After twenty years, a familiar specter is once again haunting the developing world. A wave of audacious left-leaning politicians has been swept to power in Latin America, and a few months ago Thailand's Red Shirts staged a mass protest against the military government that brought Bangkok to a standstill. Maoist groups are rising throughout the Indian subcontinent, through election as well as armed uprising. The Left has returned.
While the American mainstream doubtless looks upon these events with horror, for progressives the reemergence of the Left from the shadow of 1989 is rightly viewed with ambivalence and uncertainty. While these movements have enormous potential to alleviate human suffering and raise the living standards of the poorest of the world's poor, they also carry the potential for a reprise of all the bloody, despotic excesses of 20th century Communism.
What are the possibilities and limitations of this recrudescence? What is the appropriate attitude of American liberals and Leftists toward it? In the 20th century, rivers of blood were shed by Communist governments, as well as by their enemies. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, most of that suffering and sacrifice appears to have been for nothing. Answering these questions is of burning importance to anyone concerned with avoiding pointless horror.
● ● ●
The problem with the Communist states of yesteryear was not really that they contravened human nature, as fashionable as it is nowadays to insist otherwise. Nor was it because of the inherent inefficiency of central planning, though the command economy did suffer a great deal of that. It was not even the economically undeveloped conditions in which the Left was forced to take power, as many Marxists have alleged - though the initial poverty was doubtless, at least, a major permissive cause.
No, the real problem was the total lack of freedom. This means not only the absence of political democracy, but also the bureaucratic stultification of economic life. The only conceivable justification for a new round of social revolutions, in light of the horror and failure of past experiments, is a self-conscious effort to avoid authoritarianism and bureaucracy, to the extent that conditions allow.
Freedom is thus the primary standard by which the new wave should be evaluated. So far, most of the Latin American governments have, for the most part, respected democratic norms. In some cases, such as Brazil and Chile, deference to parliamentary principles has been accompanied by a move toward the center on the part of former Left parties. This has produced both good and ill effects for their respective nations. Although the Chavez administration in Venezuela has some worrisome autocratic tendencies, its own base and the other Left parties have mostly kept it in line.
In Thailand, the Red Shirts have been consistent critics of the monarchy and the military, and advocates for parliamentary democracy - even though it earned them a brutal crackdown by the military dictatorship. Likewise Nepal's Maoist party, which participates in routine elections, and has thus far used violence only to prevent a military takeover.
One of India's Maoist factions, however, has used guerrilla tactics against India's elected government to take over sections of the countryside. Admittedly this was probably the result of decades of neglect of India's rural poor by its government, elections notwithstanding. In any of these cases, it is not necessarily the willingness to use force, which unfortunately is unavoidable in some circumstances (just ask George Washington), but rather the end for which force is used, that is essential.
One unfortunate quality that most of these groups share is an unwillingness to rethink statist and bureaucratic alternatives to private enterprise. Although not all experiments with nationalization of industry have been failures – one has only to think of the TVA or South Korea's Pohang Steel – history seems to teach that adopting state ownership as a general rule tends toward bureaucratic sclerosis and undemocratic concentrations of power.
Thus far, no current movement has yet attempted a thorough collectivization of the economy, doubtless due, in part, to the memory of the Eastern European experience. However, in cases where alternatives to private ownership have been sought, as with energy resources in Venezuela and Bolivia, these have usually taken the form of old-fashioned nationalization, rather than, for example, experiments in ownership diversification. Although cooperatives have played a relatively large role in Venezuela and Bolivia, and to some extent in Argentina, in no case have they received primary emphasis.
It is clear that any attempt to supplant capitalism, particularly in the developing nations where such projects are likely to be instituted, will face enormous difficulties. If the new revolutionaries are wise, they will build on the experience of such moderate Communisms as those of Cuba or Mozambique, while experimenting with democratic institutions, ownership diversification, and individual proprietorship in land and small business. Of course, nothing perfect can reasonably be expected from any form of government under developing-nation conditions, but perhaps the partisans of the new wave can at least make life more bearable for their countrymen.
