Thoughts 7 Jan. 2022

 

A bestseller! (Well, at least it's sold out its first printing)

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole. From a standpoint within the representation, everything is reversed. Instead of seeing what is truly present as primary, and the representation as a necessarily diminished derivative of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation – one in which something is added in to ‘animate’ it. In this it is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow. On the contrary, however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life – the re-presentation is simply what one might call the ‘limit case’ of what is real. Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Self-distrust led to more boosting of the Volk, and the fantasy that the people rooted in blood and soil would eventually triumph over rootless cosmopolitans, confirming Germany’s moral and cultural superiority over its neighbours. Thus, [late nineteenth century] Germany generated a phenomenon now visible all over Europe and America: a conservative variant of populism that posits a state of primal wholeness, or unity of the people, against transnational elites, while being itself deeply embedded in a globalized modern world.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers, in whom they can be discounted. In the work of great authors they lead into the very center of their work and are the most important clue to a true understanding of their problems and new insights. In Marx, as in the case of other great authors of the last century, a seemingly playful, challenging, and paradoxical mood conceals the perplexity of having to deal with new phenomena in terms of an old tradition of thought outside of whose conceptual framework no thinking seemed possible at all. It is as though Marx, not unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, tried desperately to think against the tradition while using its own conceptual tools.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The shaken liberal mood was caught with near-despair in an article by the economist John Maynard Keynes in 1923: “We are today the most creedless of men. Every one of our religious and political constructions is moth-eaten.” Keynes did not mean “liberal” in a party-political sense. He was talking of a liberal world that conservative governments had done much to create. In fixing the blame for the 1914–18 war and the harsh peace that followed, mainstream conservatism took a large share, not least from intellectuals on the right.

Evolutionaries

Carter Phipps

The birth of the noosphere, according to Teilhard [de Chardin], coincided with the birth of Homo sapiens sapiens, the birth of self-reflective thought in higher primates, the birth of the animal who knows that he knows and has an interior life unlike any the world had ever seen.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

As the growth of a crystal is ordered by an abstract lattice structure, the unfolding of both psyche and physical world are ordered according to archetypal patterns. Jung then further conjectures that numbers also have an archetypal foundation or character: they are archetypes of order (cf. S: 57-59). This conjecture—further elaborated upon by Jung’s pupil, psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz, in 1974—allows us to solve a problem that only became widely acknowledged in the last year of Jung’s life: the question of why and how mathematics models and predicts the order of the physical world so accurately and precisely.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 3 March 2021

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Readers will wait in vain for a clearly stated claim or carefully reasoned conclusion [from Sloterdijk]. Never wholly lost is a preoccupying question Sloterdijk that shares with Scruton: what in the ethico-cultural turmoil of the present is a thoughtful person to shelter and preserve?

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

[The American journalist H.L.] Mencken was a deep, uncritical admirer of Nietzsche’s writings on morality. As a moral skeptic, Nietzsche’s problem was that to knock down morality, you needed to leave some of it standing. As a conservative oppositionist, Mencken always seemed to know which opinions were wrong. But he rarely, if ever, could say which were right.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Being a philosopher is a way of leading one’s own life consciously, giving it pull, form, and direction through constant, probing questioning.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

What Kierkegaard wanted was to assert the dignity of faith against modern reason and reasoning, as Marx desired to assert again the dignity of human action against modern historical contemplation and relativization, and as Nietzsche wanted to assert the dignity of human life against the impotence of modern man. The traditional oppositions of fides and intellectus, and of theory and practice, took their respective revenges upon Kierkegaard and Marx, just as the opposition between the transcendent and the sensuously given took its revenge upon Nietzsche, not because these oppositions still had roots in valid human experience, but, on the contrary, because they had become mere concepts, outside of which, however, no comprehensive thought seemed possible at all.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

The past, then, does not come to us as light from a distant star. Without the historian’s critical engagement the past could not come alive at all, but critical engagement with what? If the answer is with decisions as actually arrived at and made, then history is going to be a rather lifeless affair. If, on the other hand, it is with what may have happened as well as what did happen, then Collingwood seems to be giving historians the freedom to say what they like. In fact, Collingwood strikes a persuasive course in addressing these questions. The political historian trying to understand the actions of, say, Lloyd George during the munitions crisis in the First World War will re-enact his intentions and the situation he faced. This will include ‘possible ways of dealing with it’ (The Idea of History 215) as well as the policy he actually followed. Does this make history too conjectural? Not at all, so as long as the alternatives which the historian re-enacts are those that were considered by the agent at the time. But does this mean alternatives that actually were considered or those that could have been considered? Once again Collingwood is permissive. The historian in re-enacting past thought, both theoretical and practical, subjects it to criticism, ‘forms his own judgment of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it’ (IH 214). It would be a poor sort of historian, Collingwood suggests, who treats the past as immune from revision, even if the revision takes place in the historical imagination and the historical imagination takes place in the present. Re-enactment, in other words, includes counter-factual discussion as well as the delineation of what actually occurred.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Economists have their own version of this idea, the “policy trilemma,” which posits that countries can have two of the following three: free-flowing capital, independent central banks, and a fixed exchange rate. They’re a bit wonkish, but all these trilemmas get at a simple notion—if everything is open and fast-moving, the system can spin dangerously out of control.

