Thoughts for the Day: 24 August 2021

 

Coming later this year to a bookstore near you! (9 November in the UK)

The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life. A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.

(Location 408)

In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon.

(Location 409)

Perhaps the pope should update this in light of the most recent IPCC report. To wit, we can now gauge more accurately the ties between extreme and persistent weather events with human-caused climate change. 

It is true that there are other factors (such as volcanic activity, variations in the earth’s orbit and axis, the solar cycle), yet a number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity.

(Location 412)

Our lack of response to these tragedies involving our brothers and sisters points to the loss of that sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded.

(Location 435)

And now from some other voices: 

"To me, a universe with tendencies towards beauty, complexity, and the rich unfolding of uniqueness is already teleological. It is a verb with many adverbs, not just a matter of nouns chasing nouns."

The Matter with Things (to be published this fall in the UK)

Iain McGichrist

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The beliefs in the unlimited substitutability of resources, in the primacy of economic institutions and policies, and in the exceptionalism of human beings and their modern markets often combine to produce what I can only call unbridled hubris.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Culture is an amorphous concept at best, but the scholars Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson provide the definition I’ve found most succinct and useful: according to them, culture is “information—skills, attitudes, beliefs, values—capable of affecting individuals’ behavior, which they acquire from others by teaching, imitation, and other forms of social learning.”

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

Frederick Douglass, in his once-famous Fifth of July oration, delivered on July 5, 1852, could combine a militant rejection of slavery with a bow to the moral possibilities inherent in the Constitution to annihilate it—and this wasn’t just a rhetorical gambit designed to win support for his cause: “In that instrument, I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither.”

The Road to Unfreedom

Timothy Snyder

What has already happened in Russia is what might happen in America and Europe: the stabilization of massive inequality, the displacement of policy by propaganda, the shift from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity. Russian leaders could invite Europeans and Americans to eternity because Russia got there first. They understood American and European weaknesses, which they had first seen and exploited at home.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

MODERNITY: Condition of society from late eighteenth ceTimntury, marked by rapid growth of population, spread of industrial and then finance capitalism, division of labor, literacy, and mobility. Intellectually, a climate of ideas marked by secularization and enlightened thought. Modernity cut loose natural science from the divine and the supernatural; philosophy from alone explaining the world; morality from the task of human redemption; law from the putative universal order of nature. Modernity entered political thought via Machiavelli and Hobbes, who lifted from rulers any duty beyond ensuring a safe, stable frame for people to flourish in and pursue worldly concerns. To liberals, modernity was a liberation, to conservatives a loss of anchorage and human shelter for which they blamed liberals, hence the term, “liberal modernity.” “Many old works become fragments. Many modern works start out as fragments” (Friedrich Schlegel).

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Like cultural conservatives before him and after, [Carl] Schmitt was also disturbed by the apparent loss of compass and bleak purposelessness in liberal modernity. The oddity, for a conservative, was Schmitt’s looking to politics to fill the gap. A more natural filler—one sought by [John Henry] Newman, for example—was an authoritative religion. Schmitt’s correspondent and interlocutor, Leo Strauss, pointed that out to Schmitt, who acknowledged the religious element in his thinking.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

The contradictory of ‘metaphorical’ is ‘literal’; and if the distinction between literal and metaphorical usages is a genuine distinction, which in one sense it is, both kinds of usage are equally proper. There is another sense in which all language is metaphorical; and in that sense the objection to certain linguistic usages on the ground that they are metaphorical is an objection to language as such, and proceeds from an aspiration towards what Charles Lamb called the uncommunicating muteness of fishes. But this topic belongs to the theory of language, that is, to the science of aesthetic, with which this essay is not concerned.

Biden Wins--So What Now?

 

I write this on early Sunday morning 1 November (damned switch away from DST!). I write now because on the final day of the election ("Election Day"), as we await the verdict of the American voting public, I'll be too keyed-up to write anything coherent. As a lawyer, I've waited for many a verdict, and it doesn't get any easier even as you've been through it many times. Each case is unique; each time a significant change in the future awaits the outcome. This case, the case of Donald J. Trump, has now reached to point of closing arguments to the American voters (i.e., those who don't shirk their "jury duty"). This election is about whether this "jury" decides to free itself and open its future to better outcomes, or we chose to condemn ourselves to a future marked by fear, anger, and resentment, and the "leadership" of an incompetent, vile, and threatening man. 

