say that context provides partial justification? I think several posters allude to that above.

like maybe rhetorically they're not treating the cause as a strictly binary proposition (all or nothing) but suggesting that it's just a factor among many. or am I missing the point here? (it's been a long day!)

maybe accounts of causality that grow out of a physics of matter or claims about action just aren't helpful if you're going to talk about "responsibility" in an ethical register rather than "causal"?

i think this is key here. a physical model of causality as related to human actions wd be based at a molecular level, i.e. the concept of causality in science is not the same as the concept of causality in ethics even tho they're often used in a fuzzy, interchangeable way. one is part of the debate re. determinism, and yet i don't feel that anybody making the assertion "action Y was caused by situation X" is ever really making the claim that the actors had no choice.

yeah I think that's right. and it's a good thing we don't treat ethics like physics, too.

yeah i dont think its ever intended as a binary proposition but the statement is formed that way - i guess that the question is whether simply stating it that way implies justification in some way? but if the construction was different, ie something value-loaded like "he killed that woman because he was evil" i dont think there would be any idea that somehow the speaker was implying that evil was a justifying stance, so idk

xposts

it's a good thing we don't treat ethics like physics, too

well for one thing that's why utilitarian arguments suck, yes.

like i said upthread, i think some people genuinely want to imply that there is a physics type causation between political action and political reaction but the nicest thing we could say about people making that kind of argument is that they are at best a bit naive and muddled

take them to out behind the shed

utilitarianism is srsly the dumbest of all the ethical philosophical attempts, i got some angry red penning for a paper on utilitarianism basically along the lines of "maybe you should be less sure that you are so much smarter than J.S. Mill." but fuck that, I am.

i can see some value in utilitarianism as a critique of deontology but as an ethical system in its own right it's mostly pitiful

really tho i believe they both prove off the back of each other that ethics is a system for describing what people shd have done after they've done something else

pity that the entire field of economics is underpinned by it

i have issues with economics as a field too

i think the person we really need to talk to is captain lorax

really difficult to say OBL is the final cause of 9/11 when according to the latest smearograms bush brought down the towers

if anyone can explain this to me I would be very interested in understanding it:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/11/conditional-close-election-markets.html

about habermas on eurozone: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=939

Moishe Postone has been blowing my mind lately: http://platypus1917.home.comcast.net/~platypus1917/postonemoishe_historyhelplessness.pdf

The disastrous nature of the war and, more generally, of the Bush administration should not obscure that in both cases progressives found themselves faced with what should have been viewed as a dilemma—a conflict between an aggressive global imperial power and a deeply reactionary counterglobalization movement in one case, and a brutal fas- cistic regime in the other. Yet in neither case were there many attempts to prob- lematize this dilemma or to try to analyze this configuration with an eye toward the possibility of formulating what has become exceedingly difficult in the world today — a critique with emancipatory intent. This would have required developing a form of internationalism that broke with the dualisms of a Cold War framework that all too frequently legitimated (as “anti-imperialist”) states whose structures and policies were no more emancipatory than those of many authoritarian and repressive regimes supported by the American government.

Instead of breaking with such dualisms, however, many who opposed Ameri- can policies have had recourse to precisely such inadequate and anachronistic “anti-imperialist” conceptual frameworks and political stances...

Let me elaborate by first turning briefly to the ways in which many liberals and progressives responded to the attack of September 11. The most general argument made was that the action, as horrible as it may have been, had to be understood as a reaction to American policies, especially in the Middle East.1 While it is the case that terrorist violence should be understood as political (and not simply as an irrational act), the understanding of the politics of violence expressed by such arguments is, nevertheless, utterly inadequate. Such violence is understood as a reaction of the insulted, injured, and downtrodden, not as an action. While the violence itself is not necessarily affirmed, the politics of the specific form of vio- lence committed are rarely interrogated. Instead, the violence is explained (and at times implicitly justified) as a response. Within this schema, there is only one actor in the world: the United States.

Critiquing the left w/ Marxism is like a dream come true.

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/how-does-the-subaltern-speak/

long response by marxist/postcolonialist chris taylor http://clrjames.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/not-even-marxist-on-vivek-chibbers.html

counter-response by chris heideman http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1297-not-even-marxist-paul-m-heideman-examines-chris-taylor-s-critique-of-vivek-chibber (complete w/ counter-counter response from taylor in comments)

so i'm no expert on these matters, but Chibber seems a bit vacuous?

I am endorsing the view that there are some common interests and needs that people have across cultures. There are some aspects of our human nature that are not culturally constructed: they are shaped by culture, but not created by it. My view is that even though there are enormous cultural differences between people in the East and the West, there’s also a core set of concerns that people have in common, whether they’re born in Egypt, or India, or Manchester, or New York. These aren’t many, but we can enumerate at least two or three of them: there’s a concern for your physical wellbeing; there’s probably a concern for a degree of autonomy and self-determination; there’s a concern for those practices that directly pertain to your welfare. This isn’t much, but you’d be amazed how far it gets you in explaining really important historical transformations.

why do we have to keep fighting this fight? why does marxism need to be "universal" (or have universal application) to be useful/valid/etc?

I had a professor at NYU explain in class once that we can't judge or condemn cultures that practice clitoridectomies bc eurocentrism.

i say go ahead and judge but it's that prof's need to claim some "universal" ground (even if it be relativism) that leads him to say such absurd things. judge and be judged!

idk what to tell u. i don't think he's vacuous and i think this is an important debate to have (esp bc, as he notes at the end of the interview, post-colonialism isn't going away anytime soon). it's partially about staking out the meaning of liberalism in 2013, and the parameters of what it is trying to do. i think they're trying to do very different things, and mai nafka minnah? lead to numerous different results -- cf adbusters thread for some examples?

I had a professor at NYU explain in class once that we can't judge or condemn cultures that practice clitoridectomies bc eurocentrism.

― Mordy, Monday, May 6, 2013 11:01 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk, i mean, you can still believe in the post-colonist project and also be like, this professor at nyu is wrong and stupid

to some extent tho isn't that the disagreement? can we judge other cultures based on these ideas of universal ethics + morality or is that eurocentric/etc?

no, i dont think so. i mean maybe for some people. i think the whole framing of that question is one that most academics would object to (i hope! maybe not!)--of course you can judge! but what does it mean to judge, how is it related to networks of power, where are your universal ethics grounded? idk im making this up obviously. ive never thought of post-colonialism as being about setting limits like so much as demanding a deeper and more rigorous analysis than orthodox marxism might offer (though not one that is necessarily opposed to marxism, by any means, and probably is grounded in post-marx marxist thought)

full disclosure i havent read chibbers intvw, and i dont know anything about post colonialism, or marxism

Taking the example of cliterectomies. If they can be linked to some socially useful function, then I could see at least some validity to the idea that another culture could value that useful function more highly than retaining non-mutilated clitorises on their females. However, if the only defense of clitorectomies is "it is something we do and we have always done this, so butt out of our affairs and get lost", then the same justification can be used for slavery, human sacrifice, cannibalism, or wearing white before Easter. iow, it can justify any action whatsoever. Such a dismissive justification basically sifts down to: whoever has the power gets to do as they please.

or to put it another way mordy i think that post-colonial analysis and "orthodox marxism" are both insufficient and both necessary to understanding politics & relationship of power? two legs of a stool, or whatever the metaphor is. they keep each other honest.

otm

sorry about "vacuous"--that's the equivalent of making fart noises in response.

the point, I like to think, is that you're always gonna be accountable for the theory you bring to bear.

Which also means you can be held accountable to Marxism!

Add: To say something is wrong because it is eurocentric is no more illuminating than to say something is wrong because it is wrong. No one has, to my knowlege, proved that a eurocentric idea must necessarily be wrong. A European may sometimes have a correct idea, value or judgement in the same way that a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut.

I think you guys (xp) are speaking to something he notes in the original interview:

JB: What made you decide to focus on subaltern studies as a way of critiquing postcolonial theory more generally?

VC: Postcolonial theory is a very diffuse body of ideas. It really comes out of literary and cultural studies, and had its initial influence there. It then spread out through area studies, history, and anthropology. It spread into those fields because of the influence of culture and cultural theory from the 1980s onwards. So, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, disciplines such as history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, and South Asian studies were infused with a heavy turn toward what we now know as postcolonial theory.

To engage the theory, you run up against a basic problem: because it’s so diffuse, it’s hard to pin down what its core propositions are, so first of all, it’s hard to know exactly what to criticize. Also, its defenders are able to easily rebut any criticisms by pointing to other aspects that you might have missed in the theory, saying that you’ve honed in on the wrong aspects. Because of this, I had to find some core components of the theory — some stream of theorizing inside postcolonial studies — that is consistent, coherent, and highly influential.

I also wanted to focus on those dimensions of the theory centered on history, historical development, and social structures, and not the literary criticism. Subaltern studies fits all of these molds: it’s been extremely influential in area studies; it’s fairly internally consistent, and it focuses on history and social structure. As a strand of theorizing, it’s been highly influential partly because of this internal consistency, but also partly because its main proponents come out of a Marxist background and they were all based in India or parts of the Third World. This gave them a great deal of legitimacy and credibility, both as critics of Marxism and as exponents of a new way of understanding the Global South. It’s through the work of the Subalternists that these notions about capital’s failed universalization and the need for indigenous categories have become respectable.

aka it's very easy to deflect critiques of post-colonialism.

'keeping each other honest' is important. this meera nanda book i skimmed was looking at the way the bjp & other indian conservatives have used various bits of theory as a conversation stopper, seemed pretty interesting even tho she was mean about my sweetheart thomas kuhn:

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1356465101l/1068966.jpg

http://www.thenation.com/article/174219/nietzsches-marginal-children-friedrich-hayek

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/05/beware-extended-family.html

I know I use the term wrongly, but if I refer to 'extended family' I tend to mean non-blood family i.e. community, friends etc.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/24/2013_failed_states_interactive_map

Guardian op-ed says failed state concept is bullshit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/28/failed-states-western-myth-us-interests
Abu Muqawama disagrees: http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2013/06/if-skills-sold-failed-states-edition.html

(I should clarify, Muqawama agrees it's not the greatest prism, but he certainly doesn't buy the Guardian's conspiratorial explanation for it.)

so i'm reading this book by tiqqun, 'introduction to civil war', and i find it really charming, and beautiful in places.

i'm not well read in french philosophy after deleuze (read some deleuze, some foucault), but from the use of a few deleuzeianisms in the book, and i think what i recognize as some agamben references, i get the impression that one of this book's main virtues is the clarity of its synthesis of all the stuff, basic-concept-wise, in anarchist-leaning european political philosophy from like the 60s to the 00s.

so does anyone know a few of the key books i could look at to situate this one? it kind of suppresses its references to its contemporaries, which i assume are mostly tacit. i kind of don't want to read hardt & negri, tried that a bit several years ago and it was boring.

bump because i'd be curious about this myself.

i'd say for "introduction to civil war" some models / texts / antecedents lurking in the background that are zippy, short, and influential might include

walter benjamin "critique of violence"
guy debord "society of the spectacle"
carl schmitt "political theology"
giorgio agamben "homo sacer"

I haven't looked at that tiqqun text in a while but I seem to recall that it keeps deploying "form of life", so to grasp that in its original formulation you should look at wittgenstein's "philosophical investigations"

(sorry if this is all sorta obvious and broad)

thanks! really is about time i read debord finally.

i was hoping for a bit more / tighter specificity before, but now i see that it's just not that kind of book. those do seem like they're probably apt recommendations unless there happen to be one or two super-specific books post-dating, say, the agamben that are important for 'civil war'.

knowing the wittgenstein, i would say that wouldn't help much (even if the prospect is exciting). they seem to use the idea (against agamben? or maybe he uses it too in connection with 'bare life') as a way of registering individuals' particularity (and particular potentials for community with particular others), in a spinozist/nietzschean spirit (esp. potentials for growth of power).

the idea of 'hostis' is pretty important for them in that first part too, i gather because they're using it as a third term in the group friend/enemy/hostile to leave room for a lack of relations. i assume the schmitt is huge there. and since 'hostis' is apparently connected historically with the idea (not one they take up) of the homo sacer, maybe this amounts to a point of difference with agamben, who knows.

i think the rehearsal of the modern state --> empire story in the second and third parts confers a lot of lucidity on what i recognize as foucaultish and deleuzean ideas about subject-formation as it's tangled up in state-formation. in particular, they work pretty elegant variations on the pair 'police, publicity' in the second part that is transformed into 'biopower, spectacle' in the third part. i like the discussion of biopower in terms of empire's role in maintaining/extending the operation of norms (as the imperial successor to the modern state's 'law'). the sharp lines drawn make the story's implications for modern/cartesian subjectivities pretty strong, too.

they have a bit to say in the discussion of biopower of how norms operate via apparatuses, so i take it that the various authors writing about that (foucault a lot in the later lectures on biopower/governmentality, deleuze in something i haven't read, agamben in a later trifle that seems not too helpful), and relatedly deleuze/guattari and their machines (a term tiqqun select sometimes) are also meant to be a point of contact. but the virtue here seems to be that those contacts are registered and not allowed to muddle things by being pursued more extensively.

as it turns out, they think negri sux so no need to read that book!

though it's partly set up by the way individuals are pictured in the first part, situationist antecedents seem strongest in the last part ('an ethic of civil war'), since the picture is basically, empire has mutilated life and deprived us of experience, if you are like us you should pursue more affectvely intense experiences as suit your individuality, but there's not much to be said about that since it's an experimental thing. (then there are some snipes at bad revolutionaries.) experiment/experience how? through realization in/of practice.

(epigraph to concluding essay: 'don't know what i want / but i know how to get it'...)

this is good -

http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2010/05/from-restricted-to-general-antagonism.html

but he uses a phrase i've seen around (i think nina power uses it in her review of the later 'young-girl' book?) and find irritating, 'so-and-so ontologizes x'.

http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2013/08/blinded-political-science-egypt.html

hey mordy (or anyone else)

do u happen to know what the (caricature) vampire castle response is to the line against it that k-punk takes here?

http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299

See the Russell Brad thread from here j.
russell brand - C or D?

dur, i was looking for some marxism thread, couldn't find, ended up here - thx

all political philosophy must now be discussed with reference to R Brand these days!

Reading Ernesto Laclau's "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time" and it's pretty great. Perhaps old hat for people better versed in this stuff than I am.

does socialism represent an eusocial impulse in the otherwise presocial human species?

i thought this was a pretty good read:
http://mccaine.org/2014/05/24/no-blood-for-oil/

what was it about WW2 that the allies could collapse the German government and not get bogged down in insurgency + some kind of WW2 version of ISIS? is it bc Germany had some experience w/ democracy prior to the Nazi takeover that they could fall back on? is it bc the US and USSR were able to keep a larger force there longer? is it bc europe didn't have the same kind of radical religious insurgency ready to step into a power vacuum? putting aside all ethics - how come we could destroy the german government and not create a huge pocket of instability + violence?

loads of bourgeois private citizens and developed local and national and international industries to reinforce an atmosphere of compliance?

Splitting the country into two ideologically distinct halves must be a factor? With a sustained occupying force in each, and 'friendly' neighbouring states.

i'm not sure what thread is best for this:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/08/01/attention_deficit_disorder_economy_nigeria_gaza_caring

interesting article i thought

I believe Bernard Stielger's recent stuff has been about something similar.

i'd like to see that - got a link?

I haven't read much of it, but this seems to be a central part of what he's doing:
http://arsindustrialis.org/disaffected-individual-process-psychic-and-collective-disindividuation

Dominic Pettman has also written on Stiegler's notion of "peak libido" in an accessible way. That's how I know about it.

q:

is 'confusion' / 'wavering' / possibly 'hovering' between something like abstractions and reality, empty metaphysical ideas and concrete life, etc etc, a pretty standard marxian complaint / point of critique?

do you mean this in the "thesis 11" sense or a Marxist complaint about competing theories not drawing that distinction clearly enough?

whew that's over my head holmes, i just mean as something marxians would generally be fond of targeting ppl / thinkers / societies with

ah, well it's an interesting question! I can't answer very well since my reading in that stuff isn't all that wide--at least in regard to those specific terms you mention.

i seem to recall the latter two terms showing up a lot in the älteste systemprogramm generation / athenaeum folx, but i think the bit about confusion might be more proper to marx? for all i know that could mean an ancestry in hegel.

you know, my guess would be that your intuition re: hegel is right. prob something in the phenomenology.

Anderson's The Imperative of Integration looks extremely good. Anyone read it?

I've been reading the Invisible Committee/Tiqqun lately with some ambivalence (and extreme skepticism about their rhetorical strategies in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl), but I was impressed with Alberto Toscano's lengthy response to their latest book, To Our Friends: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/burning-dwelling-thinking

(I was thinking of posting this to HOOS's organizing thread, but IC/T isn't exactly intersectional in their approach.)

I just noticed Mordy's question from last year:

how come we could destroy the german government and not create a huge pocket of instability + violence?