The War of Art

Steven Pressfield

I'm keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what's important first.

Reading The Human Condition: Part 2 "The Vita Activa"

 

SNG Synopsis (my comments in italics):

I. The Human Condition

1. Vita Activa and the Human Condition

The three fundamental human activities are labor, work, and action, all are fundamental to life on earth. Labor addresses the biological processes necessary to maintain life. Work concerns the "unnaturalness of human existence" that creates the "artificial world of things" and establishes "worldliness." Action is the "only activity that goes on directly between men [plural of Man] without the intermediary of things or matter and corresponds to the human condition of plurality."

All three aspects of the human condition "are somehow related to politics." (Here's one of many places where I wish Arendt had been more specific or elucidated her statement. As I read her book as whole, I come away with the belief that politics--or at least "real" poltics--involves only action. Work and labor don't and shouldn't have a role in politics, at least as Arendt idealizes politics based on Athenian democracy.)

Natality (birth) and mortality (death) are two characteristics of the human condition, along with plurality. Arendt cites Genesis for the image of "male and female he created them." 

A polity (political body) establishes a framework for history as remembrance. 

Labor, work, and action all relate to natality, the fact that there are constant newcomers to the world. And these newcomers represent the start of something new. (Arendt draws on St. Augustine here; he's one of the key influences upon her work.) 

"Since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central activity of political, as opposed to metaphysical, thought. (9) 

Men are "conditioned beings." The things we make condition us as well as the general conditions of human life (e.g., natality, plurality, mortality, equality). 

The "human condition" is not the same as human nature. The most radical change in the human condition would be travel (and life) on another planet. Arendt cites Augustine: "A question have I become to myself." Augustine (and Arendt) contend we can't know our own nature. It's a matter of "who am I?" versus "what am I?" Arendt also seems to doubt that the human condition gives us a complete view of ourselves. She asserts "conditions of human existence--life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth--can never explain what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely." (10) And she notes that we now see ourselves differently than previously because we can now see ourselves from the perspective outside the earth, even as we (then) remained earthbound. 

2. The Term Vita Activa

The tradition of political thought in the West arises from the trial of Socrates and the difference between philosophy and politics. This tradition ends with Marx. Aristotle gives us the bios politikos, Augustine the via negotiosa (or actiosa) as designations of a life devoted to public-political matters. Aristotle sees three paths in life for freedom, all of which exclude labor and work. All three of the "free" paths involve a concern for the "beautiful:" 1) concern for beautiful bodily pleasures, 2) concern for beautiful deeds in the polis, and 3) contemplation of the beautiful eternal entities of philosophy. 

We need action (praxis) to sustain the world of human affairs. Thus, the despot, acting essentially alone, is not free. The world of the city-state populated by political actors--citizen--was last observed by Augustine. (14) After Augustine, politics became involved with necessity. 

All three aspects of the vita activa (labor, work, and action) are "unquiet" in both the Greek and Christian worldviews. The "Truth of Being" (Greek) or of God (Christian) can be appreciated only in stillness. The Greeks make a distinction between physei (existing of themselves; "natural") and nomo (man-made). All exists in the kosmos. Theoria equates with contemplation and is different from thought and reasoning. (How do these distinctions fit with Arendt's ideas about "thinking," especially as she explores this concept in her final work, The Life of the Mind?)

The Greek and Christian emphasis on the value of contemplation relegated the vita activa to an inferior undertaking. Marx and Nietzche reversed this tradition. Arendt refuses to take a position upon the issue of the relative value of the vita contempletiva versus the vita activa or on the issue of truth as revelation versus truth of coming from what Man has made himself. 

3. Eternity vs. Immortality

"Immortality" is "deathless, timeless on earth," the prerogative of the gods. (18) Mortality of the hallmark of the Greeks. See the line of the individual human life against the cycles of nature. Humans produce "works and deeds and words." (19) The aristoi (elites) "prefer immortal fame to moral things. (Heraclitus)." 

Socrates-Plato established the "eternal" as the center of philosophical thought. Arendt, citing the example of Socrates, contends that anyone who writes their thoughts is not concerned with eternity. (She might also have cited Jesus for this proposition. Why not?)

Plato emphasized the difference between concern with immortality as opposed to eternity. Philosophy became associated with death because of its focus on eternity. There is no activity in eternity. After the fall of Rome established the falsehood of claims of immortality. Christianity filled this void with a concern for the eternal and made the vita activa and bios politikos handmaids to the life of contemplation. Even the modern reversal of the labor-work-action triad by Marx and Nietzche was not enough to save the value of striving for immortality, which had once been the driving motive of the vita activa. 

Collingwood's "Man Goes Mad" with comments, Pt. 8

Twins: hatred of liberalism, desire for war, leaders of totalitarian regimes, slayers of millions. It seems likely that Collingwood thought of both as he wrote "Man Goes Mad"

In the preceding post, Collingwood addressed the attack on liberalism
emanating from the right, in this post, we'll start his assessment of the attack on liberalism from the left.

