Marx’s critique is powerfully moral, not in the sense of establishing rules of right and wrong conduct but in the older sense of describing what it is for humans to be able to flourish, to be able to realize themselves fully. It was also cynical about the very idea of morality, or rather of what it had come to represent. For Marx, the concept of alienation, and of human flourishing, could not be wrenched away from the project of social transformation, of the overthrowing of capitalism itself.
…’The claim of Marxism to be a morally distinctive standpoint’, argues Alasdair MacIntyre, for many years a Communist Party member, ‘is undermined by Marxism’s own moral history’. Whenever ‘Marxists have had to take explicit moral stances’, they have ‘always fallen back into relatively straightforward versions of Kantianism or utilitarianism’. There is in Marx, MacIntyre suggests, an absence of thought about the moral underpinnings of social transformation. Marx excoriated the moral consequences of capitalism. He wrote of how human nature might flourish under communism. But he wrote little of the norms by which revolutionary social movements should be judged. One result was the wrenching apart of politics and morality in those movements and societies influenced by Marx. Social change came to be seen purely in political terms and its moral content defined solely in terms of the success of its political ends. The moral case for any action was that it furthered the cause. As a result, MacIntyre suggests, there is a moral hollowness to Marxism that could only be filled by looking elsewhere for moral answers, in particular to utilitarian ideas that the revolutionary means were justified by the revolutionary ends.
…By 2008, however, the possibility of change (at least in the way that Marx would have understood it) had become negligibly small. The depth of the economic crisis led to talk of a ‘crisis of capitalism’. And yet there was no political challenge to capitalism. Workers’ organizations had been destroyed, the left had imploded, as had the idea that there could be an alternative to the market system. The resurrection of Marx challenged none of this. Those who turn to Marx these days look upon him not as a prophet of capitalism’s demise but as a poet of its moral corruption. But to what extent does a moral critique that is explicitly hitched to a social critique remain meaningful when the possibilities of acting upon that social critique seem so to have faded? That, perhaps, is the most difficult question to be asked of Marx’s thought.
books
Different Shades of Socrates
Chinese philosophers, Fung insisted, have tended to avoid the abstract, showing little interest in metaphysics or pure logic, pouring their energies instead into developing more down-to-earth, practical political arguments. They were, he suggested, ‘concerned chiefly with society and not with the universe’, more preoccupied with defining how to live than in discovering how things are. Or, as another Chinese philosopher Y.L. Chin has put it, ‘Chinese philosophers were all of them different shades of Socrates’.
Not just geography, but language too, Fung suggested, made Chinese philosophy distinct. The Chinese corpus contains few great philosophical tracts. There is little to compare with Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, or Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Chinese philosophy tends rather to be poetic, aphoristic, suggestive. The very language of the Chinese, many argue, has lent itself to aphoristic philosophy and discouraged long, finely argued theses. A written language based on the alphabetic system, and with a tight grammatical fabric, as came eventually to be used in the West, provides useful material from which to fashion an argumentative treatise. A language that is constructed from symbolic characters that are not susceptible to considerations of singular or plural, or of past, present and future tenses, and most of which can equally be a noun, a verb, and adjective or an adverb, but whose connotation changes according to the other symbols alongside which it sits in a sentence, is necessarily more ambiguous and allusive in meaning. Chinese language is, the philosopher Lawrence Wu suggests, ‘an excellent tool for poetry but not for systematic or scientific thought’. There is in Chinese philosophy ‘profound insights, brilliant aphorisms, interesting metaphors, but few elaborate arguments’.
The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the songs of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallization of language in writing… Writing creates an artificial memory, whereby humans can enlarge their experience beyond the limits of one generation or one way of life. At the same time it has allowed them to invent a world of abstract entities and mistake them for reality.
…It is scarcely possible to imagine a philosophy such as Platonism emerging in an oral culture. It is equally difficult to imagine it in Sumeria. How could a world of bodiless Forms be represented in pictograms? How could abstract entities be represented as the ultimate realities in a mode of writing that still recalled the world of the senses?
It is significant that nothing resembling Platonism arose in China. Classical Chinese script is not ideographic, as used to be thought; but because of what A.C. Graham terms its ‘combination of graphic wealth with phonetic poverty’ it did not encourage the kind of abstract thinking that produced Plato’s philosophy. Plato was what historians of philosophy call a realist — he believed that abstract terms designated spiritual or intellectual entities. In contrast, throughout its long history, Chinese philosophy has been nominalist — it has understood that even the most abstract terms are only labels, names for the diversity of things in the world. As a result, Chinese thinkers have rarely mistaken ideas for facts.
