political philosophy

The Left Behind

By in political philosophy, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

At a time when the left is struggling to redefine itself and respond to current political and economic crises, a series of trends in contemporary theory has reshaped the ways that politics is understood and practiced. Older thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, and newer voices like Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, David Graeber and Judith Butler, among others, have risen to the status of academic and cultural icons while their ideas have become embedded in the “logics” of new social movements. As some aspects of the recent Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have shown, political discourse has become increasingly dominated by the impulses of neo-anarchism, identity politics, post-colonialism, and other intellectual fads.

This new radicalism has made itself so irrelevant with respect to real politics that it ends up serving as a kind of cathartic space for the justifiable anxieties wrought by late capitalism, further stabilizing its systemic and integrative power rather than disrupting it. These trends are the products as well as unwitting allies of that which they oppose.

Perhaps Hegel was right after all, and rather than keep attempting to resuscitate a dying political tradition, we should look to facilitate a new synthesis.

…adding, since we’re on the theme of “whither the left?”, this essay from David Auerbach is also very good. There’s even a handy graph!

Today’s Moralist accepts a more moderate version of the Structural critiques of the Theory Cluster, acknowledging that good intentions may mask underlying prejudice at the individual and societal level. But the Moralist also reverts to a more Ethical focus, demanding of individuals that they comprehend the Structural framework, struggle against it, and finally emancipate themselves from it. At its extreme, the Moralist Cluster is embodied by the callout, the act of finding fault and inadequacy in the words or actions of another, which, even when well-intentioned, nevertheless constitute a betrayal of leftist ideals. Indeed, the good intentions are themselves problematic since they, in their seeming innocuousness, may succeed in obscuring a malevolent force of injustice. The callout demands that the target rectify this mistake (and so doing, alleviate suspicion) by staging a public or semi-public admission of fault and aggrievement, and applying for absolution from a community of his, her, or its cultural peers.

Leftists may draw ideas and practices from any of the four quadrants, but the further apart two principles are, the more likely they are to come into tension with one another. (Thus, individuals will tend to themselves take ideas and positions that are closer to one another rather, inasmuch as they tend toward coherency and consistency.) Many internecine struggles within the left can productively be understood as resulting from the distance between positions on the graph. In particular, the far leftist attitude toward liberalism is not a consequence of marginalization nor of resentment per se, but instead stems from the sense that liberalism is in fact the most virulent danger facing leftism today, the true center of reactionary and conservative forces—the space where these forces lie hidden rather than out in the open, and, thus cloaked, frustrate the possibility of real change.

What Piece of Work Is a Man?

By in foolosophy, george carlin, political philosophy, science 2 Comments

Middlebrow bumper sticker in California: IF YOU CAN DREAM IT, YOU CAN DO IT. Yeah, sure. Unless the thing you’re dreaming is impossible. Then, chances are, you can’t do it. But try to enjoy life anyway.

— George Carlin

Leigh Phillips:

And the turn away from modernity and enlightenment has also been coincident with the neoliberal variant of capitalism. Could it be that an unrecognized casualty of neoliberalism has been the forward-looking optimism of both the Left and Right? That neoliberalism and the global defeat of workers’ movements have resulted in a decadent bourgeoisie more interested in looting short-term profits than investing in new technology, research, and exploration?

And if this is true, then retracing our steps back to the fork in the road where we went astray will require a fresh embrace of the logical, the rational, the empiricist, the positivist, the materialist. We might try to remember that once upon a time, it was as incumbent upon leftists to battle superstition and unreason as it was to battle the bosses and bankers. We must be careful to avoid naïve championing of scientism, of course, or worse still, a blimpish, New Atheist–style Enlightenment-mongering that barely hides its apology for empire.

But why must Dawkins-esque bullying and Romulan anti-rationalism be the only choices? We might instead take inspiration from Spock, Surak, and Spinoza, and of course Rodenberry, Nimoy, and the rest of the egalitarian, ambitious, humanist, reason-loving dreamers that gave us Star Trek, and rejoin their battle so that instead of the current innovation-phobic, Earth-bound stasis, humankind might again advance outward to our final frontier.