In the case of WW2 it was not only the German government which had been destroyed, but the entire infrastructure of Germany. Their military defeat was rigorous and complete. The German people were refugees within their own country, unable to feed themselves, clothe themselves or house themselves, or transport people or products without assistance from their conquerors. Cooperation was essential to survival.

Further, the allied armies of occupation were on a massive scale, numbering in the millions and able to dominate the entire country. Under the circumstances, the allies had an extremely effective monopoly on force. And don't overlook the fact that those occupation forces stayed on for decades afterward.

The last factor I'd cite in the post-WW2 era was that both Germany and Japan had a well-established culture of obedience and deference to authority which could be used to advantage during their transitions to new governmental structures.

say what you will about moldbug, he's a bright, provocative guy w/ many interests historically, geopolitically, etc, which is a preamble to saying that i was reading this series this afternoon and found it very interesting (w/ the ilx-necessary caveat that i don't agree w/ much of what he says but i still feel richer for having examined it):
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives.html

There is one difference, though. To be a Catholic, you have to have faith, because no one has ever seen the Holy Ghost. To be a progressive, you have to have trust, because you believe that your worldview accurately reflects the real world - as experienced not just by your own small eyes, but by humanity as a whole.

i can imagine there are Catholics for whom the truths behind their beliefs are less important than their belief that Catholicism = morality. prove that God does not exist and they would still adhere to Catholicism because they believe it is the best way to be in the world.

i can extend the same idea to "progressives" - some of them may well believe not that their political opinions are true but that they are moral.

i'm not convinced by any arguments that morality is a product of rationality.

and inasmuch as political beliefs are moral beliefs, the attempt to rationalize them is at best disingenuous imo

interesting bc i feel like you could make the opposite argument easily (that moral beliefs are political beliefs) obv both terms are "fraught"

oh sure i think you could, i don't know if that's the opposite argument, i'm saying that i think politics and morality are very much intertwined

and neither are really grounded in the kind of scientific truth system that Moldbug claims to believe can be applied to history

for sure here are some problems w/ it: his pseudo-structuralist reading of history, the kind of inauguration into the 'truth' tone he strikes - like i think he observes certain things that maybe trouble contemporary political identities in productive ways, but i don't find his conclusions satisfying

i'm still picking thru and that was the first thing that struck me, tho i agree re: political identities - he's not creating Straw Catholics or Straw Progressives as such, but he's taking one kind of believer as representative of everybody who shares the label

i guess this struck me because of a cross-thought from the Guardian thread - for a lot of years now i've abandoned any effort to argue that my political beliefs are "correct" in a way that wd tally with scientism/positivism/whatever the best term here wd be - and i don't find positivist analyses of history/sociology/power relationships v. convincing either

Catholics are Catholics because they were raised catholic or are Tony Blair

there is that also obv but in this case they're just standing in for whatever metaphysical belief system you care to consider

tbf standing waiting to receive belief is part of the formation of a Catholics

if some kind of morality is embedded in our nature surely it's pre-rational (even if the two things happen to overlap sometimes)

From Guardian thread (since discussion seems to have moved here):

i wonder if being "right" or speaking "truth" is an important part of politics

Prob "values" (morality, ethics, one's hierarchy of "goods" or "ends") is primordial. Philosophers' efforts to identify "good" and "truth"/"reason" (or derive former from latter) not very successful. (But some of those efforts have had powerful political effects-- some "good,” some “bad.”)

But if politics is about praxis in the world to enact or meet or work toward those ends (insofar as they are practicable), then empirical social reality (and our corresponding knowledge or theorizing of it) v relevant-- anthropological, historical, socioeconomic, etc. And there concepts of "correctness" and "truth" have use and relevance. Fact/ value distinction is imo valid and irreducible; but on the other hand fact/value totally and inextricably intertwined.

Dunno, when it comes to the role of "reason" in politics I find myself wavering between like Rorty and Habermas (not clicking with either). Pragmatist post-Wittgensteinian theory gives you a way to think about politics (or have conversations about politics) but it doesn't help in terms of "what is to be done."

Moldburg does get at something important, that “values” are not just about morality (or truth) but involve cultural and aesthetic factors, like Rorty’s ethnocentrism and Wittgenstein’s “form of life.”

Just read part 1 (will read more). Moldbug's thought-provoking in a good way, but there's a lot to contest (in his premises let alone conclusions). For instance-- though I know the oversimplified dichotomy is intended-- presenting (American) conservatism and progressivism as utterly distinct viruses misses one of the things I find most interesting, their intertangled genealogy & ideology. Going back e.g. to Edmund Burke, or what it means today to be a "liberal" ("classical" or "progressive"; European or American meaning; etc.).

There's a strain of skepticism in conservatism that's imo salutary; as Moldbug says, you doesn't have to be or become a conservative to get something out of reading some (intelligent) voices on the right-- if only to better recognize your own biases and unexamined premises, not falling back on kneejerk political judgments. I've found that to be true in my case.

in some ways i think he's very damning of the right-wing, that they always ultimately sanction yesteryears progressive struggles, that there is no such thing as a revolutionary guerrilla right-wing movement (he discusses franco as a possible exception), that a lot of right wing power is illusory and easily crushed and that judging from history, it has not really put the brakes on its dialectical opposite. i'm more inclined to read these dialectics deconstructively - this is a piece of derrida's that i always liked about the mechanics of nations forgiving themselves: http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-05-24/news/the-global-theater-of-forgiveness/

imagine my surprise when i get to part 5 of this and it turns out i've been living in the theological heart of the cathedral the entire time - twist!

and now he's talking about israel + hamas so obv this was meant to be

Made it through part 3, plan to continue. He's a trip (lol a jacobite!)-- lots to argue with, lots to chew on. Feel I need to read a little further before commenting on his definition of left vs. right and his philosophy of history.

i'm embarrassed to admit i dreamt about this essay a bunch last night

image from harlem that feels relevant to moldbug's major theological claims

https://jewishphilosophyplace.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/012.jpg?w=1280&h=960

get why this is fun and it links to some interesting primary sources but it is also just the first half of the republic (you wouldn't elect a ship captain! not in a proper navy! you would use standardized tests!) with some attached nixonian muttering about new england. (in its analysis of a century stealthily dominated first by ivy-league communist flunkies of that-man and then by the weather underground it doesn't have a word to say about the ~50 years skull and bones spent setting up juntas everywhere; "i wonder why." it also reduces reagan to this single phrase, in a list of minor exceptions to the rule of right-wing failure and irrelevance: "he got his military buildup." haha.) its ideas about the camouflage (or seen another way, diffusion) of a specific strain of protestantism are probably more otm than not, but it's wrong to act like the present ruling ideology has not also been diffused into plenty by a different and harsher strain, one no less eager to call theology science. he keeps talking admiringly about how "shockingly to the right" of today everything from the past is, by which he mostly seems to mean that people were more interested in metrical justifications for racism, because in other ways the mainstream american intellectual climate of the early-to-mid-20c was well to the left of that of the early 21c. (his grandparents, he says half a dozen times, were cpusa activists; he's a monarchist blogger whose go-to example of a good dictatorial candidate is fringe pariah steve jobs. but all the other american families have been dragged left, i guess.) at the same time he talks as if the allied-soviet pact and its accompanying popular-front uncle-joe propaganda were evidence of washington's abiding love for stalinism rather than something that appeared when hitler invaded russia and disappeared when he was defeated--as if FDR's infernal reign was actually lefter than it was.

surprised he gets through the whole thing without talking much about augustus, who i would have thought was the ideal model for the lasting purgation of republican sclerosis, but i guess people don't think much of him cuz he accomplished the whole thing with ridiculous orwellian lies, which don't ring like a bell when struck with your dick. irl tho if america ever did somehow reconstitute itself as an absolute dictatorship it would be in exactly this way, so if i were a "restorationist" in search of a responsible technocrat to ruthlessly redesign the state i'd probably hope for another one of him (maybe with better sperm) before i'd hope for frederick or the king of lichtenstein. (cognitive dissonance is always unattractive but in practice i don't think the alleged perpetuation of the republic actually much interfered with roman reverence for the imperator, or with the Moral Strength needed for all that great stuff like building tall things and stomping people.) there shoulda been more gibbon here in general, honestly, espesh considering the big twist was that xtians did it. he should have cut out the parts about how future monarchical authority over the military will be assured by putting electronic code-locks on all small arms, and put in some gibbon.

american blacks are not a protected samurai-style upper class.

the pobedonostev quotes i admit impressed me; pobedonostsev is some deep reaction. i like his book too. longtime unrealized project: pen-and-paper rpg campaign set in a version of 19c russia wherein slavic mythological creatures co-exist with late-imperial politics; big bad is koschei the deathless in the form of pobedonoststev.

(sorry, should not conflate the uncle-joe wartime-allies phase with the pre-molotov/ribbentrop popular-front phase. still tho: in general this essay did not take the cold war seriously enough.)

still slowly making my way through this and would like to say something about it tomorrow, but don't know where to start. enjoyed dlh's response.

i love this fuckin guy

After four loping and windy installments, I thought this week I'd vary the formula. Instead of an open letter to open-minded progressives at large, this is an open letter to just one: Charles Stross, the science-fiction writer.

So there is no Nazi Wikipedia, but there could be. There is no Confederate Wikipedia, but there could be. And there is no Jacobite Wikipedia, but there could be.

A1 posts dlh, bless you, and let me have a copy of that rpg

dlh, i wonder if you have thoughts re dugin who seems much smarter than moldbug to me and also more relevant to yr theoretical russian RPG project

wrote like four medium-sized posts here over the past 4 days but all of them were p much bluffing, we need sharivari. posting this one so i can go back to posting transcriptions of dylan intonations without shame

i think the at bottom orthodox idea that russia has preserved the roman flame for eventual return to the corrupted catholicapitalist west is still v deep there; i think pobedonoststev's notion of a properly authoritarian orthodox east locked in 1812-style combat with an atomized bourgeois west was shared on the 19c left (cf the idea that the russian peasant village contained a Primitive Communism smothered--but preserved!--beneath petrine westernizations, the precapitalist mediterranean's gift to russia, soon to be russia's gift to the world) and by the soviets. lenin was the furthest thing from a russian nationalist, but the beef-swollen cartoon plutocrats in bolshevik propaganda are not slavs. and the necessity of revolution in germany and italy meant that it was extremely important to lenin that the new ussr come out of the civil war with a western border at least as far as warsaw; he was shaken when it didn't. (comrade socialism-in-one-country got his back on that tho, eventually, ironically.) so uh anyway my vague impression of dugin is that he is prob pretty realistic about russia's enduring political+emotional appetite for the empire it lost, found, and lost again, especially if you link it, and i mean how could you not, to a sense of moral combat against the rotted+floundering west. this just happens over and over again. i don't even mean to say it's some special russian thing because who doesn't like empire and teaching your neighbors a thing or two; and these days the russian ultra-right is ideologically strong for the same reasons the islamic ultra-right is. (and they feed each other, and they both feed ours.) moldbug's brand of IT-guy reaction (so allergic to vox populi) is nowhere near as pragmatically attuned as dugin's to the actual mass excitements and hatreds that remain the garmonbozia of the actually-successful right moldbug doesn't believe exists; but he does go in for plenty of my-god-these-animals rational-boy racism, so it's not like he's totally spurning traditional american power sources.

that's a major flaw i think in moldbug - he wants the authoritarianism but without the populist support (and fervent emotions) required to bring it about. In his perfect world I think a majority of society would intellectually come to the conclusion that authoritarian governance is better than democracy and would petition/protest for a shift but that's a totally insane thing to work towards.

i mean, a major pragmatic flaw in his program. there are much more severe moral flaws imo.

it doesnt seem that insane tbh! i mean its morally insane but--its basically what capital works toward right?

i just meant insane to expect to foment political change by appealing to the mass's intellect

yeah sure. but appeal to our love of stability and uninterrupted food supply!

maybe if the current system decays to the point where we're dealing w/ real instability + food shortages

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/19/blame-theory/

^thoughtprovoking; i’m sympathetic to much of it. (also liked another post from same blog you linked before, re whether some political phenomena are akin to religion. going to (ab)use that analogy myself here.)

some rambling halfdrunk tltr (seriously way tltr) thoughts:

agree (albeit in much more qualified & problematized way) that people— in this case academics— are “fundamentally good,” i.e. distressed by others’ suffering. SA argues that significant motive for western academic geopolitical “self-blame” (beyond theoretical or empirical merits of such etiology) is to resolve cognitive-ethical dissonance— to reconcile urgency to help others with our notions of “duty.”

bracketing (for sake of current arg) theoretical/ empirical merits of such etiology, i’d say 1) there’s something to this but also 2) more primordial motive is to make sense of suffering (others’ suffering as much as our own), find/ give meaning or reason to it. in other cultures or contexts, that might involve very different etiologies, teleologies, or ways to find/ give meaning. this intersects terrain covered on other recent ilx threads (e.g. problem of evil, theodicy, free will vs determinism, etc). there is something essentially “therapeutic” about such sense-making of suffering (even “scientific” explanation), whether it’s greek tragedy’s catharsis or marxist critique.

as nietzsche puts it in OGM (concerned precisely with genealogy of guilt etc.):

What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering: but neither for the Christian, who has interpreted a whole mysterious machinery of salvation into suffering, nor for the naïve man of more ancient times, who understood all suffering in relation to the spectator of it or the causer of it, was there any such thing as senseless suffering. So as to abolish hidden, undetected, unwitnessed suffering from the world and honestly to deny it, one was in the past virtually compelled to invent gods and genii of all the heights and depths, in short something that roams even in secret, hidden places, sees even in the dark, and will not easily let an interesting painful spectacle pass unnoticed. For it was with the aid of such inventions that life then knew how to work the trick which it has always known how to work, that of justifying itself, of justifying its “evil.” Nowadays it might require other auxiliary inventions.

SA expresses surprise that western academic explanation would take form of western self-blame (“naively we would expect people to cast themselves and those like them in as positive a light as possible”), but actually this isn’t surprising: for (post)judeochristian culture— even after “death of god”— guilt & the confession/ expiation of guilt, original sin etc., are deeply embedded paradigms for experiencing & making sense of (otherwise senseless) suffering.

cf e.g. anthropogenic climate change. on the one hand, there’s the scientific theory, scientific consensus, empirical corroboration, delimitation of explanation (and political advocacy based on current science). on the other hand, you find many in the west immediately adducing climate change to account for any natural catastrophe, even those which responsible scientists don’t find reason to ascribe to climate change.

on the one hand, there’s the science. on the other hand, there’s the urge to resort to quasi-religious sense-making/ blame-ascribing when confronted with great suffering in ANY case of natural catastrophe— whether or not it’s scientifically legitimate to claim, in the particular case, that the catastrophe is “anthropogenic” (our fault) or just “natural” “act of god” (or “act of planet,” planet of perpetual continuous catastrophe, from before human existence to after human extinction).

it’s more therapeutic to find reason to blame “ourselves” (original sin of the west, capitalism, etc)— to find reason— whether this is supported by science or not in the particular case, than face utter senselessness of horrendous suffering.

but also note how this therapeutic quasi-christian machinery of guilt enables relief or evasion from responsibility, too. guilt can be dealt with through confession or casuistry. cf eco-evangelist eco-warrior hollywood actors flitting to and fro on private planes.

also note how trickily guilt/blame can slide from self to other. for an academic to blame the “capitalist west” is as abstract & detached a form of self-blame as original sin or christ’s crucifixion is for the christian: it’s my sin in the sense that i inherit it, am complicit in it. yet (intuitively) i’m not personally responsible; i’m caught up in the postlapsarian (or capitalist) “system.”

so it’s all too easy to slide from self-guilt to other-blaming (or scapegoating): e.g. to blame the jews (or jewish bankers, etc).

so there’s a dark side to the western academic self-blame thing (on analogy of christian guilt machinery): e.g. facile shift to scapegoating, and relief/ evasion from personal responsibility. latter intersects with SA’s point about deontology. one thing about deontology is that it stops at the water’s edge, so to speak: i must act in accordance with my moral duty; i fulfill my duty by doing the “right” thing; but the unintended consequences of such an act don’t really fall in deontology’s purview. what counts, what’s in my power, is acting in accordance with a proper moral intention. if the arrow of my action doesn’t hit its mark (and instead, unfortunately, accidentally, hits something else)— that’s not so much deontology’s concern.

here’s where SA’s appeal to utilitarianism (or more widely, consequentialism) hits the mark for me. the western academic (on analogy of christian) makes sense of suffering through machinery of guilt, and relieves her guilt through confession/ critique. no doubt there’s something really genuinely good about urge thereby to help suffering others. but too often what takes precedence is the therapeutic deontological self-absolving: doing/ writing “the right thing” with “good intentions”— less concern with actual empirical consequences of political theory or action. (there’s some lineage here to the “beautiful soul” which i’m too lazy to trace right now.) this is one reason why it’s salutary for leftwing thinkers to read rightwing critique (and vice versa of course, but rightwing’s blind spots tend to be of different nature)— to have their “good” intentions and “good” self-critical (i.e. critical of west/capitalism) theorizing confronted with discrepant empirical realities and consequences.

on the other hand, utilitarianism unchecked by deontology is abhorrent. this leads to end-justifying-means calculations which (depending on who’s doing the calculating) are all too likely to come down to goal of gaining brute/absolute political power over individuals.

would read a blog post psychologizing those who feel the need for elaborate justifications of their disinclination for (what they perceive as) left wing "theory." talk about moving guilt around!