So I Shut It All Off, I’m a Happy Idiot
Piety and patriotism were one and the same thing. For the Greeks, to be without patriotism, to be anything less than an active citizen, was to be an ‘idiot’. That, indeed, is what the word originally meant, referring to anyone who retreated from the life of the city.
Having just finished a book in which Steven Pinker cautioned the reader against struggling upstream toward the “original intent” of specific words, against the current of popular usage, it is only after judicious deliberation that I hereby proclaim my intent to reclaim this particular term. Like Randal in Clerks 2, I realize that “idiot” is currently classed along with “moron”, “retard”, “imbecile”, “cretin” and “simpleton” as unacceptably “ableist”, in the parlance of our times, but such fashions will always come and go, and like the idiots of ancient Greece, true individuals will always pay them no heed. Oh, no, no, it’s cool, I’m taking it back.
My own retreat from political dialogue was motivated by sober realism, not by selfishness. Temperamentally averse to any sort of group activity, I’m not the sort to take part in meetings or marches, and I’m incapable of proselytizing for a cause. I make just enough money to get by, not enough to meaningfully contribute to charities and politically-oriented non-profits. I could use my limited spare time in an attempt to thoroughly educate myself about all the issues du jour, but to what end? What would I do with that information? Vote differently? Win arguments on the web? In short, I have no power or influence, and acting or speaking otherwise, even as a quasi-literary character, would be just another attention-seeking, self-flattering conceit.
Life in the modern-day polis has rendered most of our activity as citizens superfluous. Retreating from it isn’t a renunciation of obligations so much as an acknowledgement of limitations. Like another ancient Greek who was faulted for a perceived lack of community spirit, I don’t know much, but I know that much.
I Was Tutored in the Ancient Mysteries By a Wizened Philosophe
In order to try to philosophically reconstruct Camus’ position, and to show why he has been so partially received, this book argues for a single hypothesis. We argue that Camus should be understood as a philosophe, in a neoclassical, humanistic, and also an enlightened French sense that it will be our task in the Introduction to preliminarily explain.
…Already we thus see how Camus’ oeuvre, itself an argument that “a man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once,” is as good as its word. Camus does not accept the accepted polarities of philosophy versus literature. His life and work contest the separation of wholly theoretical philosophy versus philosophising rooted in the Socratic gnôthi seauton. He equally challenges the opposition between reason and emotion. Our claim is that Camus‘ bridging of these accepted polarities goes some way to explaining how often he has been partially read hitherto. If we do not accept that Camus’ thought and activity challenges these inherited oppositions, we are bound to read him as either a philosopher or a poet, a sentimentalist or a rationalist, an atheist or a theological thinker, a rebel or a reactionary, an ancient or a modern, even when such readings can only be vouchsafed at the cost of overlooking countervailing evidences found elsewhere in Camus‘ diverse production. Srigley, for instance, argues that the evidence speaking to Camus‘ deep allegiance to Greek thought (evidence we have started to give here) speaks in favour of reading Camus’ work as involving a total critique of the modern age, since its key ideologies represent for him so many secularised or immanentised, Christian or eschatological doctrines. Camus at one point in his Carnets does declare that “no, I am not a modern,” and The Rebel is a famously powerful critique of Marxism-Leninism and elements of modern liberal societies. Yet in “Helen‘s Exile” and elsewhere, Camus is critical of figures like Saint-Exupery to the extent that they despaired of the times. Again, the closing arguments of The Rebel criticise nothing so much as people who turn away from “the fixed and radiant point of the present” in the name of idealisations of what the present is decried to lack, in more or less elegiac or apocalyptic strains.
The opposition ancient-modern, we would rather suggest (one which always trades in unsustainable cultural generalisations) is one more opposition that Camus’ thought straddles. In fact, the French word ‘philosophe’ that features in our title, in Camus’ native French, is not only the generic term for philosophers of all times and places. It resonates specifically with the generations of French lumières spanning from Montesquieu through to d‘Holbach, led by Diderot and Voltaire, but looking back via Pierre Bayle to Michel de Montaigne. As Peter Gay in particular has argued, the thought and activity of these definitive “moderns,” the enlighteners, involved their attempt to revitalise the modern West‘s pagan, classical heritage in the context of the advent of the modern natural sciences. It is just such a project that Camus, his own still small voice, advocates for in the twentieth century.
I came out of Ms. McCarty’s Philosophy 101 with a deep, abiding appreciation of four thinkers in particular — Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Camus. The presence of the latter two, known primarily as novelists, indicates the broad scope of the class, in which we were taught to appreciate timeless and pressing questions about life, regardless of the academic pedigree of the questioner. The Dane and the Russian have faded in importance to me since then. Nietzsche, I dunno, I guess you could say I have something of an interest in his work. My affinity for Camus, though, has only deepened over time. His humane, pluralistic moralism, impressive even now, is even more so when considered in the original postwar context, where it was highly unfashionable and widely scorned by noxious Stalinist apologists like Merleau-Ponty and the execrable Sartre. Having just spent a good part of this evening reading and enjoying Sharpe’s introduction to his forthcoming book, I recommend it to you as well.