Indeed, “if this is true”. Rather than being a trifling afterthought, this is in fact the impasse preventing us from proceeding with the plan for an intergalactic socialist utopia. Is it true? Which is the cart and which is the horse here? Did neoliberalism unfairly brainwash and demoralize the masses, or was some form of reinvigorated market worship very likely to come about following the widespread disillusionment with socialist utopianism? Have people cynically embraced greed and selfishness, or have they rationally decided that it is, in fact, logically and empirically justified to focus our attention and efforts on tinkering with “the way things are” rather than attempting to enforce “the way we want them to be”?

But then again, can any human institution truly be said to represent some objective, preexisting nature of things? Isn’t human nature at least partially a creative act? Aren’t some parts of our nature flexible enough to adapt, whether through circumstance or design? Given the right conditions, could we perhaps create a new type of human shorn of barbaric impulses? If so, though, given past experiments, is it rational to trust those who claim to have mapped out the plan and empower them to act on their vision, or will the required gods-eye omniscience forever be out of our reach? In the case of something as completely unprecedented as relocating human civilization to outer space, what would even count as a reasonable plan? What economic and political standards can we even use for guidance?

And so it comes down to a leap of faith in one way or another. Personally, I see no reason to believe that human nature would be any more transformed for the better by reaching the stars than it was by reaching the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Wherever we go, there we are. There’s no escape, even in space, from the inevitable incommensurability of values. Indeed, even here, we see the same old seeds of politicized conflict sprouting in this visionary soil of interstellar brotherhood: Enlightenment, logic and rationality mean seeing things my way. Disagreeing with me marks you as a reactionary. I wonder where that stance will lead us?

Believin’ All the Lies That They’re Tellin’ Ya, Buyin’ All the Products That They’re Sellin’ Ya

By in free speech, media/propaganda, political philosophy 6 Comments

Some Marxists call the factors that interfere with judgment “false consciousness.” They argue that false consciousness accounts for the failure of revolutionary ideology to attract adherents among the working class in the developed world. On this view, it wasn’t outright repression or censorship that prevented the workers from adopting a Marxist perspective. It is was the subtle and concealed influence of capital on their ability to exercise their capacity to make their own decisions.

These tensions in Mill’s defense of intellectual freedom were recognized in the 19th century. What we now call political correctness was first articulated in the 1960s by the brilliant German-born philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse’s achievement was to turn Mill’s argument for free discussion, at least in a modern Western society, against its explicit conclusion.

Marcuse undertakes this inversion, worthy of a black belt in dialectical reasoning, in the 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” In it, Marcuse argues that the marketplace of ideas can’t function as Mill expected, because the game is rigged in favor of those who are already powerful. Some ideas enjoy underserved appeal due to tradition or the prestige of their advocates. And “consumers” are not really free to choose, given the influence of advertising and the pressures of social and economic need. Thus the outcome of formally free debate is actually predetermined. The ideas that win will generally be those that justify the existing order; those that lose will be those that challenge the structure.

This prong of the argument is close to the standard critique of false consciousness. But Marcuse links it to Mill’s distinction between those who are and are not capable of participating in and benefitting from the unrestricted exchange of ideas.

According to Marcuse, many people who appear to be rational, self-determining men and women are actually in a condition of ideological enforced immaturity. They are therefore incapable of exercising the kind of judgment that Mill’s argument presumes. In order to make debate meaningful, they need to be properly educated. This education is the responsibility of those who have already shown themselves to be capable of thinking for themselves—in this case, left-wing intellectuals rather than Victorian colonial administrators.

One might wonder how either Mill or Marcuse could be so sure that their kind of people knew what was best for others. The answer is that they regarded the truth as obvious.

A Poet, Not a Prophet

By in books, philosophy, political philosophy 4 Comments

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.

Conflictual Obligations

By in books, political philosophy No Comments

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.

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