(just leaving aside the weird and confused notion of "theory" at work in that blog post)

i like a lot of that - particularly re this "i inherit it, am complicit in it. yet (intuitively) i'm not personally responsible" in the sense that objection both fulfills the moral criteria ("not in my name") while obviating the need to directly confront the areas that the subject personally benefits from injustice such that in its most hypocritical state you see academics who rail against all types of injustices, but won't support adjunct unionization.

the one thing i particularly liked about the op was how generous i think the pov is that yr ideological opponent sincerely believes in their values, and aren't cynically lying about what they feel/think is true. and that more importantly, that ppl's values are often the same (i think this blog talks elsewhere about u ethically agreeing w/ salem witch hunters that witches that curse the land should be put to death - you just disagree that these are witches, or that witches exist, etc. ie - what is bad about these ppl aren't their values, but how those values are expressed).

xp to drash. ryan's ideological anxiety not so interesting ;)

ryan, i think more directly he is asking an important question about the far left - what do they gain from objecting to the very states, communities, etc that they live in. ie if you assume that members of larger social groups feel loyalty towards that group, why doesn't this one? one answer these ppl might give is that they are actually hyper loyal to the values proclaimed by the society, and therefore feel obligated to object to the society that doesn't honor those values (this is the 'protest is patriotic' argument). this might be true but is suspiciously self-serving. a cynical right-wing response might be that liberals have 'white guilt,' some kind of unprocessed psychological trauma (u hear this argument often in reverse too - that right-wingers are inflicted by paranoia, etc). the value of this post's answer is that by treating it as a deontological/utilitarian problem u don't have to either dehumanize either side of the argument - they have logical differences that account for various ideological differences. as opposed to being somehow emotionally crippled.

ryan, i acknowledge confusion of my own thinking here-- and am NOT exempting myself from any of the psychological motivations here. (i'm largely sympathetic to and partisan of "left wing theory" but tbh have a lot of issues too. i'm definitely NOT speaking from any place of superior political or ethical knowledge, judgment, or clarity. there's a lot of tension, doubt, uncertainty, confusion in my political thinking, i admit it.)

nb i was careful at the start to "bracket" theoretical or empirical validity of (leftwing) theory, just as SA's original blogpost did.

ps not just not exempting; a lot of my description of the academic here (eg re the academic's confessional self-critique) is... my own confessional self-critique. i'm not moving guilt around-- i admittedly don't know how to deal with my own "guilt."

the one thing i particularly liked about the op was how generous i think the pov is that yr ideological opponent sincerely believes in their values, and aren't cynically lying about what they feel/think is true. and that more importantly, that ppl's values are often the same

the value of this post's answer is that by treating it as a deontological/utilitarian problem u don't have to either dehumanize either side of the argument - they have logical differences that account for various ideological differences

otm, i appreciate that aspect (perspective or interpretive principle— which is also, in a way, an ethical principle) to this blogger’s thinking. seems unusual?

also, if we are to uphold value of critique then, damn, let us always take care to submit ourselves (the various “ourselves”) to critique— all the more precisely where we least think critique is called for (e.g. motives and mechanisms of contemporary critique).

i love consequence ethics, so many excuses for human sacrifice whilst you feel good about humanity

yeah I dont see why the latter seems to be a deliberate aim here

Many people have remarked on the paradox of an academia made mostly of upper-class ethnic-majority Westerners trying so very hard to find reasons why lots of things are the fault of upper-class ethnic-majority Westerners.

lol @ "trying so very hard". it's not very hard!

if you assume that members of larger social groups feel loyalty towards that group, why doesn't this one?

why is group loyalty something to take as basic?

or better: why is group loyalty to any group smaller than all people something to value rather than oppose, as a source of war/suffering/exclusion?

or all living things

or all things

which is just to say no group loyalty

these are axes of individualism vs communitarianism & debates amongst these typically assume some answer to one of these questions re. particular historical communities e.g.

& the "far left" perhaps doesn't buy this assumption. & why should that be what demands accounting ("oh, they're just suffering guilty" or whatever) rather than those who assume the importance of particular group loyalties?

lol @ "trying so very hard". it's not very hard!

i agree with that (which is not to say all those reasons are necessarily valid; no doubt many are)

why is group loyalty something to take as basic?

good salient question (assuming one takes "basic" to mean philosophically/ morally basic, rather than historically/ sociologically/ psychologically basic)

(nb it’s possible to consider “group loyalty” as basic phenomenon but any particular form of group loyalty as arbitrary/ contingent)

why is group loyalty to any group smaller than all people something to value rather than oppose, as a source of war/suffering/exclusion?

that’s even better question (and point),

but "no group loyalty" seems to imply a kind of abstract universalism which i don't think far left (at present) finds congenial, either

i've recommended it many times around here but reinhart koselleck's Critique and Crisis is a really important text in this case because it shows how something like a "critical" pov became differentiated from politics (and therefore power). koselleck argues that once politics is distinguished from an "absolute morality" centered in the subject then something like "critique" locates for itself an observational position that is not entangled or determined by what it is observing (that is, society). ever since then critical theory has sought perspectives from what you might call the "outside," the proletarian subject being of course the paradigm case. the reason why academics who engage in theory are so keen to denounce their "own" society is because its this gesture which enables their whole critical project in the first place! it's what "authenticates" and secures their ability to do Theory. you have to locate a "subject" (whether that word is used or not) somewhere from which you can do the observing.

and, of course, Theory itself (or critique) isn't domesticated in this process because it reflexively discovers (after the fact) how contingent (ie, embedded in the very society it presumes to critique) those critical observations really are---hence a sort of arm's race you see sometimes, "my oppressed is more oppressed than your oppressed."

so, for me, what's at issue here isn't "guilt" (unless by guilt you mean the status of the unobserved observer making the critique possible) but the more or less inevitable development of a mode of communication identified by koselleck.

lol ryan you should really read that sloterdijk 'critique'

i really should!

it's got fart jokes

sold

I just farted btw

i bought it as an undergraduate (god knows why or what i thought it was, i think i saw it in a barnes and noble) and it has been sitting on my shelf ever since.

fucker has a lotta pages, hope there are a lot of fart jokes

point taken that the academic left has theoretical reasons (which is imo a more cynical explanation than the ops) but i don't think that is what is animating the vast majority of the left who ime are coming from a more - idk - like sensational affect phenomenology. it is painful to see someone suffer, you want to do something to help with that, but most ppl* feel that "charity starts at home," so focusing on how yr responsible for their suffering is a neat way to bridge that gap.

* admittedly this resonates w/ me atm bc i've been reading about dolphin social groupings and the gombe chimpanzee war where i think these tribal loyalties are so crystalized

some about jerkin it too

haven't seen any about farting while jerkin it

but there are a lotta pages left

http://www.vice.com/read/undergrads-today-are-the-worst-a-tas-confession

find this weird though:

the reason why academics who engage in theory are so keen to denounce their "own" society is because its this gesture which enables their whole critical project in the first place

*the* reason? rather than academics who engage in theory living in ~the west~ and thus being first-party to their society's exploitations?

strikes me as sorta like "I pushed my car off a cliff for the excellent photo opportunity!"

sterl: accurate

who don't have the time of day for anyone who can't immediately process obtuse burns about Heidegger or whatever. Basically, professional philosophers are the worst people.

*the* reason? rather than academics who engage in theory living in ~the west~ and thus being first-party to their society's exploitations?

i think if you take "theory" to be a particular form of societal self-description then yeah distinguishing yourself from that society in order to describe it seems like a necessary move. i dont think this distinction has to be negative a la "denounce" but that's the way the particular tradition we're talking about often works. i think this form of theory from the start doesn't identify with western society--that's its whole raison d'etre!

a good example of a theorist who refused to do this and got all kinds of hell for it is richard rorty.

anyway, im dodging the question, which is why western academics are drawn to do this in the first place--but in rortyan terms think there's a good ethnocentric reason for that in koselleck! or "what is enlightenment?" even!

thanks for koselleck recommendation

Ryan I've read most of irony solidarity & contingency but I don't quite understand how rorty is more(?) ethnocentric?

Can u recommend a critique that deals w that?

sure: Rorty's own "On Ethnocentrism" in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. what i mean when i call him ethnocentric is that i think he's very forthright about his unwillingness to locate a place for critique outside of society...so the only to do is "draw a moral" (as he would put it) based on our cultural values as best we can seeing as it is impossible to locate ourselves outside of them and thus judge them from an "absolute." in turn, i think a very good critique of this ethnocentric position can be found in Tom Cohen's Anti-Mimesis. it's a thorny issue.

Rorty otm? as a complete outsider to "theory" I'm surprised they've staked out a position so at odds with Nietzsche; Rorty's view is by contrast straight out of Nietzsche. I should read Rorty (I loved his late sartorial style (blue pants e.g., church lady chic), my aspiration when I'm 80 or whatever)

Rorty's view is by contrast straight out of Nietzsche

a version of nietzsche, a version of wittgenstein, a version of heidegger

haven't read rorty in a long time (since undergrad days), should reread. it's a strange situation (or strange relation to philosopher): iirc i found him very congenial, almost too congenial, to my own thinking, intuitions, situation-- but maybe for that reason (unfairly) don't take him or read him seriously enough. funny, if i were asked to pick philosopher closest to my own views, rorty would be one of those to come to mind-- yet feel great disengagement from him. it's like he articulates in plain language metaphysical situation as i see it-- but there's something too easy, too readable, too facile, disappointing about his overall philosophy/ response (though it's not like i've read anything more convincing, either). like lol he's not tortured & complicated & mystifying enough. (and offers v little help in tackling thorny political problems, though i don't necessarily expect that from a philosopher.)

his appeal to/ avowal of 'ethnocentrism' (along with its metaphysical ungroundedness) is compelling (hits close to home for me), yet ultimately seems simplistic

one great thing about rorty is how seriously he takes "literature" (and relation of philosophy & literature), though iirc his literary readings are not particularly profound

i <3 stanley cavell more

euler otm about his style. attended a talk once; very charming witty man.

like lol he's not tortured & complicated & mystifying enough. (and offers v little help in tackling thorny political problems, though i don't necessarily expect that from a philosopher.)

my own take on rorty (in my forthcoming book!) piggyback's off cohen's argument to argue something not terribly far from this. more or less that while he's otm about the conditions of our thinking his appeal to ethnocentrism is too straightforward because that space rests on a logic of exclusion to which it remains blind. that's the short version, but you sorta see the outcome of this when he dismisses the likes of foucault and other european thinkers as "private ironists" with little useful to say about the social space.

in any case, rorty is a uniquely useful thinker because he's a congenitally clear one, and he's willing to following his argument through to it's logically extreme conclusion. i used to not like his thought very much, but his unfrozen caveman american philosopher routine has grown on me a lot.

sorry for garbled posts. i think i am ever so slightly dyslexic and when i write too fast it comes out weird--hopefully the meaning can be inferred!

agree with your posts. would be v interested to read your book!

his unfrozen caveman american philosopher routine

lol (& otm)

that is, am v interested; would read

ok here's my question:

in the United States, despite some exceptions, the left and right are pretty well understood. the right-wing is in favor of less government regulation and involvement in the market (at least ideologically, let's put aside whether right-wing capitalism is actually as govt hands-off as it purports to be), and more government involvement in social and foreign affairs issues. by contrast the left, generally speaking, is against government involvement in social and foreign affairs but in favor of more government involvement in the economy. obv this very general statement has a lot of holes in it- eg what do you do w/ libertarians? do these ideologies really correspond to the actual policies promoted by different political groups that self-identify as right or left-wing, etc. so my question is really on the most superficial level - is it incidental that the two primary methods of self-identification have lined up this way? is there an alternate reality where the two parties are more consistent on issues of govt involvement (one party against govt involvement in the economy, foreign affairs, social issues, and one party pro govt involvement in all the above), or that they align differently? or are there good reasons why, in the US at the very least, history has lined them up in this particular configuration?

have-lots vs have not-so-muches

what does that mean? i don't understand how it answers my question.

is your question, are there good reasons for ~history~

because

are there good reasons to have these particular facets bundled together like this (like a consistent ideology motivating each constellation of ideas) or is it an accident of history

there's an obvious power bloc in Western democracies whose interests align with having as little as possible government interference in the economy and regulation of business - the source of their wealth and power is directly tied up with the development of government by representative democracy.

why this same group favours more expansionist foreign policy = trade, resources, overseas markets

And domestic social interference? Doesn't seem like a good fit for unbridled capitalism

one wants ones workers well-behaved, sober and fit for duty.

otoh tho we see US corporations more-or-less lining up behind a progressive social agenda vis-a-vis diversity issues

to some extents tho these are facts of history - 18th century capitalism was not necessarily the friend of free markets for example

there's a distinct split in right wing parties across the West between a libertarian and a paternalist wing now

I don't really know about history in US, but in Denmark, the main right-wing party is called Venstre, which means 'The Left'. They were the lefties, the radicals, the freedom-demanding bourgeoisie, against the conservative monarchist right, called simply Konservative. Of course, with the workers party, Socialdemokraterne, everything switched left.

But back then, it kinda alligned: The Left, the bourgeoisie, was for free markets, and were against censorship, religion, etc. The Right was monarchistic, clerical, national, etc.

that alignment makes more natural sense to me - it's more internally consistent

similar situation in England, made slightly more fraught by having a constitutional monarch, which meant both original parties supported a version of royalty

today's right wing economic orthodoxy is a fairly recent development compared to the parties that have adopted it

there's an obvious power bloc in Western democracies whose interests align with having as little as possible government interference in the economy and regulation of business - the source of their wealth and power is directly tied up with the development of government by representative democracy.

why do poor people vote for right wing parties then? plz don't say false consciousness

false consciousness

lol

maybe bc wealth is a requirement for becoming cosmopolitan - affording rent/ownership in a big city, trips to other parts of the world, engagement w/ business in other countries, etc - whereas there is no similar mechanism for the poor to move from tribal/nationalism/protectionism?

i don't like simple false consciousness arguments, but i think there are complex arguments to account for people failing to act in their own best interests

also i think the best interests argument is often very limited? it generally means best economic interests but there's no reason to think that humans are always more motivated by economic success than by religious beliefs. like when obama made the famous "clinging to arms + bible" comment, he was suggesting that they only find value in those things bc they aren't finding value from participation in the economy. but i think there are lots of reasons to believe that ppl are motivated by more than how much money they're making.

sure, but even in the economic sphere there's plenty of examples of "i will spend this money on having fun tonight even tho i know i'm going to need it to get thru the rest of the month"

long term thinking and big picture thinking are probly not natural human skills on the whole

It has a lot to do with social standing, I think. It has a lot to do with cultural identity, with group identity. It's like that old joke, which I witnessed in person once: When a holocaust survivor, a German-American university teacher, was asked if he wanted to be called German, American or Jewish, he answered: 'Professor.' He had a professional identity, which trumped his cultural one.

Of course, the nobility, the old Right, never had professional identities, that was the entire point, that they had their power from their personal, familial, historical identities. For the bourgeoisie, professional identity can take over. For the working classes, it becomes much harder, especially once the value of labor becomes so immensely devalued as it has been over the last decades.

So yeah, cultural, 'moral' values is important to old money and no money alike.

interesting question which i've thought about but don't have good answer to
do think political/ideological constellations (& their relationship to parties) change, reorganize, & are to significant extent historically contingent (e.g. affected by events)

but it's dense, many-stranded historical contingency, which makes those constellations, looked at synchronically, seem overdetermined (when genealogical investigation wd show it's not)
elements diverging & coalescing for different reasons at different times
interesting to trace, for example, what happened over time to constellation 'classical liberal'

btw not sure yr (admittedly superficial) characterization of current left/right in america (of course diff in diff countries) is quite accurate, in particular re less/more government involvement in 'social' affairs

e.g. an nra supporter, concerned about religious liberty, who wants option of home-schooling kids, is (in significant respect) not for more but less government involvement in 'social' sphere
maybe as over time mainstream culture & gov't has become more 'progressive'; so social conservatives wd seek or feel more of an alliance with libertarians (though of course it's uneasy tense relationship)

alliances/coalitions seem more like products of 2 party systems where there's little mileage in forming a breakaway party than in more plural proprortionally representative systems

well... except I think parliamentary systems see a lot of the same alliances. At least, I think so. UK ILXORs, am I wrong?