Sophrosyne
Sophrosyne, the Greek ideal of self-restraint, girds Camus’s distinction between rebellion and revolution. Just as self-restraint implies a constant tension between two opposing forces — a straining in two directions at the center of which is the space for creation and progress — the act of rebellion thrives on a similar stress.
…Most critically, however, the rebel seeks to impose a limit on his own self. Rebellion is an act of defense, not offense; it is equipoise, not a mad charge against an opponent. Ultimately, like Weil’s notion of attention, it is an active watchfulness in regard to the humanity of others as well as oneself. Just as the absurd never authorizes despair, much less nihilism, a tyrant’s acts never authorizes one to become tyrannical in turn. The rebel does not deny his master as a fellow human being; he denies him only as his master. The rebel denies those who have treated him as less than an equal, but also denies the inevitable temptation to dehumanize his former oppressor.
…[T]his tension cannot be maintained indefinitely; sooner or later, ideals will crumble, leaders will grow deluded, followers become disillusioned. Yet, Camus maintains, this tension is as good as it gets for humankind. For the author of The Rebel, those who wish to remain in the party of humanity have no choice but to live their lives with this tension. While it is always possible that the end justifies the means, the rebel never fails to reply that the means alone justified the end. Toward the end of his essay, Camus concluded the rebel’s logic is “to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.” When the book first appeared, this phrase was dismissed as easy grandiloquence disguising an ethical hollowness within. Yet we are now confronted with the truth that there is nothing at all easy, much less hollow, to Camus’s claim. Instead, it recognizes the doubts and desperation filling an effort at true rebellion. It demands that we live with provisional outcomes and relative claims, all the while remaining alive to the one absolute: never to allow our rebellion to turn into a revolution.
An Age of Superstition
What the French thinkers (and Habermas) produced was essentially a postmodern form of Marxism. Some of the authors seem reluctant to abandon Marx, others are keen to update him, but no one seems willing to jettison him entirely. It is not so much his economic determinism or his class-based motivations that are retained as his idea of ‘false consciousness’, expressed through the idea that knowledge, and reason, must always be forged or mediated by the power relations of any society — that knowledge, hermeneutics, and understanding all serve a purpose. Just as Kant said there is no pure reason, so, we are told from the Continent, there is no pure knowledge, and understanding this is emancipatory. While it would not be true to say that these writers are anti-scientific (Piaget, Foucault and Habermas are too well-informed to be so crude), there is among them a feeling that science is by no means the only form of knowledge worth having, that it is seriously inadequate to explain much, if not most, of what we know. These authors do not exactly ignore evolution, but they show little awareness of how their theories fit — or do not fit — into the proliferation of genetic and ethological studies. It is also noticeable that almost all of them accept, and enlist as support, evidence from psychoanalysis. There is, for anglophone readers, something rather unreal about this late continental focus on Freud, as many critics have pointed out. Finally, there is also a feeling that Foucault, Lacan and Derrida have done little more than elevate small-scale observations, the undoubted misuses of criminals or the insane in the past, or in Lacan’s case vagaries in the use of language, into entire edifices of philosophy. Ultimately, the answer here must lie in how convincing others find their arguments. None has found universal acceptance. At the same time, the ways in which they have subverted the idea that there is a general canon, or one way of looking at man, and telling his story, has undoubtedly had an effect.
This is from a chapter on the French intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Most of the time, when you hear someone disparaging postmodernists, these are the people whom they have in mind. (Lacan’s most famous disciple, of course, is the grotesque caricature-wrapped-in-a-parody-inside-a-bullshit-farce, Slavoj Žižek.) Anyway, banalities elevated into profundities aside, false consciousness has indeed proved to be one of Marx’s most enduring ideas. You hear its echoes when people are said to be “voting against their own interests”, as if the speaker knows better than them what they really want or need, or when, say, minorities and women feel that their individual perspective trumps the imperatives of their race or gender (as dictated to them by the self-appointed intelligentsia). The truism that there is no such thing as knowledge outside of perspective becomes, in practice, Foucault’s “genealogical method“, where the aim of an argument is not to rebut specific assertions, but to identify the supposed wellspring of your opponent’s thought and declare it hopelessly polluted, thus implying, without needing to openly assert, that everything downstream is likewise poisoned.