The other attack on liberalism, from the left, complains in effect that liberalism, as it has actually existed, is not genuinely liberal at all, but hypocritically preaches what it does not practice. Behind a façade of liberal principles, the reality of political life has been a predatory system by which capitalists have plundered wage-earners. What is proudly described as the free contract of labour is a forced sale in which the vendor accepts a starvation wage; what is called the free expression of political opinion is a squabble between various sections of the exploiter class, which conspire to silence the exploited. Within the existing political system, therefore, the exploited class can hope for no redress. Its only remedy is to make open war on its oppressors, take political power into its own hands, establish a dictatorship of the proletariat as an emergency measure, and so bring about the existence of a classless society. 

            In one sense this programme is not an attack on liberalism but a vindication of it. The principles on which it is based are those of liberalism itself; and in so far as its analysis of historical fact is correct, it must carry conviction to anyone who is genuinely liberal in principle and not merely a partisan of the outward forms in which past liberalism has expressessed itself. The correctness of this analysis has been demonstrated by the sequel. The attack on liberalism from the right has actually been the reaction of privileged classes to this challenge from the left. 

. . . . 

But the socialist programme as I have stated it, though liberal in principle, is anti-liberal in method. Its method is that of the class-war and the dictatorship. Class-war is war, and the time is past when war could be waged as a predatory measure, in order to seize property or power held by another. That is the old conception of war, which, as we saw [earlier in this essay], no longer applies to the conditions of the modern world. Therefore, war means not the transference of property from the vanquished to the victor, but its destruction; not the seizure of political power, but the disintegrations of the social structure on whose soundness the very existence of political power depends.

[Collingwood next returns to his discussion of the inevitability of political conflict (contra Marx’s vision of political life after the revolution)]

Healthy political life, like all life, is conflict: but this conflict is political so long as it is dialectical, that is, carried on by the parties which desire to find an agreement beyond or behind their differences. War is non-dialectical: a belligerent desires not to agree with his enemy but to silence him. A class-conflict within the limits of a liberal political system is dialectical: one carried on in the shape of class-war is non-dialectical. The ordinary socialist conception of class-war is equivocal, slipping unawares from one of these meanings to the other.  

In this selection of quotes, Collingwood identifies the common bond in between the extreme Right and extreme Left in their critique of liberalism: their desire for war. For the Right, at least in Collingwood's time, a race war was the paramount rationale, although nationalism and religion could also be called into play. (Religion, perhaps even more than race, now seems to be the rallying cry for the extreme Right.*) The Left prefers to pursue class warfare, although, in its extreme contemporary manifestations, I'm not sure how groups ("classes") would line-up since a Marxian industrial proletariat no longer exists in the West, and the extreme Right in the U.S. has captured the allegiance of many wage-earners and the economically marginalized

A repeating theme of Collingwood's and one that I heartily endorse: war, whether cheered-on by the Right or by the Left, is the enemy of liberalism. As it's been said, free speech is always the first casualty of war. And it's not only speech that suffers the consequence.

The mutual admiration--indeed, demand--for war is a shared characteristic of the extreme Right and extreme Left. This demonstrates the limits of attempting to parse the array of political perspectives on a binary Left-Right choice.

Collingwood identifies why the Left (socialists and Marxists) have shared some affinities. They are marked by a desire to bring a wider, more inclusive set of groups, values, and individuals into society and political life. The chief difference becomes one of timing and cost. For the extreme Left, change must come now even at the price of war (socially destructive civil war). Mainstream liberals--those who value constitutional government, the rule of law, and peace--won't pay the price of war and do not have to look beyond the last century to see the millions and millions of lives sacrificed needlessly for an ideal that was never close to attainment. By the way, compare Collingwood's appraisal of liberalism and its critics on both the left and right, with that offered by Adam Gopnik in his recent book, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019). I find their respective perceptions and conclusions reach across the decades.

Also, by "mainstream liberals" I include traditional Republicans in the U.S., although they are now eclipsed by the non-liberal Trumpists.** This is the same for Conservatives in Great Britain and most continental conservatives. The great divide in liberalism is between those who emphasize laissez-faire economics and want to limit government--with markets as the preferred mode of decision-making--and liberals who use government as a tool and prefer political decision-making over market-based decisions.

Revised & updated 11.14.19. 

*I'm not very confident about my statement here. In the U.S., in any event, race and religion so seem to be quite mixed when one looks at White Supremacists, but this group, while prominent, isn't dominant in the Trumpist movement. Catholic traditionalists, for instance, your William Barr, your Patrick Deneen, your Rob Dreher, I don't believe make racist appeals, at least overtly, or perhaps not intentionally. Also, there are those vexing voters who voted once and even twice for Obama and then turned aound and voted once or even twice for Trump. The uniting factor among Trump loyalists is a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo. Trump voters come in many different guises. Trump himself, we've learned, has no ideology beyond his own ego, bank account, and family. He is an empty vessel into which the many different flavors of dissatisfaction can be poured. 

**Since I originally wrote this, the eclipse of traditional Republicans--those committed to liberal democracy as the pursuit of a pro-business, pro-market, small-government set of policies--is now more or less complete. After the 6 January insurrection, big business made noise about withdrawing their financial support from Republicans, but the unspoken deal between the plutocratic wing of the party for tax cuts and other financial advantages and business-friendly judges, and the Trumpist wing, seems as though it will survive. Yesterday all but five Republican senators voted to attempt to avoid a second impeachment trial of Trump on "constitutional grounds" (that he's no longer in office). And 147 Republicans in the House and about seven in the Senate voted in favor of the attempt not to certify election results. 