I don't think the left/right wing formulation is that universal globally or historically, it is v clearly contingent

good old habermas

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/16/merkel-gambling-away-germanys-reputation-over-greece-says-habermas

http://www.politique-actu.com/dossier/different-story-what-shaped-america-gordon-wood/1399328/

(link doesn't work but found article)
v interesting, thx
just the kind of thing i was thinking of re complicated & contingent divergings & coalescings
tangentially related, reminded of this interesting episode in american history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

http://queenmobs.com/2015/11/looking-for-optimism-finding-pessimism-on-salons-recent-interview-of-slavoj-zizek-and-his-turn-to-harsh-realism/

The world is hell. My vision, basically, in religious terms — though I’m atheist, of course — is some kind of Protestant view of the fallen world. It’s all one big horror. I despise Leftists who think, you know, violence is just an effect of social alienation, blah, blah, blah; once we will get communism, people will live in harmony. No, human nature is absolutely evil and maybe with a better organization of society we could control it a little bit.

a very gloomy, dystopian view of the future of europe from niall ferguson:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/paris-attacks-fall-of-rome-should-be-a-warning-to-the-west/story-e6frg6zo-1227609985667

melodramatic nonsense?

violence is just an effect of social alienation, blah, blah, blah

i love how u can see this and just KNOW who it's coming from

xp he's been writing the same article for a while http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/10/empire200610

Misanthropy's one of those luxuries the ruling class get to enjoy

http://sethfrantzman.com/2015/11/17/excusing-terror-paris-beirut-and-shingal/

The excuses and explanations are a deceptive explanation. When you ask deeper questions, such as how it is possible that “poverty” leads people to massacre poor students in Garissa, or kids in Peshawar, the awful nature of the excuses are revealed. The men who killed kids in Pakistan, or bomb Shia mosques or Ahmadi minorities, they are not “alienated”, they are killing the alienated minorities and harming the weakest members of society.

I think that piece is wrong in assuming ISIS attacks in Beirut don't relate to Lebanon foreign politics, poverty, demography etc but am NO expert. But p sure that the rise of ISIS is closely linked to Iraqi infrastructure, demography, etc etc. But maybe I'm missing some point, just skimmed the article (not because I'm not interested but because at work so limited time).

I agree that "excusing" does not seem a great idea in itself, but "understanding" maybe crucial to addressing the issue (to whatever extent it's possible to address it)

this part seems a bit radical, but again I'm no expert:

Terrorists aren’t “alienated”, they are empowered, and they are the wealthier ones who want to take the life of others. Their sense of entitlement and privilege causes them to want to commit wonton murder. It was the same with the Red Brigades and Beider-Meinhof and going all the way back to the 19th century Anarchists.

there has been some research to suggest that terrorists are better educated, wealthier:
https://newrepublic.com/article/91841/does-poverty-cause-terrorism

Enough evidence is accumulating that it is fruitful to begin to conjecture why participation in terrorism and political violence is apparently unrelated--or positively related--to individuals' income and education. The standard economic model of crime suggests that those with the lowest value of time should engage in criminal activity. But we would hypothesize that in most cases terrorism is less like property crime and more like a violent form of political engagement. More-educated people from privileged backgrounds are more likely to participate in politics, probably in part because political involvement requires some minimum level of interest, expertise, commitment to issues, and effort, all of which are more likely if people are educated enough and prosperous enough to concern themselves with more than economic subsistence. These factors could outweigh the effect of opportunity cost on individuals' decisions to become involved in terrorism.

I should probably have included the next paragraph as well:

The demand side for terrorists must be considered as well as the supply side. Terrorist organizations may prefer highly educated individuals over less-educated ones, even for suicide bomb attacks. In addition, educated middle-class or upper-class individuals are better suited to carry out acts of international terrorism than are impoverished illiterates, because the terrorists must fit into a foreign environment to be successful. This consideration suggests that terrorists who threaten economically developed countries will disproportionately be drawn from the ranks of the relatively well off and highly educated.

Good points, never thought abt that

Hm, it seems mostly just speculation to me? Most western countries have enough impoverished foreigners for anyone to fit in... I also think for the first point, we might be confusing religion and politics again. Yeah, the middle class will be most political, but the poorer classes will be more likely to go with religious fanaticism (I think).

For me it's not really about the immigrants in France being 'poor', and therefore choosing terror, but they're clearly marginalized. And this is not just about marginalization leading to terror, of even more importance seems to me to be that they are so marginalized, so shuffled off to the side and left alone, that the security agency's have lost control of them.

I've started to notice right-wing nativists using the language of "indigenous studies." My question is: If switching the X in "We are the indigenous people of X" turns it from a liberation statement to a racist statement, maybe the entire paradigm is of little value outside political expediency?

I haven't really reviewed the studies on whether suicide bombers mostly come from the poor or middle class or whatever, but I do think it's worth considering whether the "disaffected" people who might join terrorist groups could be disaffected on account of something other than pure material conditions.

ISIS, for example, provides a very tidy answer to the question "what is my life for?" as well as the promise of adventure and the potential for a glorious death.

Sorry those two posts were a little more disjointed from each other than I thought when I wrote them.

i think generally the left is less sympathetic to existential disaffection than material alienation

mordy, i think you're right re: identity politics and political expediency. not sure i've ever found that particular faustian bargain worth making but the alternative is a total deconstruction of "race" that just doesn't seem to get any purchase outside of academics and high brow philosophy.

see also derrida on the "assinity" of "the animal" as a category that in effect erases the near infinite differences among living beings.

Mordy, maybe that's true of the American left, but elsewhere one finds other preoccupations (e.g. Sartre)

the academic left? i mean sartre was not very popular among activists when i was in school - moreso among lit ppl

been wanting to read this forever:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Vxte4wdtL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I don't know about activists in the USA, I'm just observing that there's a left elsewhere and that existential concerns remain important there, even when the participants are largely atheist (though cf. e.g. Lévinas and Ricoeur)

i think material deprivation in the US has become the primary focus though obv these other concerns aren't inconsequential. from my perspective the problem w. existential alienation is that there is no fundamental justice to be readdressed - the wealthy and the poor alike can fret over their eternal soul, their alienation from society and family, their sense of meaninglessness + worthlessness. in fact it seems to me that the most unsympathetic crimes in contemporary society (like hate crimes) are also products of existential alienation. but what is the action to be taken? what injustices can be readdressed? it's much simpler to focus on areas of observable inequality. imho.

the problem of drawing the line between the shitty things we have to live with and the shitty things we don't (because we made them shitty) is a problem because we have to draw that line from within culture, social construction, etc and thus it's always a contingent boundary. which is not the same thing as saying that the boundary doesn't exist.

pikkety weighs in, suggests (somewhat unsurprisingly) terrorism is related to inequality, I'm not sure if argument is thought through https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/30/why-inequality-is-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-the-islamic-state/

probably important to distinguish between terrorist movements, civil wars, insurgencies in the MENA-region and terrorist attacks like the one in Paris - maybe the latter are less likely to be directly linked to poverty/economic inequality

I've found that I like texts that undermine large parts of contemporary Western society, philosophy + consensus. I'm reading "After Virtue" which is very provocative and I enjoyed the Unger I read (in light of the link posted in the rolling philosophy thread). Earlier we discussed the Moldbug manifesto as well, though obviously he's a particularly flawed critic (if not a still entertaining one). What are some other authors/texts that posit that our current intellectual/ethical infrastructure is broken/illusory/nonsense that might be entertaining to read?

Well, don't know about ethics, but Karen Barad extrapolates from quantum mechanics into a broad attack on Cartesian thought in Meeting the Universe Halfway. I liked that one.

mb peter sloterdijk, tho also a douchebag, if not quite as much a douchebag as moldbug

Yeah, Critique of Cynical Reason is amazing!

thx guys, they're both going on the pile

Macintyre is fabulous, read more of him; in particular the Gifford lectures, published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.

do you know Charles Taylor? start with The Ethics of Authenticity, then go to Sources of the Self.

I kinda live for this stuff.

my 2 big interests at the moment: biblical religion and temple era sacrifices, and how all contemporary ethics + thought are giant failures. now where can i go to sprinkle this sheep blood?

you might also be interested in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age also, wherein the focal question is: how did we move from a world in which atheism was unthinkable, to a world in which it seems to be a living option?

Rene Girard

seems relevant: http://www.versobooks.com/books/2118-an-american-utopia

https://thecharnelhouse.org/2016/06/05/we-are-not-anti/

translation of « Nous ne sommes pas Anti », a 2005 text by Bernard Lyon of the French group Theorie Communiste - the intro is packed though with links to v fascinating discussions about anti-imperialism, anti-anti-fascism, + related.

from huntington's clash of civilizations:

A universal religion is only slightly more likely to emerge than is a universal language. The late twentieth century has seen a global resurgence of religions around the world (see pp. 95-101). That resurgence has involved the intensification of religious consciousness and the rise of fundamentalist movements. It has thus reinforced the differences among religions. It has not necessarily involved significant shifts in the proportions of the world’s population adhering to different religions. The data available on religious adherents are even more fragmentary and unreliable than the data available on language speakers. Table 3.3 sets out figures derived from one widely used source. These and other data suggest that the relative numerical strength of religions around the world has not changed dramatically in this century. The largest change recorded by this source was the increase in the proportion of people classified p. 65 as “nonreligious” and “atheist” from 0.2 percent in 1900 to 20.9 percent in 1980. Conceivably this could reflect a major shift away from religion, and in 1980 the religious resurgence was just gathering steam. Yet this 20.7 percent increase in nonbelievers is closely matched by a 19.0 percent decrease in those classified as adherents of “Chinese folk-religions” from 23.5 percent in 1900 to 4.5 percent in 1980. These virtually equal increases and decreases suggest that with the advent of communism the bulk of China’s population was simply reclassified from folk-religionist to nonbelieving.

Table 3.3 – Proportion of World Population Adhering to Major Religious Traditions

http://i.imgur.com/pjSI3fn.jpg

The data do show increases in the proportions of the world population adhering to the two major proselytizing religions, Islam and Christianity, over eighty years. Western Christians were estimated at 26.9 percent of the world’s population in 1900 and 30 percent in 1980. Muslims increased more dramatically from 12.4 percent in 1900 to 16.5 percent or by other estimates 18 percent in 1980. During the last decades of the twentieth century both Islam and Christianity significantly expanded their numbers in Africa, and a major shift toward Christianity occurred in South Korea. In rapidly modernizing societies, if the traditional religion is unable to adapt to the requirements of modernization, the potential exists for the spread of Western Christianity and Islam. In these societies the most successful protagonists of Western culture are not neo-classical economists or crusading democrats or multinational corporation executives. They are and most likely will continue to be Christian missionaries. Neither Adam Smith nor Thomas Jefferson will meet the psychological, emotional, moral, and social needs of urban migrants and first-generation secondary school graduates. Jesus Christ may not meet them either, but He is likely to have a better chance.

In the long run, however, Mohammed wins out. Christianity spreads primarily by conversion, Islam by conversion and reproduction. The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 percent in the 1980s, leveled off, is p. 66 now declining, and will probably approximate about 25 percent of the world’s population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high rates of population growth (see chapter 5), the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20 percent of the world’s population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of the world’s population by 2025.

according to wikipedia in 2016:

http://i.imgur.com/cM7imVA.png

so was huntington wrong? and if so, what did he miss about christianity and islam that has allowed christianity, 16 years after the turn of the century, to halt an apparently decline and maintain approx 30%, and islam apparently to have slowed (tho he got the general trend of growth correct). did christianity open new markets? this seems particularly surprising considering the aging of the West. did he fail to account for latin american catholicism? ongoing conflict in the middle east?

was he confused about birth rates mb, assuming the growth would continue? obviously there aren't many significant things which those 2.2 billion christians have in common, and especially in the developing world the adherence to doctrine can be eccentric, hybridised etc. so more crucially I'm not sure what you can say the draw of e.g. Christianity is in any cultural/spiritual sense beyond the social and material benefits that are often the initial draw of missions

fwiw he argues that the revival of religious sentiment in general was a globalwide response to urbanization, industrialization, globalization, aka crisis of meaning in post cold war moment and doesn't really make much of an argument that christianity has value/appeal above or beyond hinduism or islam. tho i think he'd contest the idea that there aren't significant things which those 2.2 billion christians have in common (or at least that the 'many' modifier is essential) bc he seems religious identification as being civilizationally determinative.

I assumed that if he'd made good arguments in support of his basic contentions I would have heard of them by now. I'm struggling to think of many distinctive solid cultural/spiritual/ethical things most christians believe, never mind all. I don't think the narrative of the cold war had as much meaning for most of the areas where religion has been growing and that in fact the drivers behind the growth predate it

idiot US grad students on fb this morning blaming the brexit on neoliberalism. feel like if we lived in venezuela we'd be blaming our troubles on state-planned economies. maybe life is just hard no matter what economic or political system you live under, and though "suck it up buttercup, life could be much worse" isn't really a satisfying panacea to get ppl to vote the right way, it's really the only honest answer?

^this is why we need the humanities. (only half kidding)

what do you blame it on mordy

the boogie what else

@tinyrevolution
Can't believe the British didn't listen to the all the exact same people who brought them the Iraq war & the collapse of their economy

ppl lack the awareness + education to know how most people in the world, today and historically, have lived. contemporary western society has raised expectations significantly and so ppl who otherwise live historically extremely high standard of living lives get bitter when things are not utopian. moreover there's a huge degradation in trust in institutions and in general sittlichtkeit. families lack cohesiveness, communities are broken, ppl feel no sense of identification with anything larger than themselves. which is not to say that there are no problems w/ the modern capitalist lifestyle (which is itself responsible for a lot of the alienation being felt) but that it's not like there's a magic bullet out there. like it's not that there is a magic bullet but ppl are confused and think it's xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment instead of what it really is. there really isn't a magic bullet. there's no way to make life perfect. we can mitigate problems, and there are reforms to our system that would make a huge impact, but where is this other model that works much better than the model we have? how could it be that the western world is doing the best out of any other system in the world but is simultaneously irrevocably broken?

morbz you maybe don't see this but you have never made a post that contained any level of insight or anything interesting in it. everything you write is dumb and it is humiliating to you and to the rest of us who are humiliated watching you make a fool out of yourself. why don't you read a fucking book or two so you actually have something real to say that you didn't dream up in yr fevered consciousness.

3-VOL oRSON wELLES BIO IS NEXT, YOU TOXIN.

wow i'm sure that will teach you a lot about politics. but seriously, you sound like an idiot. get yrself an education.

"And I said unto him, be fruitful and multiply... but not in those words." - Woody Allen, 1964

look at the title of this thread. does it say "repost dumb tweets" or "quote woody allen" in the title? no? so then what the fuck are you even doing here?

if you put your cursed brain into a dog, it would walk backwards. buh-bye

There was a giant economic meltdown in 2008, and much of the world has still not recovered. It's not as if modern society is humming along, but people feel some weird kind of ennui. The world did actually, for realz, break.

seriously - i cannot believe that you post things like this -- Can't believe the British didn't listen to the all the exact same people who brought them the Iraq war & the collapse of their economy -- and think that you're adding anything. it is the lowest level of thinking a human being can do without just shutting their brain off during an episode of keeping up with the kardashians. it's just kneejerk reaffirmation of the same idea you already believe without any particular insight or novel idea. is it that your brain is so addled that you can't tell the difference between an original thought and the same idea you've expressed literally a thousand times in the last month alone? how could it be? do you not know what interesting thinking looks like? how could that be?

http://ih0.redbubble.net/image.51110193.6052/flat,800x800,075,f.jpg

you're a shitposter. it's not that there's anything necessarily wrong with your ideology (except that it's prepackaged adbusters bullshit), but that you have nothing interesting to say ever. it's telling that 90% of your posts are just copy-pastes from twitter.

like if i thought you had any sincere interest in becoming a better poster i'd suggest that you think before hitting the submit post button and ask yourself "am i adding anything new here or am i just saying the same thing i always say that everyone has heard before"? bc like maybe you think that the way the world works if you repeat yourself enough ppl are just impressed with your stamina. but actually the way it works is that after the 10th time of regurgitating the same talking point ppl just want to know when you're going to go away so they can start to have a real conversation without the peanut gallery piping up.

Mordy people dislike you too

that's fine - my point to morbz has nothing to do with his likability. he could be unlikable and still write interesting things.

he could even be likable and write boring shite. the problem is that he's unlikable and writes boring bullshit and writes it everywhere on every thread he can find. it's a toxic combination to be a bad person and a dumb person.

Morbs is a troll on the political threads. Mordy just has wrong opinions :) It's not quite comparable.

polisci is boring BECAUSE WE ARE ALL FUCKED, YOU MANIACS

like conrad - i started this thread 5 years ago explicitly to have discussions that were maybe not everyone's on ilx's cup of tea - to ghettoize off some of my interests and possible "wrong opinions" from the hivemind. it's the complete opposite of morbz' technique of posting on every thread he can with his same stupid one-liners. he's the ilx equivalent of a crazy dude on the subway yelling at you about jesus.

idiot US grad students on fb this morning blaming the brexit on neoliberalism.