It wasn’t just the French, though; the Frankfurt School is noted earlier in the book for being preoccupied with “the attempted marriage of Freudianism and Marxism.” Watson also quoted Friedrich Hayek: “I believe men will look back on our age as an age of superstition, chiefly connected with the names of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.” It’s funny because it’s true! In an age in which science was quickly colonizing all forms of human experience, almost the entire intellectual class of Europe and America was captivated by two systems of thought which look increasingly ridiculous the further they appear in hindsight. And so I still wonder: what will our descendants think about the water in which we’re swimming now? Why should we assume that we aren’t living under the spell of superstitious nonsense while priding ourselves on our cutting-edge scientific awareness just as much as people in the last century were?
There Is Freedom Within, There Is Freedom Without
Peter Watson, speaking of Maya Angelou:
[B]ut her books emphasize that life is made up of two kinds of freedom: one big political freedom, and countless little freedoms that come from education, strength of character, humor, dignity, and thought.
I like the way he put that. There are enough people who focus on the macro-level factors that shape our existence. As Steven Pinker says:
We live in an age of social science, and have become accustomed to understanding the social world in terms of “forces,” “pressures,” “processes,” and “developments.” It is easy to forget that these “forces” are statistical summaries of the deeds of millions of men and women who act on their beliefs in pursuit of their desires. The habit of submerging the individual into abstractions can lead not only to bad science (it’s not as if the “social forces” obeyed Newton’s laws) but to dehumanization. We are apt to think, “I (and my kind) choose to do things for reasons; he (and his kind) are part of a social process.”
The temptation is fierce to find a Sociopolitical Theory of Everything for explanatory and predictive purposes. Wealth, race, gender, nationality, etc. are the pavement that makes theoretical travel easier, but those little freedoms are the grass inevitably growing up through the cracks.
All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XIV)
Well, I fell short of my stated goal from this summer by one and a half books. Still, I applaud my effort. Now, my Sisyphean task resumes with another stack. And like Camus (the subject of “A Life Worth Living”, in the middle row) said, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Yes, yes, I am.
Ask Not for Whom the Bell Curves
See for example this recent Xenosystems post about a Twitterer claiming The Bell Curve has been “well-refuted”. There are definitely a lot of people who have written books, articles, and papers arguing that The Bell Curve is wrong, often in very strong terms. There are also a lot of people who have written books, articles, and papers saying that the first set of books, articles, and papers are wrong and The Bell Curve is right, also in very strong terms. To say that the first set is a “refutation” or “debunking” is as basic a mistake as saying that the new rape study is a “refutation” or “debunking” of the earlier rape study.
(albeit a mistake likely to be made by exactly the opposite people)
There are certainly things that have been “well-refuted” and “debunked”. Andrew Wakefield’s study purporting to prove that vaccines cause autism is a pretty good example. But you will notice that it had multiple failed replications, journals published reports showing he falsified data, the study’s co-authors retracted their support, the journal it was published in retracted it and issued an apology, the General Medical Council convicted Wakefield of sixteen counts of misconduct, and Wakefield was stripped of his medical license and barred from practicing medicine ever again in the UK. The British Medical Journal, one of the best-respected medical journals in the world, published an editorial concluding:
Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare…Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children’s cases accurately? No.
Meanwhile, The Bell Curve was lambasted in the popular press and by many academics. But it also got fifty of the top researchers in its field to sign a consensus statement saying it was pretty much right about everything and the people attacking it were biased and confused. Three years later, they re-issued their statement saying nothing had changed and more recent findings had only confirmed their opinion. The American Psychological Association launched a task force to settle the issue which stopped short of complete agreement but which given the circumstances was pretty darned supportive. There are certainly a lot of smart people with very strong negative opinions, but each one is still usually met by an equally ardent and credentialed proponent.
One of these two things has been “well-refuted”. The other has been “argued against”.
I’ve only been reading Alexander regularly for a few months. I don’t know for sure what his politics are, but I have the impression he’s basically liberal. He strikes me as being impressively dedicated to logical thinking and empirical fact-finding, and that, in addition to the obvious pains he takes to explain himself clearly and thoroughly, makes me trust his perspective unless given strong reasons not to. So, it could be that I just basically identify all those characteristics with being “liberal”, and thus provisionally apply the label to him.
What makes this bit interesting to me is the fact that, assuming I’m right in my guess about his political outlook, this is the first time I’ve ever seen a liberal suggest that The Bell Curve was anything other than maliciously-motivated racist pseudoscience. I mean, I’ve been aware of the book for almost my entire adult life, and I have never once encountered anyone who wasn’t, shall we say, predictably conservative, suggesting that the book’s thesis may have been mostly accurate. Even Freddie deBoer and Andrew Sullivan, with whom I wholeheartedly agree that even dangerous, wrong ideas should be confronted openly and honestly, seem to take for granted that the book is clearly wrong. “True but largely irrelevant” doesn’t seem to be an allowable option. If it’s not declared “completely false and dangerously pernicious”, there might be terrible consequences.