● ● ●
The principle that should guide the attitude of American progressives toward the new wave is restraint. The reemergence of the Cold War liberal who gleefully jumped aboard the Right's anti-Communist bandwagon is probably the worst possible outcome.
If a half-century of Cold War taught us anything, it is that the developed nations' militant reaction against Communism made the Communist states worse than they otherwise would have been. Whether intervening in the Russian Civil War, appeasing Hitler, or making the provocative moves that helped touch off the Cold War, the unrelenting hostility of the capitalist powers doubtless contributed to a hardening of attitudes among Communism's leaders, and the rigidification of its bureaucratic police states.
American radicals, on the other hand, eventually discovered that they did little service to their cause or to any attempt at expanding their relatively small numbers by an all-too-frequent naiveté – even, in some cases, willful denial – regarding the true nature of the Communist nations. This was not universally true, of course; the Bolsheviks had many critics on the Left, such as Emma Goldman, from the very beginning. Nonetheless, whether Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, or even, initially, the ghastly Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, many radicals found a train of disappointments in too much of the Really Existing Socialism.
The notion of restraint signifies dedication to realistic foreign policy. Neither the Cold War zealotry of Lyndon Johnson nor the misguided affection of Henry Wallace are appropriate. Rather, what is needed is the hard-minded realpolitik of then-prominent journalist Walter Lippmann. Unlike most liberals, Lippmann criticized the Cold War policy of containment at the outset. Instead, he proposed to build on the Yalta agreement, having the superpowers divide the world up into formal spheres of influence. This was, to some extent, done eventually anyway.
In our contemporary situation, progressive realism mostly means extricating America from the new wave's path, to whatever extent the line-up of domestic forces within the United States allows. We could, perhaps, blockade the flow of military merchandise into conflict zones, and supply aid to civilians. We can seek agreements with other powers to adopt similar policies. In brief, we should help people, or get out.
Something like the existence of Maoists in Nepal only becomes of concern to us if, for some reason, it has implications for the global balance of forces. Then our government might have to consider a range of responses. Since these movements are simply too small to have more than regional significance at most, the point would seem to be moot.
● ● ●
In Marx's theory, the economic principles that guide human history will eventually bring about the realization of the good society everywhere on earth. The particular is ultimately resolved into the universal by capitalist laws of development which are themselves universal. Since the difficulties of this tantalizing vision became manifest during the 20th century, invocation of universal principles has gone out of fashion entirely.
The Marxist vision indeed needs to be rethought, even by those movements which claim inspiration from it. Nevertheless, the positivist and postmodern approaches that have gained cachet among much of today's intelligentsia, which often deny universality altogether, are deeply unsatisfying. This is all the more so because they have so little to offer the impoverished masses of the developing world.
Let there be a virtuous mean between these vicious extremes. I propose that progressives take a letter from Aristotle, and seek the universal-in-the-particular. What this means, in concrete terms, is that the possibilities and limitations for social change and international peace should be expected to vary with situation, and the response from progressives should likewise vary.
As in Aristotle's Politics, the world will likely consist of various forms of state, from Persian Gulf monarchies to European social democracies to Latin American developing capitalism, for a long time. Likewise, there will be a welter of competing political factions and social groups in any given nation. There will be international conflict, and even war, just as there will be counter-movements for peace.
What distinguishes this view from mere relativism, however, is that it posits the existence of better and worse forms of each polity, and of objective principles that regulate their development. It offers a conception of the good life, certain elements of which are common to all people, and which may serve as the objective standard by which the values of all societies, and the policies of all governments, can be judged.
The specter of Marx is once again haunting the slums and peasant villages of the developing nations. We shall see whether history repeats itself and how, as tragedy or as farce. For now, revolutionaries in the Third World, and reformers in the First, have an opportunity to create something new.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Falling Towers
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
- T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"
Perhaps the infamous dictum about ends justifying means that appears to undergird so much of America's foreign policy might just as easily apply to certain non-state actors. One of the most startling moments of my undergraduate education was hearing one of Sarah Lawrence's professors, a leftist a outrance, compare the fanatical right-wing theocrat Osama bin Laden to our nation's first President.