― Mordy, Friday, June 24, 2016 10:16 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClumsDnXEAEsst9.jpg:small

Last line of that graphic is the key one. Lots of the areas that have traditionally voted for Labour but voted against the EU were poor to begin with. I think the minimum wage has outstripped inflation but it's still the minimum and lots of people who are either unemployed or on zero hours contracts wouldn't be earning that. Idk if the real hourly wage referred to would count tax credits or other benefits that have recently been cut, let alone public services.

There is also a huge time frame there, covering both the boom years and the economic collapse of a lot of those communities.

A lot of areas, particularly more wealthy ones, voted leave for other reasons though.

there's a similar phenomenon with trump voters who as an average are wealthier than clinton + sanders supporters

They tend to be a lot older for a start. Economic neglect of the bulk of the country is absolutely critical to why leave won.

i saw a chart i think posted on the uk thread that showed that the leave areas had received much higher levels of economic support compared to the stay areas. not dissimilar i imagine to the US where the most republican right-wing areas are southern states that receive far more assistance from the gov than blue states.

like we can quibble about what is the underlying cause of this but for ourselves we can be honest and say that right-wingers are mostly full of shit and believe things that are misaligned w/ reality.

the levels of support don't necessarily - almost certainly don't - reflect an accompanying upsurge of prosperity tho. places receiving the most support are the most economically and socially barren, there aren't people looking around going "look at this pleasure dome the EU built for us"

right-wingers are full of shit, sure, but disenfranchised and impoverished right-wingers are not really ignoring the blatant evidence of their day to day experience i don't think

Yes there is economic support in the sense of unemployment benefits or the subsidising of bad jobs, keeping people just around the poverty line, and economic support in terms of creating lasting employment opportunities and thriving communities. It has most been the former in the places voting to leave. London has boomed beyond all historical measure at the same time. When the recent round of cuts came in, it was the poorer communities disproportionately affected.

what day to day experience tho? who knows how to judge this shit objectively - it's not like their homes are being bombed out, or they're starving bc food hasn't been sent to the city in weeks, or they've run out of toilet paper. their serotonin levels more-or-less self-correct and like i said from a historically (or global) perspective they're all doing pretty okay. it's not like if they were doing 10% better they'd necessary feel differently. this kind of thing i don't think actually arises from a real phenomenology. and even if it did, it's not like it's particularly rational to cut off your nose to spite yr ugly face.

people are starving, people are living in shitholes, people are struggling to gain access to basic services like a GP

there is no pleasure dome under a different system. a. they are choosing the solution that leads to worse results for them and their family and b. there isn't a right choice they could make that would make their lives a pleasure dome. we don't live in the pleasure dome world.

it's almost as if voters in a representative democracy are sometimes mistaken as to their own best interests

We literally have hundreds of thousands of people who can not afford to feed themselves while the government's subsidising a semi-private garden bridge across the Thames to the tune of tens of millions of Pounds. It is like parking Dubai next to Banja Luka and wondering why people are angry when you keep building empty skyscrapers.

how dare these peasants not appreciate their good fortune

is it really that dire? by hundreds of thousands of people who cannot afford to feed themselves you mean who are relying on social services to feed themselves? bc the NYT has stories about 94% of Venezuelians haven't eaten today. i haven't seen similar horror stories about dire food shortages and starvation coming from the uk.

a semi-private garden bridge

where alph the sacred river runs

https://www.trusselltrust.org/what-we-do/

The Trussell Trust’s 400-strong network of foodbanks provides a minimum of three days’ emergency food and support to people experiencing crisis in the UK. In 2015/16, we gave 1,109,309 three day emergency food supplies to people in crisis.

nothing to see here

This is not Venezuela. We have the money to cover basic human dignity. Social services do not cover food bills for everyone so people have to use charity food banks.

anyway, i'm still not clear that these are the ppl who voted en masse for leave, and there were still very many people who were doing significantly better who voted leave which still leaves you wondering what they're hoping for. it would be easier if this were a movement of simply the most impoverished dire situations (at least bc it would mean that remain would've won). but it's not - it's also ppl who should know much better.

Yes, there are lots of wealthy older political conservatives who did not want to join in the first place.

they are not solely the people who voted to leave. many of them will be the people who didn't vote at all. when the right has power it's always as a coalition of the cynical powerful and the misinformed poor

even if you accept that millions of brits are starving to death, why would leaving the EU make that better?

and if holes in the social safety net are the problem, why do poors keep electing conservative governments?

http://www.fabians.org.uk/brexit-voters-not-the-left-behind/

say what you will about the US at least we never left a decision like his up to a fucking referendum

trolling aside this is basically about xenophobia/racism not economic self interest, right

in the united states its the same thing bc americans sit around saying 'why do poor people vote against their self interest' but it only actually applies to poor *white* people (actually: white people in general) if you look at the numbers & they vote against their self interest bc racism

oh i see mordy argued against this pov earlier and i missed it, now he'll get mad at me.

i do think its actually about xenophobia and racism more than you do, theres an argument going on in academia right now that the notion of 'western man' depends on the existence of a slave class for its sense of self-determination which i find p compelling, suggests that a lot of what mordy's talking about re: absurd expectations of Happiness is true but also intertwined inextricably with race

theres an argument going on in academia right now that the notion of 'western man' depends on the existence of a slave class for its sense of self-determinatio

lol rly? hasn't this been obvious for hundreds of years

idk seems to me the notion that we can 'reform' our way out of racism instead of seeing it as a cornerstone of the philosophy of our very conception of man is pretty dominant

cf all the 'progress' we've made, or the utopian vision of civil rights 'i have seen the mountaintop' etc., part of the reason Coates has struck such a chord is bc his POV is pretty insurgent on both the left and the right for taking a more pessimistic pov

americans sit around saying 'why do poor people vote against their self interest' but it only actually applies to poor *white* people (actually: white people in general)

The right wing tries to do the same thing in America re: minorities, esp. African-Americans, but it usually blows up in their faces. (e.g. "Why do blacks keep voting for the Democrats that want to keep them on the plantation," etc.)

I'd be surprised if the public has become organically more racist than it was when successive Tory leaderships under Hague, Howard and Duncan Smith tried to turn general elections into referendums on immigration and got their hides tanned. We have had a massive economic crash and austerity programme, with political and press scapegoating, since.

I've been under the assumption for a while that at least some white people are undergoing an existential crisis about the fact that they might live to see themselves become a minority population. About which, I know, boo hoo, but I can see where that mindset might account for an uptick in racist sentiment.

In democracies, there is always some insecurity over minority status. Even rich people worry about the fact they're in a minority, which is what motivates them to spend so much money on politics and propagandize so fervently about how horrible it would be to raise the marginal tax rates on them.

Some of the strongest leave pockets were places that have next to no immigration and this stuff was further below the surface when non-existent migration was higher. There is a racist element to a lot of it and it was probably the single biggest issue for most voters but there is a lot more going on.

Non-white *

Some of the strongest leave pockets were places that have next to no immigration and this stuff was further below the surface when non-existent migration was higher. There is a racist element to a lot of it and it was probably the single biggest issue for most voters but there is a lot more going on.

― On a Raqqa tip (ShariVari), Friday, June 24, 2016 1:13 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the most racist white ppl tend to live far away from nonwhite people, this is not a surprise

Or what I said like four posts earlier.

Durham, which was Tony Blair's area, voted leave. Doncaster, which was the last Labour leader Ed Miliband's constituency, voted leave by a huge margin. Places that will probably vote for the most pro-immigration of the two main parties forever more voted to leave. There has been a big swing to the far right in a lot of areas and both parties have actively courted the racist vote but if they wanted to vote for flat-out fascists they have had every opportunity to do so In the past. Farage, who has been the face of the leave campaign for much of the time, has repeatedly failed to get elected as an MP in some of the most deprived areas of the UK.

the most racist white ppl tend to live far away from nonwhite people, this is not a surprise

^^^ is this really a thing that needs to be restated

not that I am going to pretend to understand UK politics

It's pretty counterproductive to foreground frothing nativist racism, which does exist, and not look at the underlying economic issues that underpin hostility not just to immigration but to metropolitanism, 'experts' and politics in general.

ie

@ggreenwald
Maligning everyone who is dissatisfied with internationalist institutions as dumb & primitive is part of the cause.

Yr boy in 'wildly oversimplifying to make a point' shocka.

i guess people on your FB wall don't like Andy Borowitz then

1). Yes, it is unconstructive to treat people who disagree with you politically as if they're dumb rubes because you will never ever persuade anyone or find any middle ground with that approach (looking at you, Morbsy). 2) I'd be super interested to know how many 'leave'-ers had considered and nuanced objections about remaining with the EU vs. how many were just like '___ go home!' Guessing the former is a paltry number and that there isn't much overlap.

There's a fairly large constituency who just wanted to kick the political class in the nuts as well.

The area I live in voted to leave by a margin or two to one. It's 93% white British. You can write them off as unsalvageable if you like but at a local level, you can't outnumber them and they're always going to have a voice.

Alternatively, you can look at the history of the place, how the docks which were the main employer closed and the cluster of towns and cities became a warehouse for the economically marginalised pushed out of London when the slums came down and continued to be used to relocate the unemployed and 'problem families' away from parts of the country they were lowering the tone of, how the army took over as the core non-public-service employer , how entire streets that had served as social hubs were boarded up or turned into a string of threadbare charity shops and gambling outlets, how pockets have some of the best schools in the country and twenty minutes down the road there's a secondary where 94% of people fail to meet the government mandated benchmark of five GCSEs, how substance abuse became rife and was left largely unaddressed, etc, and ask why people might want to carve an ugly scratch in the political machine.

And this is basically a very decent place to live for a lot of people! You can commute into London at vast expense in 35 minutes if you are lucky enough to have a job there

If the response to the rise of a muscular right is 'some people are bad and let's just hope we outnumber them' rather than 'let's rethink how we distribute money and opportunities' we really are doomed.

i dont think saying race is central to this dynamic means that degree of expressed resentment doesn't change over time. it just means that they can pull that lever whenever they need to accomplish something

like, of course when economic security feels threatened ppl are more apt to respond but that state of racial resentment is a constant

People who say that members of the US White working class vote against their own economic self-interest need to read this

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/csdi/includes/kansasqjps06.pdf

and never say that zombie Thomas Frank meme again.

i dont think saying race is central to this dynamic means that degree of expressed resentment doesn't change over time. it just means that they can pull that lever whenever they need to accomplish something

Underlying racial / national anxieties have always been there and unquestionably played a major role in a lot of individual decisions to leave. They have been manipulated by the press and by politicians to achieve exactly this result. Growing up in a hugely multicultural part of London, though, I do have to be optimistic that this stuff isn't terminal. It can be fought where the will to do so, and the economic circumstances, align.

(looking at you, Morbsy).

you mighta misspelled his name

and never say that zombie Thomas Frank meme again.

― hamqueen (bamcquern), Friday, June 24, 2016 3:02 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well you can argue that white upper class people are voting against their interests on things like the environment or w/e but the point that white people vote against their interests in greater numbers than everyone else *to some degree* is true of the poor, too. but yes, in general, poor people are more apt to vote left

thanks for sharing that, bam. i hadn't seen it before and frank's book was tremendously influential on me when i first read it. this is pretty damning tho:

Even in 2004, after decades of increasingly widespread college education, the economic circumstances of whites without college degrees were not much different from those of America as a whole. Among those who voted, 40% had family incomes in excess of $60,000; and when offered the choice, more than half actually called themselves “middle class” rather than “working class.” Meanwhile, among working-class white voters who could even remotely be considered “poor” – those with incomes in the bottom third of the national income distribution – George W. Bush’s margin of victory in 2004 was not 23 percentage points but less than two percentage points.

so really what we're talking about - at least regarding many of our most reactionary right-wing voters - is bourgeois counterrevolution, not false consciousness proletariat counter-productive revolution.

relevant (reposting from JCLC):

https://www.thenation.com/article/progressives-need-to-stop-ignoring-rural-communities/

I think it's worth stressing that outside of the fairly stable and confused old fashioned racist crew the referendum debate was about immigration rather than race, and while sometimes difference was dwelt upon (language especially) generally there's not been too much effort spent differentiating the majority of EU immigrants in terms of race, more just culture and sheer numbers. the racism is mostly saved for the non EU migrants who are ofc less white

also that link nakh posted about authoritarianism makes sense, although this mentality is still mysterious to me in many respects, especially how it develops and fixates on certain issues

well they're authoritarians they fixate on what they're told to

a lot of taboo fixation is about social cohesion in the same way authoritarianism is -- i found it much easier to understand conservative/reactionary impulses when i realized that a lot of it has to do w/ preserving a social body which in-and-of-itself is a worthwhile goal even if i feel most of the time that the tactics used to pursue it are too blunt + ultimately ineffective. like i don't think necessarily the authoritarian voter wants a dictator to make them feel safe bc it offloads the decision making - which often seems like the subtext of the 'authoritarian' argument. i think it's more that societies with heavily centralized, concentrated authority making and strong social obedience is inherently going to be a society w/ better cohesion and sense of collective self. that's the link to the social taboos - both in terms of literal health of the community (taboos against incest, excrement, violence) and symbolically (religion taboos, strange cultural practices that by their very existence bind their practitioners and make them distinct from neighboring tribes, etc).

But imagining the UK would want to remain in the common market, they'll have to accept the freedom of movement for workers, which means that Leave won't stop EU immigrants. Right? So if it's about immigrants, it's about non-white immigrants, no matter what they say.

Otm

But imagining the UK would want to remain in the common market, they'll have to accept the freedom of movement for workers, which means that Leave won't stop EU immigrants.

this is correct, but the leave campaign went to some lengths to obfuscate this fact, I'm sure that a lot of leave voters did not appreciate that this was the case. I think it's absolutely the case that a lot of leave voters are sincerely unhappy about immigration of white eastern europeans, this is not just a smokescreen to disguise racism against non-whites (it is also about non-white immigrants as well, of course, and the leave campaign made a big deal about the possibility of Turkey joining the EU and of refugees from the middle east)

seeing the vote as for a certain sort of nationalism makes the most sense to me, the idea of repatriating powers had a big emotive pull, even if people only cared about it wrt migration

a friend's gran told her she voted leave because there were too many bangladeshis in her area. the right wing haven't really focused on commonwealth or other international migration for a long time, they've been concentrating on the referendum for years. the infirm and delirious might conflate all migration, but to the extent that there's an emblem of perceived excess immigration it's the polish labourer - plumbers, builders, farm labourers in the east especially, which had the strongest leave vote - undercutting their british competitors, sending their money to family at home

the sense of nihilism comes in part from the fact that there has never been a plan. there have been two leave campaigns with different spokespeople and styles, covering all manner of different issues and with various visions, but it's untested waters, no one could say what was going to happen and yet still managed to disagree with each other. the vote wasn't about the future, it was about the present, a present which has been building up for years in headlines. why did i think the sun might be on the losing side?

the thing which struck me most about the vote was that you could get people voting leave out of contempt for the ideal of the benefits scrounging working class, as well getting working class people voting leave out of frustration, mistrust and resentment of whoever they perceived as elites.

the british political system is one of the most stable and long lived in the world and an exemplar of political decay. the westminster parliament has been in place for hundreds of years, has changed little since 1707 and i don't think i have a chance of outliving it. there is no constitution, no architect, the system has slowly congealed over hundreds of years, with no big occasion for reform. we are literally still ruled by barons. politics is disconnected, remote, unrepresentative and seen to be unresponsive. does this explain an irrational politics? can it be rationalised as stemming from a sense of desolation in much of the country, urban and industrial but also of communities, and of the sense of the loss of some harmonious national imaginary, unreal england? it's the sad nationalism of a country that sees signs of decline everywhere and has become supremely cynical and sometimes paranoid

it sounds more desperate written down

the party system has been fracturing for a while now, likely to be more on the way and a second scottish referendum was always on the cards, so there is something v empty about waving union jacks. the guy two doors down has taken his union jack flag down now, leaving just the flag of st george & I'd go take a photo of it stuck to window with rain but fuck it

this is correct, but the leave campaign went to some lengths to obfuscate this fact, I'm sure that a lot of leave voters did not appreciate that this was the case. I think it's absolutely the case that a lot of leave voters are sincerely unhappy about immigration of white eastern europeans, this is not just a smokescreen to disguise racism against non-whites (it is also about non-white immigrants as well, of course, and the leave campaign made a big deal about the possibility of Turkey joining the EU and of refugees from the middle east)

Yes, a lot of people who viewed this as a referendum on immigration will go nuts if they find out later on that free movement is the cost of doing business with the EU, particularly if the UK loses any influence on whether, idk, Serbia or Ukraine join in the future. However, along with the 'threat' of Turks, refugees and French-speaking North Africans, i think there has been a concerted effort to racialise Eastern European migration from the press that really kicked into gear when Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania joined - an effort to hint that Southern Europeans are not quite white enough, lots of stories about 'Albanian criminals', an effort to ramp up anti-Roma prejudice, etc.

was this article by Will Davies already linked to on the uk politics thread? goes into the nihilism discussed above, also the apparent paradox of areas that had benefited the most from EU investment seeing some of the strongest majorities for Leave etc:

http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/thoughts-on-the-sociology-of-brexit

why is left-wing leadership, even in moments when you'd think they'd have a mandate or opportunity to seize democratic authority within the system, so so bad at what they do

my really abbreviated explanation is because a healthy left wing doesn't trust hierarchy and its leaders reflect that

one thing that seems to particularly characterize leftist movements of yore is an active participation in a print culture - writing up manifestos, pamphlets, publishing newspapers, going door to door selling them, party members rising in stature partially on the basis of their success in a. understanding the ideology and b. selling it, literally sometimes on the streets. when the nazis came to power there was a whole left-wing printing press apparatus that they commandeered. so what is the equivalent to this in a contemporary era where basically literacy culture is dead and no one is buying pamphlets about communism from anyone anywhere and if they are they aren't reading them. maybe it was never particularly useful/successful (tho the radicalization of the army/navy + industry proletariat in post-tzar russia suggests that print culture did play an important role in recruitment / spreading the ideology), just something to pass the time?