I haven’t read the book, and even if I were interested, I’m not in a position to judge any of the impressively-credentialed authorities who take a stand one way or the other. True or false, I can’t see how it would change the way I behave or think. My only point is that I find it somewhat scary that I, who like to think of myself as being fairly inquisitive and independent-minded, could have been living in a tightly-sealed liberal filter bubble for so long. How many things do I take for granted as being obviously true, not because I know, but because I’ve just never heard a reputable source say otherwise? How many arguments are not about the truth or falsity of the subject, but rather about the fear of what it might mean for the subject to be true or false? We like to think that the epistemological floor beneath our feet is solid stone, but we might look down to see that we’re standing on a rickety rope bridge instead.
Andropovs and Brezhnevs of the Soul
When I read Marx, I thought that his key mistake was a negative view of utopia. That is, utopia is what happens automatically once you overthrow all of the people and structures who are preventing there from being utopia. Just get rid of the capitalists, and the World-Spirit will take care of the rest. The thought that ordinary, fallible, non-World-Spirit humans will have to build the post-revolution world brick by brick, and there’s no guarantee they will do any better than the pre-revolutionary humans who did the same, never seems to have occurred to him.
Kerouac was a staunch anti-Communist, but his beat philosophy seems to share the same wellspring. Once you get rid of all the shackles of society in your personal life – once you stop caring about all those squares who want you to have families and homes and careers and non-terrible friends – once you become a holy criminal who isn’t bound by the law or other people’s needs – then you’ll end up with some ecstatic visionary true self. Kerouac claimed he was Catholic, that he was in search of the Catholic God, and that he found Him – but all of his descriptions of such tend to be a couple of minutes of rapture upon seeing some especially pretty woman in a nightclub or some especially dingy San Francisco alley, followed by continuing to be a jerk who feels driven to travel across the country approximately seven zillion times for no reason.
Like the early Communists, who were always playing up every new factory that opened as the herald of the new age of plenty, in the beginning it’s easy to tell yourself your revolution is succeeding, that you are right on the brink of the new age. But at last come the Andropovs and Brezhnevs of the soul, the stagnation and despair and the going through the motions.
If you have any affection for Beatnik scripture in your heart, you might be offended by the brutally biased and uncharitable review Alexander gives On the Road here, but I thought this part made for an intriguing rest stop. That tends to be my opinion of Beat-style “liberation” as well — it comes off as compulsive, not joyful. As Camus said about the Marquis de Sade’s celebration of all things subversive and corrupting, it strikes one as “the fury of a man in chains”. It appeals to “the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style”, as Nietzsche put it. Boundaries must be demolished for daring to exist, until the boundaries of one’s own selfhood are added to the ruins. Alan Watts was specifically critical of this unenlightened rebelliousness in Kerouac in his essay Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen:
Beat Zen is a complex phenomenon. It ranges from a use of Zen for justifying sheer caprice in art, literature, and life to a very forceful social criticism and “digging of the universe” such as one may find in the poetry of Ginsberg and Snyder, and, rather unevenly, in Kerouac, who is always a shade too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen.
When Kerouac gives his philosophical final statement, “I don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference” — the cat is out of the bag, for there is a hostility in these words which clangs with self-defense. But just because Zen truly surpasses convention and its values, it has no need to say “To hell with it,” nor to underline with violence the fact that anything goes.
…In the Dharma Bums, however, we are seeing Snyder through Kerouac’s eyes, and some distortions arise, because Kerouac’s own Buddhism is a true “Beat” Zen which confuses “anything goes” at the existential level with “anything goes” on the artistic and social levels.
Still, if you’d like to find a more sympathetic perspective on On the Road, here’s one at…The American Conservative.
Conflictual Obligations
Liberal attitudes to conflict made a second point of contrast with their conservative and socialist rivals, following that over power. For liberals, conflict was ever present. It was unceasing and ineradicable. Whatever form it took, over interests, beliefs, or ways of life, the thought was that conflict must be tamed, transformed into competition, and made fruitful in trade, experiment and argument. Too much could be made of whether liberals welcomed conflict as healthy and productive or feared it as dangerous and destructive. They did both. Conflict, for liberals, was a fact of life. Politics was about how conflict might serve useful ends and not break society apart.
Conservatives took a different view of conflict. To them society was not by nature divided. Society was at root harmonious and unified. The myth of class conflict in particular was put about by resentful agitators and disaffected intellectuals. Diversity of opinion was not the welcome result of an unending conversation among equals but the regrettable consequence of truth’s failure to prevail over error. There were not many equally worthwhile paths in life to choose from but one path, the path of virtue. Conservative eyes were no worse than liberal eyes. Conservatives could see divisions in society. But to conservatives those divisions were not of society’s essence. To the extent that divisions existed within society, they represented for conservatives a fall from grace, a lapse into modernity, a loss of past unity.