"After all," the argument went, "Washington was a wealthy landowner, a slave-owner even, and a conservative nationalist." Yet Washington's struggle against imperialism is today remembered a great deal more fondly by Americans.
In accordance with the principle of charitable interpretation, I swallowed my distaste and went with the assumption that the comparison was meant sincerely, and not intended to shock and provoke as many leftist screeds of this sort appear to be. After mulling it over for a bit, I came to the conclusion that our professor indeed had a point.
The United States not only established its independence through violent means - including the use of vigilante terror against unarmed citizens who too openly professed support for the British king - but has, within living memory, used its unmatchable war machine in attacks throughout the globe that have killed and injured civilians by the tens of thousands.
During the Vietnam War, for instance, we killed about 2 million noncombatants in Southeast Asia through bombing alone. Most of this unlimited use of air power had political and psychological, rather than tactical objectives.
None of this, of course, should be taken to explain or justify the September 11 attacks, merely to keep a sense of perspective about them. To condemn Al Qaeda when our body count is so much higher would be the grossest hypocrisy.
No, if that professor's remarks still sit uneasily with me, it has more to do with Al Qaeda's ends than its means. This is not to say that the use of terror against civilian targets is any more defensible when terrorists do it than when imperialists do it. In both cases, it is at best unclear whether the means employed do actually achieve the desired ends; whether, if the desired ends are in fact achieved, the violence used to achieve them does not create other ends equally pernicious; and most importantly of all, whether the means defeat and destroy the ends.
These are questions to trouble leftists, not medieval barbarians. Osama bin Laden is not George Washington, not because his methods are cleaner, but because his objectives are utterly reprehensible. Washington and his comrades were fairly progressive for their time, bourgeois nationalists steeped in the rationalist ideals of the European Enlightenment.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban, on the other hand, are regressive outriders of what the Slovenian Marxist thinker Slavoj Zizek calls "the New Barbarism." They would replace American imperialism with a second Dark Ages, capitalism with Asiatic despotism. If they could achieve these ends with deep-tissue massage and poetry recital they would scarcely be less appalling.
There are two bottom lines to all this. One is that those on the left who characterize the barbarians at the gate as heroic anti-imperialist freedom fighters are doing no favors to their cause, and setting themselves up for a terrible disappointment. Similarly, the right needs to stop its self-righteous chest-pounding jingoism. America is hardly an aggrieved innocent in world affairs.
The other, more concretely, is that we must come to a resolution with regard to Afghanistan. As the Obama Administration struggles and fumbles with the sticky tactical situation in that unfortunate land, it has become obvious that our halfhearted, slapdash approach is not working.
We ought to either redouble our efforts and deploy all available troops and resources against the villains of 9/11 - which would quite likely endanger our empire in the Fertile Crescent - or simply declare victory and leave.
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
- T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"
Perhaps the infamous dictum about ends justifying means that appears to undergird so much of America's foreign policy might just as easily apply to certain non-state actors. One of the most startling moments of my undergraduate education was hearing one of Sarah Lawrence's professors, a leftist a outrance, compare the fanatical right-wing theocrat Osama bin Laden to our nation's first President.
"After all," the argument went, "Washington was a wealthy landowner, a slave-owner even, and a conservative nationalist." Yet Washington's struggle against imperialism is today remembered a great deal more fondly by Americans.
In accordance with the principle of charitable interpretation, I swallowed my distaste and went with the assumption that the comparison was meant sincerely, and not intended to shock and provoke as many leftist screeds of this sort appear to be. After mulling it over for a bit, I came to the conclusion that our professor indeed had a point.
The United States not only established its independence through violent means - including the use of vigilante terror against unarmed citizens who too openly professed support for the British king - but has, within living memory, used its unmatchable war machine in attacks throughout the globe that have killed and injured civilians by the tens of thousands.
During the Vietnam War, for instance, we killed about 2 million noncombatants in Southeast Asia through bombing alone. Most of this unlimited use of air power had political and psychological, rather than tactical objectives.