I mean, there is still no end of communiques and manifestos, but they tend to be mostly distributed on the internet these days. Print zines, pamphlets, and radical small presses seem to have remained important to the anarchist left, at least in punk circles, but largely as a supplement to online communication.

where do most socialists congregate online?

Like, there are still infoshops in many cities, but I don't know how important they are to recruitment in particular.
Xp

my really abbreviated explanation is because a healthy left wing doesn't trust hierarchy and its leaders reflect that

yeah to (regretfully) paraphrase Frum, it's not necessarily a leadership problem on the Left, but the "followership"

That seems pretty decentralized to me: forums, Facebook groups, mailing lists, tumblr cliques, but there are probably other gathering places I'm not aware of.
Xp

(As a disclaimer, most of the demonstrations and activist projects I've been involved with over the last couple of years have been locally organized and somewhat disparate, so other ILXors can probably give you a more informed answer.)

lol socialists still have blogspot blogs

i was reading the start of gorky's 'mother' some months back, at the beginning of which a worker self-radicalizes himself by a program of study of radical literature, which makes him a fearsome disciplined figure to his family, and it definitely seemed like a characteristic trope of the times a la mordy's description above, but one that does not quite hold anymore.

i went to a union meeting years ago during a time when my campus grad students were trying to unionize with like electricians i think, and i actually had someone at the meeting encourage me to read something that went into an explanation of the nature of exploitation, etc.; it seemed very much like a throwback. and while there are still marx-reading groups aplenty (somewhat rebounding since the financial crisis/OWS imo), i have gotten the impression that at least the shared-doctrine/outlook-generating function those used to serve, whatever the leftist tendency toward anarchism or absolute egalitarianism, is no longer vital.

i mean you still have jerkoff right-wing aspirants out there reading their bibles, and the catholic classics, and the documents of the american founders, and von mieses, but on the left at similar points in political development you're likely to find a nascent interest in deleuze. or something equally useless in terms of concrete political organization. i know a political-theory guy from grad school who went through a phase of enthusiasm for radical cartography. basically i'm saying nothing is biblical enough to help center a print political culture on the left?

Capital, you'd think but maybe too dry?

yeah, i think that used to be it, but no longer is

i mean pick up a contemporary text in that vein and the first thing they'll do is twist themselves into pretzels justifying returning to marx or ignoring marx or setting marx right, but still, the idea that one really has to read marx to get off on the right foot in this lyfe is like, nonprevalent

why is left-wing leadership, even in moments when you'd think they'd have a mandate or opportunity to seize democratic authority within the system, so so bad at what they do

i'll contribute my best guess about that. I fear that left wing leadership in general believes quite strongly in the essential goodness of human nature. as a result, they consistently direct their narratives and appeals for support to our better side. they experience just enough success with this approach that they persist in it as their habitual mode of operation to a degree that no practical politician ever would.

to be fair, if left wing political leadership were to swing very far or very obviously away from their stated idealism they would risk alienating those who have responded most strongly to their idealistic positions and these are the people to whom they most directly owe their current position and power. this dynamic makes them vulnerable to the attack that they are out of touch with reality, or, if they have moved tentatively toward the center, the attack that they are 'mushy' or 'waffling'.

in practical terms, this has some explanatory power in regard to the successes of single issues in left wing politics. by isolating an issue it becomes easier to dissociate it from left wing politics as a whole, so that the center elements of the center-left coalition that eventually help the issue to succeed do not have to identify with broad left wing aims or tenets, but can address the issue on its individual merits. It is a variation of divide and conquer, dividing the center so that parts of it can be split off to form an ad hoc majority on that one issue.

but on the left at similar points in political development you're likely to find a nascent interest in deleuze. or something equally useless in terms of concrete political organization.

im not very smart or knowledgeable about this kind of thing, but i think this is a really insightful point. the post-marxist left is more or less founded on post-68 critical theory, but it's that same foundation which makes any actual program or sufficiently large coalition impossible to achieve (cf. deleuze's notion of an authentic leftism being devoid of content). and while im sympathetic to that deleuzian point it's also important to recognize that it is in no way a political point. this is the big failure and misunderstanding of a lot of critical theory on the left imo. there's no real politics in it at all--hence the massive and infuriating hyper-inflation of what counts as "political" thinking in a lot of current theoretical discourse. as a result the left devolves into the endlessly fragmenting forms of identity politics you see going on now and thus an "authentic leftism" becomes a kind of performance of absolute theoretical purity.

(i also think there's also more than a touch of gnosticism in a lot of theoretically oriented leftist discourse, hence its essentially a-political slant at times)

remember when 'everyone' was suddenly excited about the political potential promised in hardt & negri

last fall i did a 'name the last book you read' exercise and one of my students had read graeber over the summer, was hoping to read piketty, so i think that's indicative of how wide of philosophy the curious-to-be-political reading syllabus is going to be for some time

I have a 15 year old unread copy of Empire on my shelf that testifies to that moment.

coming out of a Schmitt/Koselleck ---> Luhmann school I probably sit uneasily in the Left as currently construed but for myself I'd argue that one of the more important projects for the Left is to achieve an understanding of politics and political action that is more, and not less, specific and limited.

recently i feel like the problem is that the left walled itself in -- it put all its eggs into articulating a dramatically different vision of society from capitalism and when the ussr collapsed (and chinese communism was forced to transform) it essentially lost touch with reality. there's never going to be the popular will for the dismantlement of the essential institutions and structures that provide order + stability to people's lives. the best thing the left could do is continue to mitigate the failures of capitalism and slowly guide the project along the historical route to communism, but that kind of incremental action is demeaned as neoliberalism (or "soft" neoliberalism, as i've heard recently, or third-wayism). the main difference obv should be that while neoliberalism uses progressive policy to perpetuate the capitalist system (take care of the people so they don't riot), a leftist incrementalism would see it as a process towards developing a more communist government (tho everyone at this point should be honest that it's always going to look a little hybrid - obv fully state-planned economy does not work). so a difference in goal and motivation, if not really in practice. the good news tho is that if the left embraced this we'd eliminate a lot of the idea that communists cannot work w/ socialists (or liberal democrats or whatever the more moderate left is calling themselves that week) bc they could contextualize these incremental reforms as inherently subversive. you see this psychologically too i think - as things get better the people demand more. even if the capitalist bankers see government jobs, or higher minimum wage, as a way of keeping the proletariat under control, they're making the changes that will fundamentally alter the system.

idk if anyone here missed it (i linked to it from the stalin thread) but ppl might find this thread worth checking out - mostly quotes i thought were interesting from some reading i did over the weekend re the left + the weimer republic: social fascism

not an expert by any means here, but i feel like a lot of the problem between socialism and capitalism is that for a socialist, the greatest imperative is to ascertain what the right thing to do is, and do it, whereas for a capitalist the question is what action will yield the best results. that's not to say that capitalists don't have values and socialists are never pragmatic, just the the two groups have different ethical hierarchies. for a capitalist, compromise necessarily implies compromising some of one's principles, which they are willing to do, but they will expect that anyone they compromise with do the same.

beyond that, perhaps compromise, as a relational mode, is so strongly identified with capitalism that expressing a willingness to compromise makes you look like a capitalist.

i'm not sure i agree. you can have dogmatic capitalists and pragmatic socialists. for me it's the difference between economic liberalism / free market / adam smith and state-planned economy / regulated market.

hmmm. maybe it's that capitalists have the opportunity to put their ideas into practice on a much wider scale than socialists do. i mean, i guess you have that basic income experiment going on in oakland, but compare that to the much greater extent of micro-lending (the failure of which didn't become apparent until it was deployed on a wide scale) and you have a lot of socialists talking theory and a lot of capitalists talking about their experiences.

partially though isn't that because communism has generally been a failure - in the USSR, in China, most recently in Venezeula. obv lenin would say that this also has to do w/ the inextricable link between capitalism and imperialism/colonialism (about which there's maybe room for skepticism but still it would explain why capitalism has been so persistent at getting their ideas out there). certainly while communism was a going concern tho it was being exported diligently. and also, tho this is obv an area ripe for discussion, ideologies associated with successful states are going to be more attractive. now the question is whether capitalist west was successful bc of historical contingency (aka for arbitrary non-ideological related reasons) and you can imagine a counterfactual where the eastern bloc is more powerful and so communism is v attractive, or whether capitalism was successful bc it's actually a better economic theory for developing nations / keeping stability. my reading of the literature suggests the latter to me - and even marx had his infatuations with the productivity of capitalism.

Socialism can try to be a theory of everything, the Right is much more comfortable with odd or contradictory alliances.

On the Question of Free Trade: Preface by Frederick Engels for the 1888 English edition pamphlet

To him, Free Trade is the normal condition of modern capitalist production. Only under Free Trade can the immense productive powers of steam, of electricity, of machinery, be full developed; and the quicker the pace of this development, the sooner and the more fully will be realized its inevitable results; society splits up into two classes, capitalists here, wage-laborers there; hereditary wealth on one side, hereditary poverty on the other; supply outstripping demand, the markets being unable to absorb the ever growing mass of the production of industry; an ever recurring cycle of prosperity, glut, crisis, panic, chronic depression, and gradual revival of trade, the harbinger not of permanent improvement but of renewed overproduction and crisis; in short, productive forces expanding to such a degree that they rebel, as against unbearable fetters, against the social institutions under which they are put in motion; the only possible solution: a social revolution, freeing the social productive forces from the fetters of an antiquated social order, and the actual producers, the great mass of the people, from wage slavery. And because Free Trade is the natural, the normal atmosphere for this historical evolution, the economic medium in which the conditions for the inevitable social revolution will be the soonest created -- for this reason, and for this alone, did Marx declare in favor of Free Trade.

Anyhow, the years immediately following the victory of Free Trade in England seemed to verify the most extravagant expectations of prosperity founded upon that event. British commerce rose to a fabulous amount; the industrial monopoly of England on the market of the world seemed more firmly established that ever; new iron works, new textile factories arose by wholesale; new branches of industry grew up on ever side. There was, indeed, a severe crisis in 1857, but that was overcome, and the onward movement in trade and manufactures soon was in full swing again, until in 1866 a fresh panic occurred, a panic, this time, which seems to mark a new departure in the economic history of the world.

curious about the translation of the colloquial "anyhow," but anyhow, the attraction of free trade - in spite of the 'inevitable' crises it produces - is obv. 'productive forces expanding to such a degree,' that they rebel but if you can mitigate the rebellion and keep the system running you get all the production and limited downside. and maybe it's worth asking whether he was right anyway that they contain their own undermining - i mean in 2008 i looked at the world and felt like holy shit this is obvious what he was talking about, but otoh life is full of crises (which was what i was asking when i bumped the thread above) so to attribute a collapse to capitalism /inherently/ is not so certain and certainly when compared w/ equally (or more) unstable systems where you don't even get the production but you still get the crisis.

personally, i'm no more interested in lenin's excuses for the failure of soviet communism than i am in churchill's self-justifications on the topic of gallipoli. i'm a little flabbergasted that lenin is still considered a leader in socialist thought and holds so much sway. marx, while certainly not infallible, was a brilliant economic and political thinker probably on par with adam smith, but this insistence on painting the soviet union, which can't even really be classified as a "noble failure", with rose-colored glasses, or else attributing all of the failures of the era to convenient scapegoat (and, to be clear, one of history's greatest monsters) stalin, baffles me.

the far left is dead, everyone still claiming commie status is just fronting IMO

i don't really believe in 'socialists' anymore tbh. we're all just quibbling over the details of the mixed economy and discourse would be way less annoying if everyone just admitted it instead of posturing

― flopson, Monday, March 14, 2016 4:54 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i actually know ONE real honest-to-god communist. he reads Andrew Kliman and political papers, and he's part of a group that goes to industrial towns and give out pamphlets about the revolution to factory workers

Marxism is parlour games for members of a small, and unimportant cabal and attempts to use Marx as a tool for creating revolution is doomed to failure because literally everything he expected to happen to precipitate world revolution hasn't occurred, class as he understood it no longer exists, and his writing is almost completely non-programmatic.

i thought this piece by Mike Konczal was interesting in terms of figuring out what the whole 'democratic socialist' thing is all about

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/karl-polanyi-explainer-great-transformation-bernie-sanders

but it's an extremely booj socialism (if it can even be called that) he describes. more along what we now see as yuppie craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality kinda stuff and 'you can't turn me into a commodity, maan' individualism than blood-thirsty class conflict and false consciousness. focus on tensions between the market and democracy, it's closer to what someone like Dani Rodrik or 'Political Economy of Institutions'-development people preach than raw-dog decommodification of the material economy.

topic for discussion: does bernie sanders understand how capitalism works? does he need to?

wow this thread sucks

make it better

tbf he did post a link to a vice article about a year ago so what more do u want

i'm a little flabbergasted that lenin is still considered a leader in socialist thought and holds so much sway. marx, while certainly not infallible, was a brilliant economic and political thinker probably on par with adam smith, but this insistence on painting the soviet union, which can't even really be classified as a "noble failure", with rose-colored glasses, or else attributing all of the failures of the era to convenient scapegoat (and, to be clear, one of history's greatest monsters) stalin, baffles me.

^^^this

i don't really believe in 'socialists' anymore tbh. we're all just quibbling over the details of the mixed economy and discourse would be way less annoying if everyone just admitted it instead of posturing

also this

there is no capitalism or socialism, there are only degrees of mediation between the state and capital

there is no capitalism or socialism, there are only degrees of mediation between the state and capital

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, June 28, 2016 2:12 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this isn't political philosophy. this is a wet raspberry.

what day to day experience tho? who knows how to judge this shit objectively - it's not like their homes are being bombed out, or they're starving bc food hasn't been sent to the city in weeks, or they've run out of toilet paper. their serotonin levels more-or-less self-correct and like i said from a historically (or global) perspective they're all doing pretty okay. it's not like if they were doing 10% better they'd necessary feel differently. this kind of thing i don't think actually arises from a real phenomenology. and even if it did, it's not like it's particularly rational to cut off your nose to spite yr ugly face.

― Mordy, Friday, June 24, 2016 12:48 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^ and this right up there with some rector shit (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/mitt-romney-welfare-obama-robert-rector)

yeah i don't think the two are related - mostly bc rector is using a maybe similar argument to push for welfare cuts, whereas i was asking whether economic depravity is a compelling argument for why ppl vote for right-wing outcomes - aka the exact opposite of how he's using the argument. like maybe getting into the weeds of actual quality of life is a bad diversion but if the answer to "why are you voting against your economic interests" is "because my economic interests are not being represented" you're def dealing w/ some kind of paradox.

and left-wing apologists like jill stein who want to claim that these reactionary political responses are really about economic alienation don't have a clear answer for why the most deprived voters are not voting for these outcomes. it's just a very shallow interpretation of a political phenomenon that suggests that they only see the world on a very determinist economic axis and don't really understand other elements to politics like tribalism, fascism/authoritarianism, nationalism/nativism, etc.

yeah, this thread sucks

god u suck what a fucking whiner

in my experience a lot of the movers and shakers at the concrete end of political activism, from migrant solidarity to housing campaigns to antiracist movements, are still the kind of ppl who'll read marx and other historical materialist stuff and to a certain extent 'theory' (tho not poor ol' hardt & negri any more) and in some way model their political practices on that background

my experience POSSIBLY a little skewed

god u suck what a fucking whiner

― Mordy, Tuesday, June 28, 2016 9:34 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

at least i don't hate poor people

Who knows what you do besides shitpost

http://65.media.tumblr.com/avatar_1d6330389db6_128.png

at least i don't hate poor people

― R.I.P. Haram-bae, the good posts goy (s.clover)

is ok, they're not real poor people, they're KULAKS

amazing propaganda posters here:
https://thecharnelhouse.org/2016/07/01/anti-bolshevik-propaganda-posters-metal-as-fvkk/

https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/large.jpg?w=820&h=622

oh wau

one of my favorite blogs

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/08/teaching-trump-to-college-students/498158/

Trump’s effect on writing a syllabus has been to make this political controversy even more poignant. This is because for the last 50 years, most political-science professors have relied on what has become a standard framework. It comes from Louis Hartz, a Harvard professor, whose famous thesis states that both the left and the right in the United States are dominated by what he dubbed the “liberal tradition” (“liberal” in the older sense of the word and not as the opposite of “conservative”). The liberal tradition is an ideology that affirms individual rights, due process of law, and a separation of powers in government. Hartz believed this tradition was so ingrained in American culture that there had never really been a need for a distinct liberal party or movement but simply what he called “the American Way of Life.” On this view, ideological conflict in the United States has primarily been an intramural quarrel among conservative liberals, centrist liberals, and liberal liberals.