The socialist left’s attitude to conflict was different again. It agreed with liberals that conflict in society was wide and deep, not that it was endless or inevitable. It disagreed with liberals about how many sides were involved. For liberals, conflict involved many, many sides and many, many matters. Conflict’s subject matter, in a sense, was unbounded. To socialists, conflict involved only two sides, rich and poor, and one topic, material inequity. Conflict would cease, they held, once its sources in material inequity were removed. Socialists disagreed with conservatives that society was harmonious until foolishly interfered with. They faulted liberals for refusing to see where the roots of one, overarching conflict lay. Those roots lay for the socialist mind in differences of material interest among unequal classes, differences from which other conflicts, notably of faith and opinion, invariably stemmed. Remove inequity and harmony came in all life’s departments. That, in crude summary, was the socialist dream of one-stroke emancipation. Although divided and denatured at present, society for the socialist left was by nature harmonious. There it agreed with conservatives, though not about structure or timing. For conservatives harmony lay in a hierarchical past, for the socialist left in a brotherly future.
Society for liberals was always in conflict. To liberals there never had been and never would be a time of harmony. The best hope was for a frame of order and stability that was flexible enough for adjustment as the forces in conflict changed. Such a frame would be “artificial” and man-made.” It would be neither God-given or natural but reliant on common interests in peace, stability and prosperity. Within it, private conflicts could be bargained away leaving no one with festering regrets that might threaten common interests.
Ancestor Worship
Some choice bits from Peter Wood’s book Diversity:
• The new perspective of diversity is not just about emphasizing groups at the expense of the whole; it is also about treating groups as having saved up a right to special privileges in proportion to how much their purported ancestors were victimized in the past. This quid-pro-quo view has become a quasi principle that aims to encompass American life. It is invoked by its advocates, for example, as a reason why the federal government should set aside a certain percentage of federal contracts for minority-owned businesses, and why the federal courts should not apply the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions.
But is it more than a matter of government mandates. The diversity principle is also a belief that the portion of our individual identities that derives from our ancestry is the most important part, and a feeling that group identity is somehow more substantial and powerful than either our individuality or our common humanity.
• Diversity, in effect, enshrines certain kinds of factionalism as a universal good, just like liberty and equality. Well, no, not just like liberty and equality — better. Diversity raised to the level of counterconstitutional principle promises to free people from the pseudo-liberty of individualism and to restore to them the primacy of their group identities; and diversity raised to the summit of “critical thinking” insists that traditional notions of equality are a sham. Real equality, according to diversicrats, consists of parity among groups, and to achieve it, social goods must be measured out in ethnic quotas, purveyed by group preferences, or otherwise filtered according to the will of social factions.
• Once we allocate political rights by group identity, the assignment of group identity becomes the crucial determinant of everything else for the individual; the group gains a strong interest in ensuring the conformity of its members; the individual faces powerful pressure to conform; and the resentments only multiply.
And one section dealing with a common theme around these parts:
Diversity makes us think that, deep down, all religions say the same thing. But all religions don’t say the same thing, and Islam especially dissents from the idea that its Truth is merely a local variant of the generic truth available in other flavors at other stores. To the extent that it blinds us to the kind of intellectual inquiry we need to understand these matters, diversity is not just folly; it is dangerous folly.
Religious toleration is, of course, nothing new, and if we are to understand the religion of diversity, we have to distinguish between several kinds of toleration. One form, which might be called Jeffersonian tolerance, regards all religions as more or less the same sort of mistake, and therefore equally due condescension. Tolerance of this nature may be based on deism, agnosticism, atheism, or mere indifference. It proceeds by a principle of prudence, to the effect that, as people believe many and conflicting things, the common good is best served by not making an issue out of anyone’s faith.
ADDENDUM:
Noel asks: Also, are you criticizing “Jeffersonian tolerance”?
No. I’m all in favor of it. I just found it amusing the way Wood openly stated what is usually the implied subtext, namely, that Jeffersonian tolerance is predicated upon treating religions as “more or less the same sort of mistake.” Of course, being too open about that disdainful indifference would undermine the sort of cultural unity it was designed to promote. If anything, I would only like for more spiritual-not-religious types to appreciate the weighty significance of Jefferson’s razor.
So, then, to clarify the rest of my interest in these excerpts:
I was struck by the succinct way Wood described the three lenses, if you will, through which we make sense of our identity — individuality, group identity, and common humanity. Now, as an (Isaiah) Berliner, I’m naturally predisposed to see these three perspectives as basically irreducible, and prone to being in conflict with each other. That is, none of the three can ever be the One True Perspective. Each one makes sense in the right context, or the right proportions.