None of this, of course, should be taken to explain or justify the September 11 attacks, merely to keep a sense of perspective about them. To condemn Al Qaeda when our body count is so much higher would be the grossest hypocrisy.
No, if that professor's remarks still sit uneasily with me, it has more to do with Al Qaeda's ends than its means. This is not to say that the use of terror against civilian targets is any more defensible when terrorists do it than when imperialists do it. In both cases, it is at best unclear whether the means employed do actually achieve the desired ends; whether, if the desired ends are in fact achieved, the violence used to achieve them does not create other ends equally pernicious; and most importantly of all, whether the means defeat and destroy the ends.
These are questions to trouble leftists, not medieval barbarians. Osama bin Laden is not George Washington, not because his methods are cleaner, but because his objectives are utterly reprehensible. Washington and his comrades were fairly progressive for their time, bourgeois nationalists steeped in the rationalist ideals of the European Enlightenment.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban, on the other hand, are regressive outriders of what the Slovenian Marxist thinker Slavoj Zizek calls "the New Barbarism." They would replace American imperialism with a second Dark Ages, capitalism with Asiatic despotism. If they could achieve these ends with deep-tissue massage and poetry recital they would scarcely be less appalling.
There are two bottom lines to all this. One is that those on the left who characterize the barbarians at the gate as heroic anti-imperialist freedom fighters are doing no favors to their cause, and setting themselves up for a terrible disappointment. Similarly, the right needs to stop its self-righteous chest-pounding jingoism. America is hardly an aggrieved innocent in world affairs.
The other, more concretely, is that we must come to a resolution with regard to Afghanistan. As the Obama Administration struggles and fumbles with the sticky tactical situation in that unfortunate land, it has become obvious that our halfhearted, slapdash approach is not working.
We ought to either redouble our efforts and deploy all available troops and resources against the villains of 9/11 - which would quite likely endanger our empire in the Fertile Crescent - or simply declare victory and leave.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
What Kind of Person Thinks About This S***?
I came to my gestational ideas out of an engagement with Marxism which began in my undergraduate days. I found many aspects of Marxism quite compelling, others lacking. I began thinking about alternate approaches that could either replace or be combined with Marxism to compensate for its deficiencies, including Critical Theory, poststructuralism, and analytic thought of various kinds.
It was to learn about these sorts of ideas that I committed to a graduate program in philosophy in the Fall of 2008. Unfortunately, I found the small taste I got of these alternative approaches not entirely satisfying. Even more unfortunately, partly because of the stress of a collapsing relationship, I became extremely nervous and overly defensive of Marxism.
Being excessively argumentative in my first semester of graduate school did not endear me to certain faculty members, who not-so-politely suggested I explore other career paths. (I am, as a matter of fact, contemplating Law, Journalism, and civil service, among other things.) I still want to finish the degree, in part because I feel it will help open doors in these other fields, in part because I simply want it. For all the hardships I experienced in grad school, I'm still interested in ideas. Silly me.
It wasn't all hardship, I suppose. I toned it down a bit my second semester, and developed a new interest in some old ideas. I took a class on Aristotle, and loved it so much I made the classics professor my advisor. Aristotelian realism, I now believe, is a perfect complement and corrective to Marxist materialism.
I took the next year off, decided to return to Korea. I had taught English there in 2005, and decided it might be nice to see some old friends again. Unfortunately, I found the country as corrupt, conservative, and chauvinistic as I had left it. No, not fair. There had actually been a significant amount of progress in some ways, more development, slightly softening attitudes on women and gays and foreigners.
Unfortunately, the English academy (hagwon) system is still a frightful mess, only in the earliest stages of being cleaned up. Basically, these McSchools charge wayyyy too much money to parents frightened for their children's future in a society competitive enough to rival the ecosystem of the Amazon basin for Darwinian savagery. They skimp on essential costs, use substandard texts and supplies, overwork students, rearrange classes every time a parent or adult student complains, and oh yes, horribly mistreat their workers (Korean and foreign both). In general, the academies are the worst possible way to do education.