The dominance of the Hartzian paradigm is evident in the way the top textbooks in American politics (used to teach literally thousands of undergraduates every year) uniformly omit any extended analysis of fascism, communism, or any other non-liberal ideology. This omission was certainly standard practice among political scientists who taught introduction to American politics courses at Berkeley. What it allowed professors to do was paint the full ideological spectrum in the U.S. using the same brush. Everyone in America was more or less on the same side. No harsh lines needed to be drawn. Of course, whether intended or not, this assumption implied a kind of liberal triumphalism. Other ideologies could be ignored because all American roads led to one final destination—liberalism.

https://www.thenation.com/article/a-lion-in-winter/

 Memories of these times give the impression of a brilliant professor who possessed a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor. During a lecture in the university’s largest auditorium, a student interrupted to ask if Habermas “could express himself a little less complicatedly, for it was so difficult to understand him. One half of the audience applauded. He promised to do his best in order to be intelligible, Habermas replied, whereupon the other half of the audience started booing. To those who were now booing, Habermas continued, he could promise that his good intentions were bound to fail.”

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hobbes/thomas/h68l/chapter47.html

But after this doctrine, that the Church now militant is the kingdom of God spoken of in the Old and New Testament, was received in the world, the ambition and canvassing for the offices that belong thereunto, and especially for that great office of being Christ's lieutenant, and the pomp of them that obtained therein the principal public charges, became by degrees so evident that they lost the inward reverence due to the pastoral function: insomuch as the wisest men of them that had any power in the civil state needed nothing but the authority of their princes to deny them any further obedience. For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.

The language also which they use, both in the churches and in their public acts, being Latin, which is not commonly used by any nation now in the world, what is it but the ghost of the old Roman language?

The fairies in what nation soever they converse have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, prince of demons. The ecclesiastics likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universal king, the Pope.

The ecclesiastics are spiritual men and ghostly fathers. The fairies are spirits and ghosts. Fairies and ghosts inhabit darkness, solitudes, and graves. The ecclesiastics walk in obscurity of doctrine, in monasteries, churches, and churchyards.

The ecclesiastics have their cathedral churches, which, in what town soever they be erected, by virtue of holy water, and certain charms called exorcisms, have the power to make those towns, cities, that is to say, seats of empire. The fairies also have their enchanted castles, and certain gigantic ghosts, that domineer over the regions round about them.

The fairies are not to be seized on, and brought to answer for the hurt they do. So also the ecclesiastics vanish away from the tribunals of civil justice.

The ecclesiastics take from young men the use of reason, by certain charms compounded of metaphysics, and miracles, and traditions, and abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else but to execute what they command them. The fairies likewise are said to take young children out of their cradles, and to change them into natural fools, which common people do therefore call elves, and are apt to mischief.

In what shop or operatory the fairies make their enchantment, the old wives have not determined. But the operatories of the clergy are well enough known to be the universities, that received their discipline from authority pontifical.

When the fairies are displeased with anybody, they are said to send their elves to pinch them. The ecclesiastics, when they are displeased with any civil state, make also their elves, that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects, to pinch their princes, by preaching sedition; or one prince, enchanted with promises, to pinch another.

The fairies marry not; but there be amongst them incubi that have copulation with flesh and blood. The priests also marry not.

The ecclesiastics take the cream of the land, by donations of ignorant men that stand in awe of them, and by tithes: so also it is in the fable of fairies, that they enter into the dairies, and feast upon the cream, which they skim from the milk.

What kind of money is current in the kingdom of fairies is not recorded in the story. But the ecclesiastics in their receipts accept of the same money that we do; though when they are to make any payment, it is in canonizations, indulgences, and masses.

To this and such like resemblances between the papacy and the kingdom of fairies may be added this, that as the fairies have no existence but in the fancies of ignorant people, rising from the traditions of old wives or old poets: so the spiritual power of the Pope (without the bounds of his own civil dominion) consisteth only in the fear that seduced people stand in of their excommunications, upon hearing of false miracles, false traditions, and false interpretations of the Scripture.

It was not therefore a very difficult matter for Henry the Eighth by his exorcism; nor for Queen Elizabeth by hers, to cast them out. But who knows that this spirit of Rome, now gone out, and walking by missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, that yield him little fruit, may not return; or rather, an assembly of spirits worse than he enter and inhabit this clean-swept house, and make the end thereof worse than the beginning? For it is not the Roman clergy only that pretends the kingdom of God to be of this world, and thereby to have a power therein, distinct from that of the civil state. And this is all I had a design to say, concerning the doctrine of the POLITICS. Which, when I have reviewed, I shall willingly expose it to the censure of my country.

awesome

he rly liked that kingdom of fairies thing! i'm a big fan of this graf from several chapters earlier

As there have been doctors, that hold there be three souls in a man; so there be also that think there may be more souls (that is, more sovereigns) than one, in a Commonwealth; and set up a supremacy against the sovereignty; canons against laws; and a ghostly authority against the civil; working on men's minds, with words and distinctions, that of themselves signify nothing, but betray (by their obscurity) that there walketh (as some think invisibly) another kingdom, as it were a kingdom of fairies, in the dark.

strange echo at the beginning there of an unborn freud

Was wondering if he had read Kirk's "The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies", but I think they missed each other,chronologically.

sheldon wolin on hobbes:

The state of nature symbolized not only an extreme disorder in human relations, causing men to consent to the creation of an irresistible power; it was also a condition distraught by an anarchy of meanings. In nature each man could freely use his reason to seek his own ends: each was the final judge of what constituted rationality. The problem posed involved more than the moral issues arising from man's vanity or his desire for pre-eminence. It was a genuinely philosophical one involving the status of knowledge....

[Man] alone of all the animals possessed speech and was capable of science, yet he alone could turn speech into deception, ideas into sedition, learning into mystification.... These ironical overtones rule out interpreting the state of nature as belonging to the remote past... Instead, it represented an imaginative reconstruction of a recurrent human possibility ... built on the causes and consequences of political breakdown. Its meaning remained eternally contemporary and urgent....

In this sense, the concept did not belong solely to the past or even to the present. Its status was that of an ever-present possibility inherent in any organized political society, a ubiquitous threat which, like some macabre companion, accompanied society in every stage of its journey. It was present each night, as men sealed themselves in their homes and succeeded only in locking in fear.... The content of the state of nature could be filled in by consulting "the manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government, use to generate into, in a civil war."

what do people really mean when they say 'i'm wary of rights talk'?

xp the first book of leviathan, with the epistemological stuff in it, is pretty amazing

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/opinion/the-intellectual-life-of-violence.html

interview w/ richard bernstein on fanon, arendt, and benjamin

cc Mordy: Scott Alexander on moldbug

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/

yeah i've read that a few times before. it's a good rejoinder. did u see bannon listed moldbug as one of his favorite writers?

ya that's where i saw this linked

what do people really mean when they say 'i'm wary of rights talk'?

― j., Thursday, January 12, 2017 4:51 AM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I say that I'm wary of rights talk! What do I mean? well, start here: if I'm to accept such talk, I want to understand the genesis of rights. How to make sense of rights talk without there being a giver of that right? Consider the claim that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." From what comes that right? One can offer theistic answers, of course, but a) what force would this have for non-theists b) how to resolve differences between theisms? If one goes Kantian and says that the deeming of rights is a consequence of rationality, then one can evade rights by choosing irrationality (if irrationality can't be chosen, then the Kantian move explains nothing: why do we have rights: because we do).

I realize that this is all quite naive but it's why I'm wary of rights talk.

surely it's a matter of mutual recognition rather than anything transcendent. your self-conception is as one among a community/world of a baseline of equal status. it is clearly negotiable in the long term at least and not absolutist

xp yet how often are there people who are wary of rights talk who are also willing to say 'also i don't think anyone has any rights' (or equivalently expressed)? i mean we ain't talkin nietzscheans here

yeah I don't know, I read your post in my usual philosophical vacuum, I have no idea who says "I'm wary of rights talk" outside of the ivory tower

yeah they're the only ones afaik

for the same kinds of reasons that people have, i dunno, problems with chapter IV of utilitarianism or meditation 3 - it repeats some dumb objection they picked up somewhere so that they know how to make the next move in the schtick

One can offer theistic answers, of course

i find these satisfactory and actually feel like if there is no god then there are certainly no natural rights. normative rights or pragmatic rights maybe (something like 'these rights are necessary to posit in order to have a society that is somewhat nice to live' seems like a practical argument to me) but certainly no natural rights since the only natural right in the absence of god is the right to kill or be killed.

You don't need a god to have a concept of "natural rights". Human beings are animals with, generally speaking, shared instincts, attitudes, attributes, etc. We can create natural rights out of our shared nature as a species, and for the most part, that involves being both cooperative and individualistic, valuing life and relationships, that sort-of thing. There are statistical outliers like psychopaths out there, but that's why they're called "psychopaths".

You don't need a god to know what love, beauty, and connectedness feel like, and to understand that most other people feel those things, too, and to accept that as a natural right to respect.

It's not for the sake of god, but for the sake of the person. So the only way to have a true natural right is without a god.

how is the material possibility of killing or being killed a right?

haven't you ever seen james bond

a natural right to sell alcohol for consumption on or off the premises

it's not really a right - it's bellum omnium contra omnes

the natural state of life is one of chaos + war + brutality. you can invent a social contract to make life more pleasant but i don't see how it becomes natural just bc it's nice. larry, you seem to be arguing that it's natural to honor each other's rights to love beauty and connectedness. i'm surprised to hear you of all ppl assert this. you must be much more optimistic about the nature of humanity than you let you.

than you let on*

i think i'm one of the "wary of rights talk" people. i don't see much value in a concept of rights that isn't backed up by a legal system with power to enforce them, so i think talk of human rights beyond the specific rights people are granted within the constitutions of specific states is pretty meaningless. maybe as a notion to aspire to but i can't see any important difference between saying "i believe in the right to life" and a statement of personal values that doesn't drag universalist notions in as collateral

xp

We're talking about creating normative standards, which is a willed creation the same as any other tool out there. What I'm saying is that god is an unnecessary intermediary between people when we're dealing with relationships between people as individuals and as a society. It can be used for good or bad So, why not cut out the excess fat and get straight to the point to make things as realistic and efficient as possible with minimized ability to fuck with things.

Basically, take as much abstraction out of it as possible, and as much power out of the hands of people to create standards using concepts like gods -- from god to a shared nature as a species, which belongs to us rather than whomever is creating the god. It lets us see the standards for ourselves in us and most of the people in the world, so we have a reality check right in our own pocket.

It's not necessarily optimism, it's just observation ... not just from empathy, but culture. In my experience most people are pretty OK, the ones who cause the real problems are the outliers, and they're excellent at having their will forced on the rest of us. My own bizarro moldbug type belief is that we should do a total genocide on psychopaths and sociopaths. As if such a thing were even possible.

We're talking about creating normative standards

no we aren't - we're talking about natural rights

"Natural right" is a human-created concept. What was the natural right for human beings in the last universe where human beings, and in this iteration, no intelligent life existed? For the moment just imagine you're an atheist, because that's a requirement to think along these lines.

NV I agree with you

i don't see much value in a concept of rights that isn't backed up by a legal system with power to enforce them

i'm not sure why this would be a defect. you could think that the rights that are enshrined in a legal system have their grounding in something that's not part of the legal system, and for their part, the rights that are enshrined don't seem to be any less legitimately rights because it takes powers of punishment and deterrence and procedures for adjudication of claims to see them realized.

larry, i wrote above: "normative rights or pragmatic rights maybe (something like 'these rights are necessary to posit in order to have a society that is somewhat nice to live' seems like a practical argument to me)" which you apparently agree w/. you can't have it both ways - it can't both be a natural right and a human construct. if it's a construct it's not natural. if it's natural it's not a construct. this seems obvious to me.

Everything is a human construct because human beings have to create and accept it. By "natural right" we can decide that it belongs to our shared nature as a species, as in, it has a place in reality, in our biology. Which is far more verifiable than placing it in a god.

So it's not just a social creation, it points back to something, but replace god with nature. Of course the problem then becomes how to define human nature, and that's a whole other thing. Everyone wants to control reality for their own benefit...

oy larry i'm getting a headache. you're using /natural right/ in a way different i think than how it's traditionally used in the literature. have u read leviathan? it's a good read - you'd probably find it interesting if you haven't.

~sovereign must control reality for benefit of all~

xp

I will have to check it out. What I'm saying is "natural right" is just a concept, and can be a pretty useful one, and so I'm trying to open up the machine and tinker around with it.

j what would rights be grounded in, beyond legal structures?

thinking along a bit, i think i mean maybe that rights specifically involve a legal relationship between individuals or individuals and the state. does it make sense to talk about murder for example as a breach of my rights? does that get to the heart of murder as a crime? i'm certainly unlikely to prevent my own murder by invoking my right to life to the person about to kill me.

rights seem like things that can be contested in court, and although that might involve reparation or punishment the important thing might be that contestation of my rights involves the possibility of their being acknowledged and granted to me? in a way that isn't possible for situations of extreme coercion like murder, by individual or state.

maybe in short to say that most crimes most of the times can be considered as such in simpler ways than breaches of my rights, natural or otherwise.

btw - if rights existed within our biology i would agree that they were natural - but if they were biologically determined then we wouldn't have to discuss them at all. we don't discuss the right to breath. that we can even argue about what they are or where they come from indicates that they are not biologically determined.

Yeah, things are complex, if it were simple I'm sure we would have perfected this stuff a long time ago.

think about it like this - we were endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights

we were endowed by our creator ???? with certain unalienable rights

you need some compelling things to fill in for ????. i'm not opposed to ???? = "normative practices that make life pleasant" but inherently that makes them not natural but a construct. afaic you need a god to get to natural rights. which i'm cool w/.

i'm largely with you Mordy, but i'm not sure the creator in any of the big theistic religion actually gives human beings any rights? wouldn't doing so set a boundary on the creator's omnipotence?

NV i don't know, but some minimal normative conception seems as fair as anything: 'stuff we think shouldn't be done'.

rights underlie claims individuals can make to society (represented by the state) to be protected from certain harms or injuries stemming from other individuals or society by society. there's no claim being made that rights would express the essence of some wrong things that you could suffer, just that they would mark out a domain of things which anyone could reasonably demand protection and redress for. in cases where a claimant cannot claim these things for herself, a society recognizing rights can still press claims on her behalf, for the sake of redress or just the general maintenance of the rights of others.

now maybe there's a problem articulating the contents of that domain, but if the mechanism for the observance of rights makes sense and there are some rights we are confident would be included in any such domain, then it's not clear why we should have to shy away from saying that there are rights.

i'm largely with you Mordy, but i'm not sure the creator in any of the big theistic religion actually gives human beings any rights? wouldn't doing so set a boundary on the creator's omnipotence?

i'm trying to think how to untangle what creator gives or doesn't give to humans in terms of rights but while i do - why would giving humans rights limit omnipotence? (which isn't to say that if it did it would be a problem - all of creation limits omnipotence, the whole thing is a project in limitation/contraction of infinity.)

ok j that makes sense and i don't object to most of it. it seems to me that this kind of notion of rights would necessarily reduce natural or human rights to quite a small scope - problem of general agreement, wherever we set the threshhold for "most people agree" or even "enough people agree" - and that this scope would be quite a lot smaller than the ideas expressed in, say, most historical declarations of human rights.

i guess the way i'd conceptualize it is like this. you write: "rights seem like things that can be contested in court, and although that might involve reparation or punishment the important thing might be that contestation of my rights involves the possibility of their being acknowledged and granted to me?" -- the creator has a code that is enforced from a divine level (either through intervention into the worldly realm or the spiritual one) and that guarantees my rights w/ the threat of retribution/punishment for infringement upon them. additionally he mandates* that we establish courts in order to serve as an earthly proxy to enforce these rights on his behalf. so these rights are natural acc to the definition that you find compelling. rights that can be contested in court, and that are guaranteed ultimately by a creator.