Revised & updated 01.27.21

Don't Play the Fool, My Friends. 'No' to Violence

Don't play the fool, my friends, don't play the fool.

I was going to write a freestanding essay on the issues similar to those raised by Peter Beinart's Atlantic post, I realized that Beinart's essay provides an excellent (and brief) text upon which I can riff.

How might people opposed to violent white supremacists and their ilk become fools? By taking the bait of violence.

Of course, persons who value freedom and equality--fundamental American values--are shocked and appalled at the events in Charlottesville and the dismaying response of 45. And of course, those who cherish the American heritage of human rights don't want to cede the public space to violent thugs and bullies. But neither should we play their game, the game of violence. In the game of violence, the most violent, the most radical, win, whether they be on the right or the left.

Yes, while as Beinart points out, violent actors on the left have not come anywhere near to matching the violence and intimidation of the violent right, they still exist and pose a threat. Students of history will note that street fights marked much of the turmoil in post-WWI Germany, with communists and Nazis battling in the streets. When such battles erupt, who wins? In the parade of 20th-century horrors, whom can we say perpetrated the worst evils? The right of Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler, or the left of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others? Political divisions aren't accurately captured on a line running from left to right (or vice versa if you prefer), but seemingly opposed movements intersect in a circular configuration--in some cases, they meet in the sector marked by violence. (Others meet in the sector of order, law, and reason, which can include American liberals and conservatives, Democrats and traditional Republicans.) The comparative body count of the totalitarian left and the totalitarian right leaves little basis to prefer one to the other. The same can be said lesser, contemporary movements that adhere to one set of extremes or the other. Many have given the benefit of the doubt to the left based on the messianic and utopian elements of Marxist thought that draw upon those elements of Judaism and Christianity. But Marx had no political theory (despite some keen political insights), and the vacuum was filled by Lenin, Stalin, and others in ways that created states no less odious than those of Nazi Germany. The left is not pristine, and it must guard against those who would happily push progressives toward violence.

So what is to be done? This is a question of the highest moral, practical, and political significance (one problem viewed through three overlapping perspectives). The American Civil Rights movement led by Dr. King and the SCLC was able to pursue its successful campaign based on an extraordinary commitment to principles of non-violent resistance. But that was against the unconstitutional actions of state and local governments and was undertaken by a tight-knit community. I doubt such a community can be replicated today. But serious consideration must be given about how to combat the violent right without resorting to counter violence, which is pure oxygen to fuel the hatred of those who marched as 21st-century successors to Nazis and secessionists defending slavery. Anarchy is not the answer. Left-wing thuggery is not the answer. Right now there is no clear picture about how to respond with something more than words. We need to appear in the public space in support of American values. While I don't have a definitive answer about how to do this, I do know that we should eliminate one option: violence.

There's No Equivalence Between Antifa and White Supremacists

If Trump is concerned about violence on the left, he can start by fighting the racist movements whose growth has fueled its rise. 

THEATLANTIC.COM

Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred by John Lukacs

The past as a lens on our present

I first read John Lukacs’s Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (2005) in 2006 and then again in 2009. I’ve gone back to it before for some quotes (here, here & here), but for obvious reasons I’ve returned to it again this election season. Lukacs is a sage; not infallible, but certainly wise. There are comments that he makes with which I disagree, but his breadth of knowledge and depth of insight make any disagreements tolerable and call into question my suppositions; a very good thing.

Democracy as a form of rule—rule by the people, or in the name of the people—is a relatively new phenomenon, especially on the scale of the nation-state as it developed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Before this, the people could influence rule by mob actions or rebellions, but they were not granted any formal voice in affairs. Now, as Tocqueville so presciently described, we live in an age of democracy. (And Tocqueville is Lukacs’s most important source on this topic.) Along with the rise of democracy, we see the development of (classical) liberalism and conservatism (or reaction), depending on the temper of the times and individuals. With the French Revolution, we get the idea of Left and Right, which, according to Lukacs, retains more validity than do current classifications of “liberal” or “conservative.” Conservatives today in the Republican Party are those who promote (at least until this election cycle) rampant capitalism and free-market economic ideology and tend to deplore government (military functions excepted). Liberals (Democrats) favor capitalism with a welfare state; capitalism-lite, the unwanted calories being taken out by a social safety net. But with the rise of Trumpism to the national stage in the form of a demagogue with all the markings of a huckster, we have to consider populism. And here is where Lukacs excels. For populism and nationalism have become two of the most common forms of political belief of that marked the 20^th century and now the 21^st.

Worthy of Tocqueville, Burkhardt & Huizinga

Lukacs draws upon his vast knowledge of 20^th-century history, to distinguish different political movements. The nationalist socialism of Adolf Hitler was the most important and nearly triumphed in Europe. Lukacs explains the difference between nationalism and patriotism (not at all alike) (quote), and he essays the implications of ideas about popular sovereignty, public and popular opinion, snobbery, class distinctions, and the difference between fear and hatred that allow us to appreciate these phenomena.