Koreans know this. They've actually known it for a while, but a newly developed country with a democracy less than 20 years old, locked in a perpetual state of war with its collectivist northern alter-ego, and bitch-slapped by the most recent economic crisis just as it was finally recovering from the one in 1998 can only do so much.
Long story short, I got monumentally screwed over -- again. Fool me twice, shame on me, I suppose. I figured, this time around, I know the ins and outs. I'll work for a reputable company, YBM, and teach grown-ups. Sounded good on paper, but YBM, while not especially corrupt, by Korean standards, proved to be extremely disorganized and poorly managed, at least by typical American standards.
After three months of doing my best to follow my boss' instructions, I got tired of getting blamed for managerial snafus, as well as of consistently negative feedback from students that often went suspiciously unsubstantiated. For instance, I requested several times to see student evaluations. Even if they had been in Korean, I could easily have had a friend translate them. The evaluations were never produced. My manager refused to provide any details, and actually identified as a source of criticism a class that I hadn't even taught!
I believe that my articles for the Korea Times, mentioned in my first post (http://smugpansy-cynicscorner.blogspot.com/2010/04/smug-pansy.html), may have played a role in souring my relationship with my employer, but I can't be sure. Me and my big, fat, um, word processor?
I tried to move on to another job, but Immigration (which is as full of racist a******* in Korea as it is in America) put the kibosh on it. So I returned to America, penniless. A warning for anyone thinking about teaching English abroad.
Again, I suppose it wasn't all hardship. I got to see some old friends and make some new ones. Koreans, even middle-class Koreans, are used to a somewhat greater level of hardship than are Americans. My friend kadual (handle, not real name, of course), for example, ended up homeless and sleeping on the street for a while when he toured Australia. Didn't even complain about it, said the weather was nice. Yeesh.
So, now I am thinking about completing my degree, applying for jobs, and of course, blogging. I'd say the 21st century's off to a roaring start.
It was to learn about these sorts of ideas that I committed to a graduate program in philosophy in the Fall of 2008. Unfortunately, I found the small taste I got of these alternative approaches not entirely satisfying. Even more unfortunately, partly because of the stress of a collapsing relationship, I became extremely nervous and overly defensive of Marxism.
Being excessively argumentative in my first semester of graduate school did not endear me to certain faculty members, who not-so-politely suggested I explore other career paths. (I am, as a matter of fact, contemplating Law, Journalism, and civil service, among other things.) I still want to finish the degree, in part because I feel it will help open doors in these other fields, in part because I simply want it. For all the hardships I experienced in grad school, I'm still interested in ideas. Silly me.
It wasn't all hardship, I suppose. I toned it down a bit my second semester, and developed a new interest in some old ideas. I took a class on Aristotle, and loved it so much I made the classics professor my advisor. Aristotelian realism, I now believe, is a perfect complement and corrective to Marxist materialism.
I took the next year off, decided to return to Korea. I had taught English there in 2005, and decided it might be nice to see some old friends again. Unfortunately, I found the country as corrupt, conservative, and chauvinistic as I had left it. No, not fair. There had actually been a significant amount of progress in some ways, more development, slightly softening attitudes on women and gays and foreigners.
Unfortunately, the English academy (hagwon) system is still a frightful mess, only in the earliest stages of being cleaned up. Basically, these McSchools charge wayyyy too much money to parents frightened for their children's future in a society competitive enough to rival the ecosystem of the Amazon basin for Darwinian savagery. They skimp on essential costs, use substandard texts and supplies, overwork students, rearrange classes every time a parent or adult student complains, and oh yes, horribly mistreat their workers (Korean and foreign both). In general, the academies are the worst possible way to do education.
Koreans know this. They've actually known it for a while, but a newly developed country with a democracy less than 20 years old, locked in a perpetual state of war with its collectivist northern alter-ego, and bitch-slapped by the most recent economic crisis just as it was finally recovering from the one in 1998 can only do so much.