* interestingly one of the few laws that is mandated to both jews + gentiles alike -- acc to the OT the establishment of courts is truly one of the bedrocks of society.

"there are some rights we are confident would be included in any such domain"

Do you mean "should be included"? There've been some stingy states...

Mordy - actually ignore the "constraint on omnipotence" part because i guess if i accept omniscience along with omnipotence then there is no point at which God-given rights would create an unexpected boundary on God's power, it would look more like some kind of function of the universal laws God had already set in place maybe

xp, would, given time and appropriate procedure for the practical establishment of the rights : )

yeah and just generally speaking (tho we're in theological territory here not political philosophy) there are no limits on omnipotence including the limits of paradoxes/constraints etc. xp

hmm xp j so you think that e.g. the Khmer Rouge or the Taliban would eventually concede rights that they don't / didn't in their time, given enough time? isn't this just a Hegelian version of the theistic option?

if u give a thousand totalitarians a thousand years they'll eventually produce the code of hammurabi

There are no rights other than what we make for ourselves, just the same with gods. The rights we have are what we agree upon based on our circumstances. There tend to be fewer "natural rights" during famines IIRC.

Ugh I just contributed to this thread's descent into the undergrad dorm lounge didn't I

you will be stripped of further posting rights

some gods, a few masters

The IRL debates on rights mostly seem to be about who gets what, like we're up against the limits of how much egalitarianism people can tolerate, but I guess that's also always been true

i would guess - don't really know the debates - that people are 'wary of rights talk' because they push the concept of rights either in the direction of groundless constructions out of a state of nature or otherwise rightsless regime, or the direction of systematic and universally binding timeless norms. but i don't see why we can't say, NV, for example, that perhaps the core conception of rights which are natural is small, and that a broader range of rights growing out of the idea of a protectable right is not necessarily to be grounded in what is natural any longer. and on the opposite side, euler and mordy, i don't know that a rights proponent has to be committed to any and all future acceptability of a given society's or group of society's conceptions of rights, their adoptability by other existing societies, etc. say that rights (such as 'our' liberal-democratic-capitalist ones) may have a limited universality the appreciation of which is conditional upon participation in a society whose project has partly been the extension and observance of such rights. that leaves room for saying that, when we look at how the khmer rouge operates, we're just not going to admit that they did not violate rights they should not have violated, no matter what they might say about rights; but that we do not necessarily have high expectations of talking them into recognizing rights as we conceive them, absent genuine involvement in the kind of social arrangements and political and legal institutions that have accompanied our own rights project.

in other words, going back to mordy's point about the courts, there is an underacknowledged practical (practice-al) thickness to the whole idea of a right, absent which of course it will be easier to construe rights as fictions or universalist fantasies

and ppl can say what they will about rights in the abstract, but if it comes to them needing to claim their rights upon injury, they will be sure to acknowledge the same practical factors (institutions, procedures, imaginative presentations) in an attempt to see satisfaction

i agree with the practical element, my objections are mostly aimed at situations where legality can't intervene. that might include relations between nation states tho - there's something about the language of rights which can't help but appeal to universalism and is frequently used as an ideological weapon by liberal-democratic capitalism. against the Khmer Rouge that's unobjectionable, but against (potential) non-malign states that emphasize a different set of human values i'm less convinced. the right to private property, for example, feels pretty contestible in a way that the right to life doesn't.

"i don't know that a rights proponent has to be committed to any and all future acceptability of a given society's or group of society's conceptions of rights"

I can't parse this, can you rephrase it?

"rights...may have a limited universality"

what is limited universality?

xp sorry, should have said, group of societies': idea being, we uphold what we take to be (the) rights, but that doesn't commit us in any determinate way to thinking that everyone will come around to agreeing with us in the end.

universal 'for us' ?

Rights are inalienable for most of us, as long as certain things aren't happening.

The concept of rights only makes sense to me as description of a government's most fundamental relationship to its citizens. The assertion that a right is inalienable or God-given strikes me as an assertion about where a given society locates the boundary between legitimate governance and illegitimate governance.

If one goes Kantian and says that the deeming of rights is a consequence of rationality, then one can evade rights by choosing irrationality

I am one of those, like Nietzsche I suppose, who thinks the theistic position is as good as it gets, for anything like an "objective" conception of rights. What to conclude from thatree,, should one agree, is rather open, of course.

Reading my blogs today I came across the following article https://nyupress.org/webchapters/Knight&Schwartzberg_intro.pdf by Ingrid Robbins. She defends the following view:

limitarianism advocates that it is not morally permissible to have more resources than are needed to fully flourish in life

She distinguishes between intrinsic limitarianism, which says it's morally wrong in itself to have too much, and non-intrinsic limitarianism, which says it's morally wrong to have too much because having too much has bad consequences. She defends in this article a version of non-intrinsic limitarianism, on which having too much violates political equality (since the rich can dominate the public sphere where democratic deliberation is supposed to take place, e.g.).

I think that I am a limitarianism! My breed is intrinsic, and I wonder how the policy differences between intrinsic and non-intrinsic versions would shake out.

what should society do with surplus?

how deep does your intrinsicness go?

it's morally wrong in itself to have too much, and non-intrinsic limitarianism, which says it's morally wrong to have too much because having too much has bad consequences

you don't need having too much to have a bad consequence to dislike it, fine, but what if limitarianism has bad consequences? what if there were a class of peasants who only produced a luxury good, that society bans under limitarianism, and the class of peasants wages fall below subsistence. still good?

Surplus should be redistributed.

The small group of workers you mention will have to change work. Luxury good here might include hedge fund secretaries.

you're being non-intrinsic by attributing some negative connotation to the luxury good (hedge fund, something bad rich people do that has bad consequences) it could be something banal. if the people go work in something else they drive down the wages of the other people doing it, below the level of 'what's needed to flourish in life'

but what if the surplus brings us over the threshold in 'what's needed to flourish in life'? then everyone is in sin. seems the limitarian thing to do is burn it

isn't it more important that everyone should have the 'what's needed to flourish in life' minimum, rather than no one should have more? would you prefer a society where everyone is at or above the 'what's needed to flourish in life' threshold, or a society where no one is above but some are below? limitarianism seems to put hatred of the rich before love of the poor

There's already lots of work on sufficientarianism, making sure everyone gets the minimal to flourish. This is a different concern. For the author, the claim is that political inequality is a consequence of some having too much, and that political inequality is a moral wrong.

to fully flourish

i mean

sufficientarianism + limitarianism is absolute egalitarianism: no one can be above and nor below the 'minimum amount needed to fully flourish' (accounting for compensating differentials)

there could still be political inequality in a materially egalitarian society

another thing is invention. we are fortunate to live after the invention of many wonderful products. but let's say you invented Limitarianism before the printing press (spread by word of mouth), or the development of film or recorded music. surely people were able to live 'fully flourished' lives before these inventions, and many inventions would be initially costly, so it seems the limitarian thing to do would be to discourage invention. doesn't that much us all much poorer in the long run?

How does limiting how rich a person can get, limit invention? In printing press days it was institutions not individuals who were buying books.

Is there a limitarianist position that allows for some inequality? It seems like for many rich, above a certain $ amount it's more about competition and status than additional material well being, so you could hypothetically have a world with inequality and competition to indulge those impulses but just a much narrower range of wealth/poverty.

It's all gonna ride on what counts as full flourishing of course. If some money competition is part of a fully flourishing life, then sure, there's room for it as a limitarian.

Though I can't help but think in reply something along the lines of, it's not how much you have, it's how you use it.

Do you have another link the paper? This link isn't working for me.

Doesthis work?

old one worked fine for me

It's all gonna ride on what counts as full flourishing of course.

There are clear physical limits to personal consumption, no matter if it is a diet consisting exclusively of hummingbird tongues and an education incorporating daily personal tutorials from Nobel laureates. And if you're Elon Musk, you get to have your own rocket ships, too.

just sounding like the bad guys in an ayn rand book isn't enough to make your ideas right, i'm afraid.

there's a truism that republicans are willing to hold their noses and vote for their candidates more consistently than democrats are.

two recent data points along those lines:
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55768/why-ossoff-lost/

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/238157/what-the-alt-right-understands-about-winning-elections-that-some-progressives-do-not

assuming this is true i had an idea about possibly why. maybe it's bc republican voters are more likely to have strong affiliations outside of politics - communal, familial, religious (particularly), and so that sittlichtkeit is transmissive to politics where they can draw on their other tribal identities to constitute their political tribal identity. when democratic politics were most successful it was when union politics were particularly successful - so they could draw on that tribal identity in their political life. are non-political affiliative cultures predictive of political loyalty? does experiencing sublimation in a group teach repression of individuated desire? and if so, is the solution for the left to start building more widespread affiliative groups?

Finished reading "The H-Word" by Perry Anderson, which is interesting as a genealogy of the concept of hegemony, tracing its different usages and inflections across time and in different places/historical and political contexts. Some seemingly notable omissions from it but he's clear about how he takes up the concept and surveys its use across history. It does take you to some interesting and unexpected places (Tokugawa Japan, for example!) and sheds interesting light on the historical ambivalence between the terms of hegemony and empire (and their local and historical variations).

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2439-the-h-word

reading the democratic paradox by chantal mouffe which is so extremely my shit and that i agree with so much that i feel like for the sake of fairness i should actually read habermas and rawls on democratic theory to counter-balance my confirmation bias

via HOOS

oscar wilde was so ahead of the timehttps://t.co/aiJsX1MGCH pic.twitter.com/HyQ9dO2oed

— DSA Queer Socialists (@QueerDSA) July 23, 2017

Word

As a set of generalities, Wilde's remarks are fine. Once you start to implement them, they are much too vague to be of any use whatsoever.

The literature, however, remains unsettled as to exactly when and how misperceptions can be corrected. In addition, the role of the “backfire effect,” where corrective information can actually make false beliefs more prevalent, in these processes remains unclear. For example, Weeks and Garrett (2014) do not find evidence for the backfire effect in a study about correcting rumors in the 2008 presidential campaign. Similarly, Ecker et al.’s (2014) study of racial attitudes finds those attitudes do not change the effectiveness of discounting information. Looking at similar attitudes, Garrett et al. (2013) find no evidence of these backfire effects in a study about a proposed Islamic cultural center in New York City. By contrast, Nyhan and Reifler (2010, 2015) find evidence for a backfire effect in a vaccines context as well as in the case of being correctly informed about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This research note reports a replication of Nyhan and Reifler’s (2015) flu vaccines study embedded within a larger experimental study of flu vaccine intentions and attitudes. Data generated in the experiment do not replicate the backfire effect or the finding that corrections reduce misperceptions about vaccine safety. This suggests that more work is needed to validate the backfire effect, establishing the conditions under which it occurs and the size of its effect.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053168017716547

interesting interview:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/sigmar-gabriel-we-are-seeing-what-happens-when-the-u-s-pulls-back-a-1186181.html

feel like i should try and use this thread more this year

it's def a better thread than the regular politics one, which is mostly just media talk

I want to read your link, will do so a bit later I think.

it speaks to a lot of the issues that i opened this thread w/ - Europe, the US, the military guarantee of sovereignty, national interest vs. national values, etc.

I though his separation between European values and European interests was interesting but cloudy. Here's what I made of "European interests": financial interests, connected with soft power interests like being admired, but distinguished from mere "output". So it's not *just* cash, but how the cash is made: by workers and corporates acting in line with democratic values, in order to insure that democratic and free countries can continue to exist and prosper.

It's also interesting that while he speaks a great deal of Europe, on foreign policy he speaks as much of Germany as Europe. He notes that France is a nuclear power, but that "Europe could not defend itself without the U.S., even if European structures were strengthened." I gather he means a land invasion by Russia, since France's nuclear arsenal is sufficient to destroy the metropolises of any invaders, but presumably not Russian tanks across the Curzon line.

He seems to judge the USA to not longer count as a democratic and free nation, so that Europe stands alone against the authoritarian states of the USA, Russia, and China. An interesting new Axis I suppose. He mentions Chinese intervention in Africa and wonders why Europe isn't working harder there; of course France does work hard there but the colonial legacy is still playing out and it's not a pretty one. Africa is Europe's future, I think; but how to do so in a non-colonial way, when we begin with such inequalities, is hard to think about. The Chinese have no such problem (and obviously the Americans don't care).

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/critique-and-tradition-a-conversation-with-susan-buck-morss/

You have described your thinking as close “to what Bert Brecht described (and admired) as plumpes denken — non-elegant thinking.” Plumpes denken would be a kind of vulgar or inelegant thinking that has the agility to respond to the demands of our historical present. Fredric Jameson has described this kind of thinking as not a “position” that stands alone but a “demystification of some prior position from which it derives its acquired momentum.” This seems to fit in well with what you have termed a boundary question.

Yes, my colleague Irving Wohlfarth was the first to describe my work as a form of plumpes denken, and I take that to be a compliment! You have mentioned the element of unfaithfulness or a kind of promiscuity to my method. I would also add that it offers a critique of received tradition. In 1992, I was in Berlin, and it was some anniversary of Hegel. A lot of new books came out on Hegel’s Jena Writings that offered variants of his lectures recorded in student notes. Reading those, I noticed that it was exactly in 1804/1805 that the dialectic was spoken about by Hegel in terms of master/slave. I thought that was curious: this year was the culmination of the Haitian Revolution. So I asked some scholars in Germany, but they all said, “No, no. The master/slave dialectic is a reference to the revolt of Spartacus in ancient Rome.” I thought, “Well, wait a minute. Hegel’s economic theory is about Adam Smith, and his political theory is about Rousseau and the French Revolution, so how is it that he goes back to Spartacus for the theme of master and slave?” That struck me as bizarre. So I began to read about the Haitian Revolution, but it took me almost nine years to bring Hegel and Haiti together. Eventually, I found the microfiche of the journal Minerva, which Hegel read religiously, and in it I found many pages on the Haitian Revolution.

I remember when I first gave the lecture, “Hegel and Haiti,” in W. J. T. Mitchell’s seminar at the University of Chicago, someone in the audience asked me, “Why are you so angry when you give this lecture?” I was angry at the thought that my education had completely overlooked this connection between Hegel and Haiti. So there is also a kind of rebelliousness or anger at received traditions. It taught me, “Don’t be too respectful of authority — if it doesn’t make sense, maybe it’s wrong.”

https://thepointmag.com/dialogue/control-groups-william-davies-nervous-states/

TH: Would you say that a relatively modest economic decline has more political impact than long-suffered misery?

WD: This is an interpretation you could draw from the data. But in any case, we live in a political world today where questions of suffering, disease and mortality have reentered the center of the political scene. Not only in the U.S., but also in Britain, the trends of life expectancy are pointing downwards. On the other end of the age spectrum, political activism has become much more existential in nature—think about things like Black Lives Matter or the Extinction Rebellion movement. Politics has become about questions of life and death again in a way that blows a hole in a key aspect of the Hobbesian liberal project, which is that unless you declare war, politics would not be shaped by mortal concerns. Over the past two decades in America, orders of magnitude more people have died due to opium overdoses than in the Vietnam War. Capitalism is generating problems that impact people’s bodies and mortality. This is a phenomenon that rationalist social sciences of economics or behavioral psychology are not equipped to deal with. It’s another reason why a more psychoanalytically informed approach to subjectivity is necessary.

mordy:

series of moishe postone lectures on marx

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUzGFXPJAZ6qq7rI8GhPJ6gi7fH9cfUnI

thx i will watch. i almost bumped this thread this week actually w/ a long post but self-censored oops.

reading thucydides - it's cool.

thought about posting this to right-wing drift. seems v hostile to ilx: https://tinkzorg.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/on-strasserism-and-the-decay-of-the-left/

goddamn. that should be required reading with a competency exam before one is allowed to post on the 'smart socialists explain conservatism' etc. threads

it's a repetitive mess, a mixture of things a lot of ppl are saying abt the difficulty of building a broad leftist coalition/the contradictions within, a bunch of bitter attempts at score settling, some flattery for conservatives, the occasional baseless assertion and a whole lot of hubris. the real split is between ppl who find this sort of bravado impressive and those who roll their eyes

wow that was boring. maybe one or two good points somewhere in there but people keep writing this same fucking article like they’re saying something new

beyond sick of people tossing around lazy received crap like “identity politics scares away workers” without bothering to specify either term. since the writer is moaning about the “cancellation” of Angela Nagle due to her “class-based, materialist perspective” on why ethnic cleansing is necessary (another fucker who thinks nationalist workerism is class analysis and identities aren’t material) it’s pretty clear which workers are supposed to matter here. vampire castle bollocks

I looked at that but boy is it long, without any definition of what they take "strasserism" to be.