Here I’ll stop and let Lukacs speak. His sentences, even in the midst of paragraphs, pages, and chapters, have aphoristic quality to them that beg for consideration on a sentence-by-sentence basis:

Is democracy the rule of the people, or, more precisely: rule by the people? No: because it is, really and actually, rule in the name of the people. (5) 

[P]erspective is an inevitable component of reality; and all perspective is, at least to some extent, historical, just as all knowledge depends on memory. (7)  

The “Right,” by and large, feared and rejected the principle of popular sovereignty. The “Left” advocated or supported or at least would propose democracy. It still does. The “Right,” for a long time, was not populist. But now often it is – which is perhaps a main argument of this book. (18)  

Hitler, for one, was an idealist not a materialist: an idealist of a dreadfully German and frightfully deterministic variety, and a believer in the power of ideas over matter. These men know how to appeal to the masses – something that would have filled Maistre with horror. They knew (as did Proudhon but not Marx) that people are moved by (and at times even worship) evidences of power, rather than propositions of social contracts. (24)  

Marx and Marxism failed well before 1989 – not in 1956 and not in 1919 but in 1914. For it was then that internationalism and class consciousness melted away in the heat of nationalist emotions and beliefs. (43)  

[Marx] entirely failed to understand what nationalism (beginning to rise all around him) was. His heavy, clumsy prose droned and thundered against Capitalism and against the State. Hardly a word about the Nation; and, of course, not even the slightest inkling (true, alas, of most political scientists even now) that State and Nation are not the same things. (43)  

This brings us to what is perhaps the fundamental Marxist (and also economic; and often liberal) misreading of human nature. This is the – alas, still near-universally prevalent – belief that the world and its human beings consist of matter, and what the latter think and believe is but the superstructure of material “reality.” But the opposite is true. (45)  

What a governs the world (and especially in the Democratic age) is not the accumulation of money, or even of goods, but the accumulation of opinions. “Opinion governs the world”: a profound truth, uttered by Pascal, more than three hundred and fifty years ago, in the age of the absolutist monarchy of Louis XIV. (45)  

That opinions can be molded, formed, falsified, inflated has always been true. But it is the accumulation of opinions the governs the history of states and of nations and of democracies as well as dictatorships in the age of popular sovereignty. (46)  

Every human event has multiple causes; and the cause-effect relationship in human events does not accord with the cause-effect relations in mechanical causality. And it is really not enough to ascertain the pathogenesis of events (as, too, in the case of physical illness); we must now attempt to find something about their etiology. (78)  

[T]he history of ideas (indeed of all human thought) is inseparable from the history of words. (117)  

Freedom and freedoms; restrictions of freedoms, the wish – or appetite – for freedom, indifference to freedoms – these are difficult and problematic matters, and perhaps especially during the democratic epoch. To regard freedom simply as an emancipation from chains, as an absence of restrictions is of course insufficient. Aristotle knew that it is more difficult to be free than not to be free. That political freedom does not exhaust the meaning of freedom ought also to be obvious. (129-130)  

That there were, after all, only a small minority of communists worldwide is but one proof of the melancholy human condition: the unwillingness of most people to change their minds, even within the site of clear and definite evidence. (133)  

I put “conservatism” within quotation marks – because there was (and still is) so much in American “conservatism” that it was (and is) not conservative at all. (151)  

As the former liberal meaning of democracy devolves toward populism, the danger of tyranny by the majority arises. . .. The majority is not inherently right for having been a properly elected majority; a majority, like an aristocratic minority, or like a monarch, may be right or wrong; and when it is wrong, to change it or its consequences may be long, arduous, while seeming hopeless. (176)  

[T]he term “P.R.” has become a part of the American vocabulary – and soon a part of many other languages. Ever since then the functioning and the “measuring” of “public opinion” and of its simulation, or manufacture, began to overlap – as in more than one instance the purposes of public relations agents and the pollsters: the generating of publicness, even more than that of “opinion.” Thus the second transportation transformation of the American political system, from popularity contests to publicity contests, had begun. (187)  

In the life of man the decline of his powers in old age more often results in his reversion to infantile habits, to a weakening of physical, and sometimes mental, controls. There may be something similar in the devolution of a people. Again the wisdom of Johan Huizinga, the worthy successor of Tocqueville and of Burkhardt is telling. “Puerileism,” he wrote in the 1920s, is “the attitude of the community whose behavior is more immature than the state of its intellectual and critical faculties would warrant, which instead of making the boy into a man adopts the conduct of that of the adolescent age.” Lamentably enough this is not an imprecise description of recent American presidents – and then some. (191)  

In our times (I wrote for than 20 years ago), toward the end of the Modern Age, the difference – indeed, the increased discrepancy – between frame and honor has become so large that in the characters of presidents and in those of most public figures in all kinds of occupation, the passion for fame has just about obliterated the now remote and ancient sense of honor. (192)  

[A]ll thinking, including imagination, involves and depends on reconstruction; because perception inevitably depends on memory; because all cognition involves, and depends on, recognition. “We live forward; but we can only think backward” (Kierkegaard). (197) 
We have seen that, among other things, “conservative” and “liberal” have lost much, almost all, of their meanings. But “Right” and “Left,” in their widest and deepest sense, still remain with us, especially at their extremes. And now let me state something that may be startling. One of the fundamental differences between extremes of Right and Left is this: in most instances hatred moves the former; fear the latter. (203)  