Long story short, I got monumentally screwed over -- again. Fool me twice, shame on me, I suppose. I figured, this time around, I know the ins and outs. I'll work for a reputable company, YBM, and teach grown-ups. Sounded good on paper, but YBM, while not especially corrupt, by Korean standards, proved to be extremely disorganized and poorly managed, at least by typical American standards.
After three months of doing my best to follow my boss' instructions, I got tired of getting blamed for managerial snafus, as well as of consistently negative feedback from students that often went suspiciously unsubstantiated. For instance, I requested several times to see student evaluations. Even if they had been in Korean, I could easily have had a friend translate them. The evaluations were never produced. My manager refused to provide any details, and actually identified as a source of criticism a class that I hadn't even taught!
I believe that my articles for the Korea Times, mentioned in my first post (http://smugpansy-cynicscorner.blogspot.com/2010/04/smug-pansy.html), may have played a role in souring my relationship with my employer, but I can't be sure. Me and my big, fat, um, word processor?
I tried to move on to another job, but Immigration (which is as full of racist a******* in Korea as it is in America) put the kibosh on it. So I returned to America, penniless. A warning for anyone thinking about teaching English abroad.
Again, I suppose it wasn't all hardship. I got to see some old friends and make some new ones. Koreans, even middle-class Koreans, are used to a somewhat greater level of hardship than are Americans. My friend kadual (handle, not real name, of course), for example, ended up homeless and sleeping on the street for a while when he toured Australia. Didn't even complain about it, said the weather was nice. Yeesh.
So, now I am thinking about completing my degree, applying for jobs, and of course, blogging. I'd say the 21st century's off to a roaring start.
Let's Get Metaphysical
A word of warning: what follows is very long, theoretical, and for many people, quite boring. If theory is not your cup of tea, please feel free to skip it. Most of my writing won't be this abstract; in fact, my next entry will be entirely personal. I just wanted to get it out of the way.
Allow me to elaborate on the 'formal materialism' I mentioned in my previous post. Again, purely speculative at this point. While I cannot say that I think seven contradictory ideas before breakfast, the labels I use and the exact parameters of what I think are still somewhat malleable. Brisket with a side of Weltanschauung, known to stick to the ribs. Mylanta, please.
Basically, I wish to follow in the vein of such thinkers as Santayana, Alain Badiou, and even to an extent the neo-Thomists (from whom I purloined the term), among others, in attempting a synthesis between the classical realism of Plato and Aristotle and contemporary materialism. Or, to put it more simply, I think that some human concepts can be provisionally taken to describe real attributes of things in the physical universe.
'Redness', for example, can be taken to represent a real existing quality of red things. The various instances of red that we observe can be supposed to be linked by unchanging causal principles, as well as emergent natural laws. Every instance of red is red for the same reason, has the same cause. They're not just suggestions, they're natural laws. :) Or at any rate, we infer the existence and nature of such laws to the best of our fallible knowledge.
Individual people and societies also have certain 'laws', though certainly not in the sense of positivist social science, or even of Marxist social science for that matter. The laws in question are institutions, organizations of people in accordance with fixed normative principles (as opposed to the causal principles mentioned just previously). Ethics, values, political theories, these are human creations for human purposes. To put it bluntly, morality is table manners.
It is in this sense that my current line of thinking is still a form of social materialism, and not moral realism in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense. Whereas Plato or Aristotle would have held that moral laws have a kind of real existence in a way identical to, or at least similar to, causal laws, a materialist still insists on a kind of fact-value distinction. Norm and cause are horses of very different colors.
Unlike a relativist, however, a materialist does not make an absolute fact-value distinction. Normative principles may be conventions, but they are, in a sense, necessary conventions. We need values so we can cooperate in order to survive and prosper. (It should be noted that I take a more expansive definition of "need" and "prosperity" than is usually meant by these words; more on that later. There is also an intriguing question of why, if morality is so good for us, does it so often seem such a burden? Karl Marx and others supplied some interesting ingredients for an answer to that question; more on that later as well.)