If, when you read this, you have sound grounds to believe that Joe Biden has been elected president, then by all means (reasonable and legal) celebrate. However, I suspect most, like me, will more likely simply feel a sense of relief. We have not condemned ourselves. We will sigh and say "Thank goodness!" (For it is a sense of goodness that would allow such an outcome.) We will go to bed or if late enough, on to our daily activities, with a sense of ease, at least in the sense of reduced anxiety. 

So what can we expect with a President-elect Biden? Will we awaken to a scene of rainbows and unicorns and people joining around the campfire to sing Kumbaya together? 

No. 

In electing Biden--and even if he gets a Democratic Congress--we should understand as a nation that we have only broken the fever, that Trump is not the underlying cause of this dis-ease in our body politic. Trump is only an opportunistic secondary infection. Voters have acted as the antibodies to this infection, working to drive this infection away. But the body politic isn't cured once and for all of this dis-ease. Underlying Trump is a chronic dis-ease that allowed our nation to succumb to this secondary infection. Although the American voters have vanquished Trump, Trumpism, the syndrome that he embodies, will remain. American has suffered this infection of right-wing extremism for almost its entire 245 years. Sometimes the infection has been acute (the Civil War as the worst outbreak), but there have been other manifestations, such as the Klu Klux Klan uprisings during Reconstruction and the 1920s;  Joe McCarthy and witch-hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s; and the Civil Rights movement backlash and the candidacy of George Wallace, to name just a few examples of outbreaks. This politics of fear, anger, and resentment from the "right" has always been far more important than anything coming from the "left." Radicalism and violence have arisen from the left, but these outbreaks tend to be acute although sometimes intense infections that don't continue too long and that don't usually translate into electoral clout. The violence that we've seen in American cities this year has been the result of acute, intense frustration with police killings and brutality and all of the underlying conditions that allow such wrongdoing to continue. But never in my lifetime has the radical left gained any lasting power, but not so the right, especially to the degree manifest by Trump's administration. 

If we're lucky, we'll get something approaching politics as usual, only with a New Deal-like shift. We can hope for a change in policies that will begin some fundamental changes in the American political scene. A "Green New Deal" (of some sort) to address climate change and environmental degradation is a must. Also, we badly need significant reforms of our electoral system to end voter suppression schemes and to allow fair and proportional representation. (The Supreme Court required the states to practice "one person one vote" back in 1962 in Baker v. Carr. We should apply this principle to all elections.) A respect for minority rights is baked into the American Constitution even as they're too often ignored in practice. However, there's no brief for minority rule, which has become increasingly common. Only once have Republicans won the popular vote for president after 1988: Bush in 2004. And yet, in 2000 and 2016 Republicans won the presidency despite having lost the popular vote. 

In short, we live in a time of troubles. We know this even as we don't want to acknowledge it or we can't quite understand it. The human herd is spooked. This is a time when dictators and radical movements ferment and often gain power. And by "radical movements" in this instance I mean those who eschew politics, speech, and persuasion in favor of violence. There can be peaceful radical movements, such as the American Civil Rights movement as led by Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to name but one prominent example; and there have been many less well-known but nevertheless potent peaceful movements. We can expect--and no doubt need--some (peaceful) radical movements. Indeed, the change we need isn't generated or pushed by traditional political discourse, but it swells up into political discourse from below. We need to radically (to the root) re-think our relationships with each other, with others around the world, and with Mother Nature herself. The journey of modernity is over, and we need to move on to something better (and I'm not talking about silly "post-modernism). What that "better" consists of we must hash-out continually as we progress. We have to turn to prophets, but not those who scare us with hellfire and brimstone, but the whose who provide us with a vision, a new way of seeing and understanding ourselves and our world. Only when the prophets do their work, and the people convert can this change be channeled into the political sphere. I think (hope) that we have a start on it. If we don't make some very immediate--and yes, drastic--changes very soon, I fear that we'll be in a hell of a fix. (And I mean that in a literal sense as well.) 