We have seen that sometime after 1870 that came a change. Nationalism was replacing the older forms of patriotism, and it proved to be an even stronger and more lasting bond for masses people than their consciousness about the struggle of classes. It’s extreme representations and incarnations involve more than a dislike of foreigners. It included a contemptuous hatred of people within their own countries whom such nationalists saw as being insufficiently or even treasonably nonnationalist. This is no longer an aristocratic or even a conservative phenomenon but a populist one. It appeared in a great variety of nations and states; it attracted many revolutionary young; and their opponents soon clear learned to fear them. (204) 
But while hatred amounts to a moral weakness, it can be, alas, often, and at least in the short run, a source of strength. Hence the advantage of the Right over the Left – especially in an age of democratic populism. (209)  

Bernanos: “In the spirit of revolt there is a principle of hatred or contempt for mankind. I’m afraid that the rebel will never be capable of bearing as much love for those he loves as he bears hatred for those he hates.” (As true of elements of the Left is of the Right.) (209)

I’ll stop here, although there’s much more that I could add. But the better course is for you to read the book.

"Thank you, John Ralston Saul": The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

At the Jaipur Literature Festival, I looked forward to hearing a program on “History Strikes Back and the End of Globalism.” It was a dialogue between John Ralston Saul and Hubert Vedrine (a former French foreign minister). I hadn’t read either author, although Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards is packed with my other books back in Iowa City). I wasn’t sure what to expect. The Glamorous Nomad and C joined me. We were in for a surprise. 

Saul opened the session by singling out “some guy called Francis Fukuyama” for writing one of the “stupidest books in the last 25 years”. In this book, Saul claimed, Fukuyama declared the end of history. Saul continued that Fukuyama then wrote another “stupid” book (unnamed) and yet Fukuyama still makes money. I was flabbergasted, while C and the Glamorous Nomad (who’s read Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order) simply walked out. I was shocked and puzzled. Also angry, but this bit of intellectual character assassination intrigued me enough to stay. I’d read The End of History and the Last Man about 15 years ago or so, and I’d thought it brilliant. Had I missed something?  

The good news from this is that it’s led me to re-read The End of History and the Last Man (1992; with a New Afterward, 2006). (I’d purchased a copy here in India last October because I thought it worth a re-read; perhaps a bit of intuition here). To start with the conclusion: the book is brilliant. It’s one of the best books about politics that I’ve read. It is also one of the most discussed and criticized books about politics since its publication. Saul’s low blows aren’t new or novel. Why so? I suspect because few people have read it carefully or have grasped its real significance. 

What Fukuyama wrote, shortly after the fall of Communism in 1989, was that History (may have) come to an end. (I know: China, North Korea, Viet Nam, and Cuba—these regimes survived, but Communism as a living ideology was dead, a few zombies notwithstanding.) Fukuyama, building on the work of Hegel and Hegel’s 20th-century interpreter, Alexandre Kojeve, argues that liberal democracy may have answered as thoroughly as possible the “struggle for recognition” that has driven History. By the way, there is history, and then there is History. “History” with the capital “H” is not a Teutonic affectation on my part, but it’s the term for the Hegelian understanding of the fundamental pattern of change in human history. (With a small “h”, history is the story of the stuff that happens.) Hegel believed that History came to an end in 1805 at the Battle of Jena, when the ideas of the French Revolution, imposed by the military might of Napoleon, defeated the forces of reaction. 

Fukuyama’s intellectual project and lineage are not familiar to most readers. Few have any direct knowledge of Hegel. Most, like me, only learned about Hegel as the precursor to Marx. I expect only a handful of persons know of Kojeve. (I didn’t.) Thus, History is a new concept to most readers, and many seemed to have confused the End of History with the end of stuff happening, which isn’t what Fukuyama argued. 

But History isn’t the most important subject of the book for me. The most intriguing part comes from Fukuyama’s project of reinstating thymos into our understanding of human motivation. If you've read Plato’s Republic (or about it), you know of Plato’s tripartite division of the soul into Reason (logos) on top (for the Philosopher-Kings) and desire (appetite) at the bottom for the masses. In the middle, he places thymos, often translated as “spiritedness” for lack of a better English equivalent. This attribute manifests in the Guardians, the warriors who protect the polis. Fukuyama notes that thymos dominates in aristocratic warrior societies. Thymos receives a new and unique treatment in the Anglo-American liberal tradition starting with Hobbes and Locke. To deal with “vainglory” or “pride” (as manifestations of thymos), these authors and their successors—including Madison and Hamilton—work to sublimate thymos under the devices of desire. Bourgeois man becomes interested only in fulfilling desires and living rationally. So the Anglo-American tradition argues and hopes. But fortunately for the U.S., Madison, Hamilton, and their peers knew that strong men will still strive, and they put in place many checks on power. In the German tradition, Hegel puts thymos front and center as a part of the “struggle for recognition” that drives the dialectic of master and slave (or lordship and bondage, if you prefer). This struggle for recognition drives History. With the French Revolution, the Christian project of equality before God now translates into equality between individuals in the social and political realm. Work becomes dignified as a replacement for the thymotic urge to prove one’s worth on the field of battle, the warrior-aristocrat ideal. 