By the same token, we don't entirely choose our values. They are a legacy of the past. We have the values that we have because of the way our society evolved over history to meet our needs. Conceiving of the fact-value distinction in this way, making normative universals immanent properties of human institutions, allows us to reintroduce metaphysics to politics.
Our precise conception of what matter is and how it evolves over time will have important ethical and political ramifications. Metaphysical speculation of this sort has the potential to answer pressing questions about determinism and free will, mind and matter. It can inform discussions of how societies develop and how political decisions should be made.
More on all this later!
Allow me to elaborate on the 'formal materialism' I mentioned in my previous post. Again, purely speculative at this point. While I cannot say that I think seven contradictory ideas before breakfast, the labels I use and the exact parameters of what I think are still somewhat malleable. Brisket with a side of Weltanschauung, known to stick to the ribs. Mylanta, please.
Basically, I wish to follow in the vein of such thinkers as Santayana, Alain Badiou, and even to an extent the neo-Thomists (from whom I purloined the term), among others, in attempting a synthesis between the classical realism of Plato and Aristotle and contemporary materialism. Or, to put it more simply, I think that some human concepts can be provisionally taken to describe real attributes of things in the physical universe.
'Redness', for example, can be taken to represent a real existing quality of red things. The various instances of red that we observe can be supposed to be linked by unchanging causal principles, as well as emergent natural laws. Every instance of red is red for the same reason, has the same cause. They're not just suggestions, they're natural laws. :) Or at any rate, we infer the existence and nature of such laws to the best of our fallible knowledge.
Individual people and societies also have certain 'laws', though certainly not in the sense of positivist social science, or even of Marxist social science for that matter. The laws in question are institutions, organizations of people in accordance with fixed normative principles (as opposed to the causal principles mentioned just previously). Ethics, values, political theories, these are human creations for human purposes. To put it bluntly, morality is table manners.
It is in this sense that my current line of thinking is still a form of social materialism, and not moral realism in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense. Whereas Plato or Aristotle would have held that moral laws have a kind of real existence in a way identical to, or at least similar to, causal laws, a materialist still insists on a kind of fact-value distinction. Norm and cause are horses of very different colors.
Unlike a relativist, however, a materialist does not make an absolute fact-value distinction. Normative principles may be conventions, but they are, in a sense, necessary conventions. We need values so we can cooperate in order to survive and prosper. (It should be noted that I take a more expansive definition of "need" and "prosperity" than is usually meant by these words; more on that later. There is also an intriguing question of why, if morality is so good for us, does it so often seem such a burden? Karl Marx and others supplied some interesting ingredients for an answer to that question; more on that later as well.)
By the same token, we don't entirely choose our values. They are a legacy of the past. We have the values that we have because of the way our society evolved over history to meet our needs. Conceiving of the fact-value distinction in this way, making normative universals immanent properties of human institutions, allows us to reintroduce metaphysics to politics.
Our precise conception of what matter is and how it evolves over time will have important ethical and political ramifications. Metaphysical speculation of this sort has the potential to answer pressing questions about determinism and free will, mind and matter. It can inform discussions of how societies develop and how political decisions should be made.
More on all this later!
Monday, April 5, 2010
A Spoonful of Cynicism
I hate blogs. Hate them. Why am I writing one, then? Mostly to vent, like Lear shaking his fist at the heavens; partly to show the world that yes, Virginia, you can have correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation on the Internet.
This is a blog for people who hate blogs. At least it is if it becomes a long-term thing. Who knows? I might give up on it when I decide I hate it, which, given the major premise of the work, seems rather on the likely side. We'll see.
Do you know what I miss? Essay writing. Crisp, tight, ad unguem. I miss writing that is formal enough to publish, yet personal enough for the average educated reader to ken. I miss topic paragraphs and allusions and wordplay. I miss writing that has a point.
For example, Paul Krugman is one of the few voices on the New York Times' opinion page who makes an ounce of sense and isn't annoying as hell. (Even if he is a phrenologist.) Still, I read his column, not his blog. I don't need Paul Krugman's opinion every single day of the week. A series of thematically related yet topically selective expatiations is all I ask.