Human beings being human beings, though, we tend toward Procrusteanism. When we find a concept or perspective we think is accurate, we tend to want it to be true at all times, in all situations, and so we stretch or chop the facts as needed. As an example of people who cling too tightly to individualism as an organizing concept, think of rigid, dogmatic libertarians, and the lengths to which they go to avoid acknowledging anything like a common humanity based on levels of obligation.
Likewise, diversity can be turned into an unquestionable moral virtue in and of itself and pushed to absurd lengths in contexts where it doesn’t belong. Take the arts, for an obvious example.
• Stephin Merritt apparently failed to evince a properly proportional interest in music created by ethnic artists and was publicly trashed as a racist cracker.
• Lena Dunham is likewise accused of being racist for not including any ethnic characters in her TV show. (Terry Sawyer, the author of the linked article, does a good job limning the incoherent, contradictory demands even within the diversiphile camp.)
• Pitchfork magazine’s readers vote for their favorite 200 albums of the last fifteen years, and diversiphiles complain that there aren’t enough women on the list. This leads the intellectual featherweights at the Atlantic Wire to pop their thumbs out of their mouths long enough to muse about just how misogynist Pitchfork’s readers might be.
• It is a popular cause online to talk about the VIDA count, and whine about how women aren’t proportionally represented as either reviewers or reviewees in the major literary outlets, as if the right to a good shot at a successful literary career is on a par with the right to higher education. Some diversiphile writers, like Roxane Gay, even go so far as to call for quotas as a solution to this “problem”. Now, one can argue, and I certainly have, that making literary criticism into yet another zero-sum battle between “white men” vs. “everyone else” is an insanely reductive and misguided obsession, that the purpose of literature and criticism is not to advance trendy social justice-y causes, and that the content of the art is what matters for the purpose of criticism, not the race and gender of the author, protagonist, or audience, but in doing so, one has to argue uphill against the facile assumption that “more diversity” is such an obvious plus that only bigots would oppose it.
This is what I mean when I say that diversity means different things in different contexts. Not every situation requires balanced ratios of gender or race. Not every disparity is a problem indicating oppression and requiring a solution. The world isn’t going to be “fixed” when we get the ratios all correctly sorted.
Not only that, but there isn’t even any consensus among diversiphiles as to what the ultimate goal of all this diversity is. Some think that by being exposed to people of all different races, religions and ways of life, the rough edges of our tribal natures will be sanded off, and we will better appreciate our common humanity. Others, especially SJWs, are fixated on preventing what they call “cultural appropriation”, by which they mean greedy white people “stealing” ethnic cultural motifs. This amounts to rigidly defining and strictly policing the borders of what they consider to be different cultures. The fact that their rhetoric and logic is the mirror image of white separatism doesn’t trouble their little pea-brains in the slightest. One Slymepitter whose opinions I generally like, a self-described right-wing black woman from New Zealand, once summed it up in a way that I actually saved for reference:
The idea of appropriation/cultural intellectual property is another one that creeps me out. People learn and adopt and remix cultural emblems and traditions because that’s the nature of how we interact and assimilate/create new paradigms. If you cut off a culture from the ability to be remixed by those outside it, then you are killing it. There is no difference from that to putting it in a museum or locking it away an a sanctuary somewhere. Cultures that you cannot adopt or enter into are endangered.
If you wanted to kill a minority culture than the best way to do so is to tell people they cannot be part of it, and it will ensure that the only culture that can be used/adopted by anyone is the majority one, which can be replicated and reused and entered-into without fear of repercussions.
They’re a movement of cultural exterminators.
And finally, I think certain conservatives do have a valid point when they scoff at the progressive fixation on diversity as being cosmetically diverse but ideologically conformist. That is, it’s not too hard to find smug progressives who pride themselves on their magnanimous ability to tolerate the presence of people who look and speak differently from them while breaking out into hives upon encountering someone who substantively disagrees with them.
Everyone Wants to Be a Perpetual Motion Machine. We All Try Harder as the Days Run Out
Anyone who challenges the narrow practicality that dominates education will be suspected of elitist or aristocratic pretensions. The risk should be run. For if a liberal education is to regain its vitality, it must recapture its nonutilitarian dimension. Thinking, reading, and art require a cultural space, a zone free from the angst of moneymaking and practicality. Without a certain repose or leisure, a liberal education shrivels.
Today, to mention leisure evokes images of retirement communities or television viewing. Leisure has lost meaning, succumbing to the general fetish of leisure in a consumer society. In America leisure usually means buying or doing or watching something. The 1911 commission that validated an educational shift from academic to useful subjects listed the “worthy use of leisure” as one goal. “This objective calls for the ability to utilize the common means of enjoyment, such as music, art, literature, drama and social intercourse, together with the fostering in each individual of one or more special avocational interests.” The terms are revealing: leisure, the very antithesis of utility, must be “useful.”