Fukuyama also discusses whether contemporary liberal societies will see an actual End of History by granting recognition to all and by channeling thymotic urges into more productive pursuits than war. Fukuyama points out that among all the factors leading to the outbreak of WWI, we shouldn’t ignore the popular expression of thymos that led millions to greet the coming of the war with glee. Many greeted the war as an outlet for pent-up desires. This is an astute observation. Now, perhaps, war has become too terrible for its use as such a popular outlet for thymos. Fukuyama also explores whether the twin ideals of liberty (which fosters outlets for thymos in individuals) and equality (our urge to see each acknowledged as equals) can co-exist over a long period as often antagonistic goals. 

Fukuyama levels a sharp critique of realism in international relations, especially in its academic guise typified by Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer. Fukuyama argues that academic realism posits that nothing has changed since Thucydides and that nations are motivated only by the desire for greater power vis a vis any potential rivals. Changes (history) in the motivations of actors or the system of international relations count for nothing in the purer forms of realist theory. Fukuyama is undoubtedly correct in his critique. Legitimacy has become a significant touchstone of action in the international realm as well as in the domestic sphere. 

I highly recommend this book. Fukuyama isn’t as naïve or brazen as his detractors would like to portray him. Like Thucydides and Machiavelli, Fukuyama examines the world today to gain deeper insight into the most significant issues in political thinking. 

Postscript: If you want to see and hear John Ralston Saul’s attack on Fukuyama (and Hubert Vedrine’s more measured comments, go here, starting about 3:40 minutes. My question in defense of Fukuyama and challenging Saul comes at 49:45. I didn't speak as artfully as I would have liked, but I think that I get my point across. The answer is vague. In fact, I believe I have a good deal of sympathy for Saul’s perspective, but his modus operandi in attacking Fukuyama and Huntington was disgraceful. He should—as should we all—at least accurately and honestly state our adversaries’ positions if we are to attack them in absentia.

A Review of Choosing Survival: Creating Highly Adaptive Societies by John Kemp

 

I discovered courtesy of the Social Evolution Forum that back in Iowa City a physician at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics has produced a book that looks into a number of issues that interest me, so, although in China at the time, I downloaded it to my Kindle and began reading. The book looks at what it means to be a “highly adaptive society” (adaptive in the Darwinian sense). It identifies basic characteristics and surveys nations around the world, gauging their relative adaptability viz. the factors that he identifies as crucial to highly adaptive societies. These factors are “a representative form of government, a market-oriented economy, a growing scientific and technical enterprise, a universal system of education, and a system of religious practice which becomes progressively more disentangled from government and progressively more tolerant of diverse beliefs.” (Kemp, John (2013-06-11). Choosing Survival: Creating Highly Adaptive Societies (Kindle Locations 68-70). Kindle Edition.) After further discussing these factors, which one can recognize as common factors that many scholars identify as crucial the rise of Western domination of the world in the last 500 years, Dr. Kemp looks more carefully at nations and societies around the world to gauge their adaptability according to these standards. Finally, he addresses some of the challenges that the remainder of the 21^st century will present to such societies.

This summary of the book is short because I want to get to what made it fun for me to read. This book really got my juices flowing. As you will see, I have a number of criticisms and suggestions that I set forth below, but this is a terrific project and it really goes to the heart of what we have to do in the years to come. Accordingly, here’s a list of thoughts that this book has generated and which I hope will contribute to the project. (Based on memory and with no pretense to scholarship or form, I randomly cite some thinkers and books that I believe pertinent to any particular point in my discussion below.) 

1.      Dr. Kemp is an optimist. He seems to believe in Progress or a variation of the Whig theory of history (that history is moving inevitably toward liberal institutions). In his inventory of nations, for he opines that most of them are moving toward becoming “highly adoptive societies” (hereinafter HAS). I am less optimistic, or at least less certain. I agree that overall, his discernment of the general direction of change is correct; however, his available data set is short. That is, the advanced nations of today (Morris, Why West Rules—For Now) are very recent developments. The Industrial Revolution is only about 250 years old. Given this short time span against about 10,000 years of agriculture and civilization (i.e., cities), this is a brief period in human history. Can we say that Progress, in this case defined as movement toward HAS, will prove inevitable? I sense an assumption of inevitability in the tenor of the book, although it’s not an explicit argument. I don’t believe that representative government is the inevitable result of human change. Germany came close to prevailing in the Second World War (before the entry of the U.S.) (J. Lukacs), or perhaps Communism could have prevailed before the collapse of the U.S.S.R. or the change in China (look at the persistence of N. Korea & Cube, for instance).

2.    A key question, I think best formed by Peter Turchin and his work (War & Peace & War), is whether the historical cycles (“secular cycles”) that he’s identified in agricultural civilizations will continue to apply in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Age. Turchin recognizes this is a key issue. I note that Turchin has done some preliminary work on cycles in U.S. history, most of which encompasses the Industrial Age and qualifies as an HAS. Perhaps it will address to what extent we might be really different from the past and therefore exempt from the social gravity that has dragged down earlier societies.