So, yes, celebrate, and then let's get to work. 

Post Script: Monday 9 November 2020

I've decided to post the above. Nothing has changed my mind. The repudiation of Trump was not nearly as overwhelming as I'd hoped, and few Trump enablers--virtually the entire Republican Party--paid an electoral price. But otherwise, the post seems on point. We still have to deal with the problems of Trumpism or perhaps its more lethal (to democracy & our lives) mutations. 

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

Published February 2017. The title captures the key point.

Here’s an idea for a history professor who teaches a class in European Thought from the Age of Enlightenment to the advent of the First World War. You give this question as the take-home exam:

Identify a trend in European thought that spread throughout the continent and beyond and that has a connection to events in the contemporary world. Identify the trend and explain how this trend relates to significant contemporary events.

I imagine that something like this popped into the head of Pankaj Mishra, and the Age of Anger is his answer to this challenge. Our imaginary professor need not look further than this brilliant book to find an “A” answer.

In this book, Mishra looks at terrorism, rising popular frustrations, and the shift toward populist politics, ardent nationalism, and autocratic rulers in the contemporary world. In Mishra’s book, we see connections between Islamic terrorists, Hindu nationalists, Brexit, and Trump voters. Each group manifests a fundamental rebellion against the social and economic—and therefore political—strictures of modernity and its most forceful representative, global capitalism. Others have identified these contemporary connections, but Mishra reaches back to the Enlightenment in 18^th century France to see how the foremost nation of the age understood modernity and how it responded to the changes modernity imposed upon individuals and societies. Mishra focuses on the leading figure of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, and its most prominent critic, Rousseau. European politics after 1789 can be viewed as a continuation of the battles of the French Revolution, and in the same way, European social and political thought can be seen as a continuation of the contending viewpoints of Rousseau and Voltaire.

Voltaire: more famous at the beginning

Rousseau: greater influence, larger image

Mishra traces the history of Rousseau’s thought as it emigrated to Germany and captured the attention of Herder and the Romantic movement. Germany was late to industrial development and late to nationhood, but it made up for its lost time with a vengeance. Mishra also charts the course of Rousseau’s thought and its attendant nationalism into Italy, which also came late to statehood and only falteringly to industrial capitalism.  And Mishra looks at Russia, its nationhood achieved, but sorely lagging in the cultural and economic markers of modernity. In each nation, throughout Europe (with Great Britain a significant outlier), the demands of modernity and modern industrial capitalism tore the social fabric and created a backlash among those unable to realize the prizes offered by capitalism. In short, a backlash occurred beginning with the French Revolution and continuing through the First World War to now. While the working class struggled for basic living conditions, the intellectual class struggled with the indignities and frustrations that this system built upon mimetic desire created. Mishra examines the work of a variety of continental thinkers in this period, Herder, Proudhon, Marx, Bakunin (anarchist), Mazzini (Italian nationalist), Dostoevsky, Tocqueville, and Nietzsche, to name some of the most prominent writers who addressed these issues. Also, Mishra discusses the spread of these lines of thought through other parts of the world, including Islamic civilization, India, and China. These nations, in seeking to throw off the yoke of Western imperialism, adopted and modified Western thinking both modern and anti-modern.

But don’t think that this is merely an account of abstract thinkers. Mishra’s book also recounts the violence spawned by these thinkers and others like them. From the French Revolution to the Revolutions of 1848 to the anarchist bombings and assassinations of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, violence-plagued Europe, the U.S., and the rest of the world. While the two world wars and the Cold War placed a damper on much of this ferment, it erupted again after the end of the Cold War. Whether massive scale killings like those in Bosnia, or acts of terrorism like the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building and the World Trade Center, in Mishra’s account, it’s all of a single cloth. Indeed, the physical proximity of Timothy McVeigh, U.S. Army veteran, and Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack (1993), represents the similarity of their characteristics. Yousef claimed the mantle of Islam, and McVeigh claimed no religion other than “science,” but both held a deep-seated grievance against the existing order.