Sebastian de Grazia, in his Of Time, Work and Leisure, sought to disentangle leisure from “free time,” an empty category. “Free time refers to a special way of calculating a special kind of time. Leisure refers to a state of being.” Originally leisure signaled something like quiet reflection. As the point of work and life, leisure or contemplation sustained Western culture.
…A liberal education requires a cultural breathing space, a small refuge. Reading, writing and thinking are delicate activities, easily numbed by the dint of money, shopping and jobs. This is not a judgment on individuals, who live as they must, but a judgment on a society that constricts the education it provides.
Jacoby is, of course, talking about the sorry state of higher education, but he could just as easily be summing up my complaint about Nicholas Carr’s big idea. The supposed neurological differences between reading a dead-tree book or a Nook book are petty when compared to the larger forces that prevent most people from having the time or inclination to read anything at all.
Speaking of Carr, a frequent enough target of my spitballs, I will say that this review of his latest book seems pretty unfair. I don’t think he’s paranoid or a scaredy-cat; he’s just barking up the wrong tree.
Sankhara-Dukkha
Mama always said life is like a Rubin vase. If you focus on this part of it, you see the Ploosa Shawnje. But if you focus on the other part, you see the Ploosa La Memshows.
John Gray offers a positive review of Harari’s book, though, as is frustratingly often the case with him, the book being reviewed seems to be judged primarily on its proximity and sympathy to Gray’s own “godless mysticism” worldview which has featured so prominently in his writings over the past decade or so (one might say he’s become quite a hedgehog about it). Perhaps he only chooses to review books which address similar themes, I don’t know; it just makes me a wee bit leery when so many of his reviews seem to hinge upon whether the author has wisely echoed or foolishly disagreed with Gray’s well-known thoughts about the subject. And I say this as someone who is largely in agreement with that worldview. I fear the temptation of Procrusteanism may get the better of him at times, that’s all.
And If My Interest Is Waning, I Can’t Fake It
By ‘thick’ description, I mean an extended, detailed, evidence-based, written interpretation of a subject. If you want to write a feature, or blog, or wikipedia entry, be it about the origins of the first world war; the authoritarian turn in Russia; or the causes and effects of the 2008 financial crisis, in the end you will have to refer to a book. Or at least refer to other people who have referred to books. Even the best magazine pieces and TV documentaries — and the best of these are very good indeed — are only puddle-deep compared with the thick descriptions laid out in books. They are ‘thin’ descriptions and the creators and authors of them will have referred extensively to books to produce their work.
In this sense, authors and publisher-curators are in the ‘civilisation business’, trafficking in the knowledge that provides the building blocks for culture and society. They probably shouldn’t go around talking about ‘civilisation’ too often, but it’s true nonetheless. Books are a different class of object, profoundly unlike magazines, newspapers, blogs, games or social media sites. The world they evoke is richer, more dense and, literally, more meaningful.
At times, tired from other responsibilities and bereft of inspiration, I’ve forced myself to consider whether I might have taken this blogging thing as far as I can. The answer I came up with is no, I enjoy writing too much to simply stop doing it. But in the course of my musings, I did have to acknowledge that I was spending too much of my already-limited free time looking for things to write about on a web that, to my curmudgeonly eyes, at least, was increasingly filled with ephemera and effluvia. The pop culture/current events section of the web, to be more specific, is overflowing with clickbait trash and superficial treatments of topics that deserve better.
I’m not pining for some lost Golden Age when the web was truly scintillating or anything; I realize that it’s just my own perspective which has changed over time. But with that aging perspective comes the realization of the many ways in which the web is a younger person’s game, and the recognition of how uninterested I am in keeping up with what today’s undergrads find important and exciting. Mundy reaffirms what I’d already been thinking, that there’s something unique about the form of the book that enables deeper consideration of a topic. I haven’t given up on the idea that there are still interesting blogs to be found out there somewhere far from the bright lights and big traffic of the mega-blogs, with authors diligently setting down their thoughts on whatever interests them, taking no notice of the changing fashions or stat-measuring contests on social media. But it appears increasingly clear to me that I will need to feed my writing habit with material found in books rather than on blogs. I’m sure that means my output will continue to be much reduced from what it once was, but so be it. You have to stop talking if you want to do some worthwhile thinking.
All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XIII)
When I haven’t been watching World Cup games, I’ve gotta admit I’ve been much more inclined to read books instead of blogs. Some of these have been on the waiting list for a couple years now. That’s ridiculous. I hereby declare my intent to get through this stack by the end of the year.