It irritates me that blogs are seen by an alarmingly large segment of the public, of whatever political persuasion, as the wave of the future, a technological force majeure. Blogs, it is said, will eventually supplant the traditional media (be it conceived as liberal, corporate, freemason, or whatever), ushering in a new utopia of chrome and neon and penis enlargement.
The reality is that, to the extent that they have had any impact on human society, blogs have contributed to the erosion of traditional media -- which actually pay reporters to gather information -- while adding nothing but distortion and pontification (typically of the most puerile and uninformed variety).
What you will get from me, to put it plainly, is simply a series of essays or columns or just plain rants. Every so often, I will choose some topic that interests or provokes me, and attempt to analyze it or argue about it.
I will not bore you with excessive details from my personal life, although I may regale you with some or other anecdote that I find amusing, revealing, funny, or just plain weird. By way of introduction, I will say that I am 28 years old, a white male of Jewish extraction, though atheist in belief. I am politically progressive, though in a perhaps surprisingly unconventional way, a gay guy (deal with it, assholes), loyal but often stubborn and irascible.
I emerged from the darkest pits of suburban Long Island, that alienated wasteland of postmodernity, and attended college at Sarah Lawrence in Westchester, New York. I have done some freelance reporting (Here are some links to my work: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/10/117_54131.html, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2010/04/160_55501.html) I am currently finishing up an MA in Philosophy.
Finally, please note that I am theoretical in my orientation. That is, I usually interpret the world by applying some larger idea to particular things, showing how details fit together systemically. If this turns you off, well, don't read it. Right now, I would describe my thinking as a kind of "formal materialism," for want of a better term. What does that mean? A subject for another column.
Be seeing you....
This is a blog for people who hate blogs. At least it is if it becomes a long-term thing. Who knows? I might give up on it when I decide I hate it, which, given the major premise of the work, seems rather on the likely side. We'll see.
Do you know what I miss? Essay writing. Crisp, tight, ad unguem. I miss writing that is formal enough to publish, yet personal enough for the average educated reader to ken. I miss topic paragraphs and allusions and wordplay. I miss writing that has a point.
For example, Paul Krugman is one of the few voices on the New York Times' opinion page who makes an ounce of sense and isn't annoying as hell. (Even if he is a phrenologist.) Still, I read his column, not his blog. I don't need Paul Krugman's opinion every single day of the week. A series of thematically related yet topically selective expatiations is all I ask.
It irritates me that blogs are seen by an alarmingly large segment of the public, of whatever political persuasion, as the wave of the future, a technological force majeure. Blogs, it is said, will eventually supplant the traditional media (be it conceived as liberal, corporate, freemason, or whatever), ushering in a new utopia of chrome and neon and penis enlargement.
The reality is that, to the extent that they have had any impact on human society, blogs have contributed to the erosion of traditional media -- which actually pay reporters to gather information -- while adding nothing but distortion and pontification (typically of the most puerile and uninformed variety).
What you will get from me, to put it plainly, is simply a series of essays or columns or just plain rants. Every so often, I will choose some topic that interests or provokes me, and attempt to analyze it or argue about it.
I will not bore you with excessive details from my personal life, although I may regale you with some or other anecdote that I find amusing, revealing, funny, or just plain weird. By way of introduction, I will say that I am 28 years old, a white male of Jewish extraction, though atheist in belief. I am politically progressive, though in a perhaps surprisingly unconventional way, a gay guy (deal with it, assholes), loyal but often stubborn and irascible.
I emerged from the darkest pits of suburban Long Island, that alienated wasteland of postmodernity, and attended college at Sarah Lawrence in Westchester, New York. I have done some freelance reporting (Here are some links to my work: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/10/117_54131.html, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2010/04/160_55501.html) I am currently finishing up an MA in Philosophy.
Finally, please note that I am theoretical in my orientation. That is, I usually interpret the world by applying some larger idea to particular things, showing how details fit together systemically. If this turns you off, well, don't read it. Right now, I would describe my thinking as a kind of "formal materialism," for want of a better term. What does that mean? A subject for another column.
Be seeing you....
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