3.    I think that the term HAS is misused, or at least misplaced. It strikes me that the most highly adaptive societies were those of the hunter-gathers, who really did have to adapt to their natural environment. With the advent of agriculture, humans really begin, tentatively, to shape their environment. With the Modern Age (beginning, shall we stipulate, around 1600), humans significantly begin to change their environment, a project that truly takes off with industrialization. Thus, what Dr. Kemp identifies has HAS should, I think, be dubbed Highly Transformative Societies (HTS). The Modern Age marks the transformation of society and (not always intentionally) the transformation of the natural world as well. If we think of adaptation, what has the Modern Age adapted to?

4.    Dr. Kemp refers often to the “fragmentation of power”. I don’t like this term for several reasons. As a term, I think that several options are more appropriate, such as “de-centralization of power” or “devolution of power” (Khanna), or “disbursement of power”. The connotation of “fragmentation” is not a good one, but it does lead us to a deeper issue. I agree with the general proposition that de-centralized decision making, such as we find in markets (Hayek) and democracy are usually the best ways of decision-making in complex societies. However, if we understand power as the ability to make decisions and effect change through speech (and not through force) (Arendt, Habermas), then too much fragmentation damages power in a society. With too much fragmentation, anarchy (in the non-philosophical sense) or political impotency become problems. For instance, the U.S. Constitution came about as a result of the excessive fragmentation of power inherent in the Articles of Confederation. The Civil War came about from an attempt to fragment power (the secession of the Confederate States). Indeed, much of post-Civil War U.S. history shows a trend toward centralization of power in the federal government, which on the whole, I judge to have been beneficial. Today, we see a strong fragmentation sentiment in the Tea Party and Radical Republicans (Wills) who want to strip the federal government of much of its power and role in American life. For the better? I don’t think so, although finding the right balance between centralized (coordinating) power and de-centralized decision-making is not an easy issue or one given to bright lines. (See Coase’s theory of the firm, which I think has applications in political theory, and, of course, The Federalist Papers.)

5.     The book doesn’t address directly the theory of complexity as applied to societies (see, e.g. Gaddis, The Landscape of History; Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth). Whether we can model societies successfully seems to me crucial to gaining a sense of how we can successfully shape the future. It will also help us understand how things might not go the way we want. (Or is this wishful thinking? Theories of the cycles of history have been around almost as long as history itself, yet societies seem to be immune to their insights—historians have just been so many Cassandras to the extent that they might have hoped to alter the course of events.)

6.    The book’s seeming faith in progress (movement towards HAS) is not balanced by a consideration of how things might go amiss, both in countries that have achieved a high level of development and those who might hope to achieve it. Some nations get stuck in an unfavorable equilibrium and have a hard time getting out of it. As a current resident of India, I perceive that despite some strong economic growth recently, it’s hard to see how this society will gain traction in the near future. Corruption, extreme poverty, poor infrastructure, political fragmentation (in the negative sense): all of these factors make me much less optimistic that what I take Dr. Kemp to be from his discussion of India. Having just spent a month in China, I was amazed at the overall level of development, but much of the cost has been externalized (some horrible air pollution and apparently even greater problems of water quality and quantity). These facts serve to cancel much of my amazement at the terrific infrastructure improvements and astonishing commercial development. The prospects of democracy in China are uncertain at best, and the model of centralized power seems to growing in popularity for some. (See M. Pettis, Avoiding the Fall: China’s Economic Restructuring, on prospects and problems for the Chinese economy.) 

7.     How do societies avoid the collapses or declines described by Turchin, Tainter, Diamond, P. Kennedy, Homer-Dixon, Toynbee, et al.? (This list could go on at some length.) This, to my mind, is the ultimate adaptation that any society can aspire to, which assumes that the society has achieved a satisfactory level of equilibrium. (Has any society ever achieved this?) We need to address not only factors of collapse identified in past societies (as controversial and elusive as these causes can be), but we also need to contemplate new threats to social survival. Nuclear war (hey, I’m a child of the 50’s & 60’s), as well as human-caused global climate change pop to mind, but certainly others exist. (Local climate change has certainly altered and contributed to the collapse of many social orders.)

8.    What will drive future adaptation? War, along with economic competition, drove much of the European change (Ferguson, Civilization). What will drive change in the future? If war becomes the driver, it could destroy much of social development achieved to date. (The physical survival of the U.S. allowed Europe to recover after WWII; compare what happened in Europe after WWI). Can we continue to compete in economics with the same system that we have now? (See #9 below.) There have to be ecological limits to growth (Julian Simon notwithstanding). 

9.    We have to figure out how consumer capitalism will morph into a sustainable equilibrium. Can consumer capitalism come to such a state? One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to believe that this system is unsustainable (although Marx had some insights; also see John Stuart Mill). This is the visionary aspect of a program for thinking about future societies.

I’ve said enough for now. I hope it’s apparent that the book has certainly stimulated my thinking, and the parts of the projects that I’ve suggested need further development are a huge challenge, especially given that Dr. Kemp has a day job. I hope that as an amateur who has not ventured such a demanding project as writing a book on such an important topic, my writing this this review isn’t too galling. Think of this, please, as cheerleading, or egging on, if you will.

If you’re interested in this topic—what our future holds and how we might shape it—start with this book and join the conversation!