The common bond of this tale of violence is ressentiment, frustration, powerlessness, and humiliation. These feelings provide the motivation for both the angry words and the violent deeds that seek to destroy the system, to remake the world. Note that as I write this, a self-proclaimed “Leninist” who want to bring down the system, Stephen Bannon, sits at the right hand of our demagogic president. I fear it events could become uglier more quickly than we can imagine.

Mishra is a native of India and resides currently in London. He is conversant in both worlds. In considering An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the World, which I read some years ago, I noted how fluidly Mishra moved between the Buddhist and Western traditions. His mastery of the material of the “exam question” that he gave in himself in Age of Anger is also exemplary. (He provides a thorough bibliographical essay to show where he has been in this research. It’s impressive.)

More than any other source dealing with the Age of Trump, I found Mishra’s account provides the most useful guide because it reaches back in time and around the globe. I agree with Mishra that economic turmoil and uncertainty, threats such as climate change (which some deny but still no doubt fear), and the ongoing frustrations and humiliations perceived by many have created our volatile political climate. Like me, Mishra looks around the world and sees millions and millions of young men [sic] who are encountering frustrated expectations because economic growth inevitably slows, thereby denying them opportunities to climb the latter of status and success. Alas, Mishra doesn’t have an answer for all of this. I suspect, like me, that he doesn’t want to crush the benefits of modernity to ameliorate its detriments. But somehow, we have to find our way beyond our current fix, or we will suffer much worse to come. 

Revised 8.29.19

Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment & the Challenge of the Next Millennium by William Ophuls

When I took a course entitled “Introduction to Political Theory” as a freshman at the University of Iowa in 1972, the course reading  requirements included Plato’s Republic, Machiavelli’s The Prince, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, a selection of Karl Marx that included The Communist Manifesto and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter-Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. You may notice that one of the assigned authors was not like any of the others. Roszak’s book was only published in 1969, and he was not then (nor is he now) among the pantheon of great political thinkers. But the book was as important and influential on me as any of the others. As an ardent young Republican, this book introduced me to a way of thinking about politics and the contemporary world that I’d not been exposed to before (which was true of the other authors as well, but I at least had heard of them). Roszak discussed thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, and Lewis Mumford. What this book did was to critique the liberal consensus of American politics. And back then at least, this included both Republicans and Democrats. In later courses in contemporary political thought (with Lane Davis and John Nelson), the critiques of modernity, industrialism and technology, and liberalism (as a system of thought) became more distinct. I never wanted to throw out the liberal system (in this way I’m very much a conservative), but I appreciate these critiques and regard them (to some extent) as better templates than our current system. And now, with Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the New Millennium by William Ophuls (1997) I’ve encountered a sustained and summary critique that captures all most everything that I’ve found suspect in social, economic, and political thought and action in the modern world.

For any reader of this blog, my affinity for this book should come as no surprise. In 2014 I had the good fortune to read both Plato’s Revenge and Immoderate Greatness, briefer, more recent books by Ophuls that focus on a vision of a new politics (Plato’s Revenge) and the inevitability of civilizational decline (Immoderate Greatness). Requiem follows his initial work, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited (1992; earlier version 1977)(on my to-read list). Ecology focuses a great deal on ecological issues and less on the political and social theory, while Requiem is very much a work in political, social, and economic theory. (Can these three realms be separated? Not really.) In fact, Ophuls dispenses with most of contemporary social science, finding what he needs in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Tocqueville, Lippmann, and others among the pantheon of great political and historical thinkers. There is no mention of John Rawls in this book. His self-imposed limitation does not impede his argument—it strengthens it. However, he does make one decisive move that distinguishes his work from that of his august forbearers in this field: he bases his work in the science of ecology, something that he emphasizes in all of his works. And, in conjunction with ecology, he necessarily incorporates thermodynamics, complexity theory, and evolution in his explanation of how we humans exist in nature.

His work can be described as one long diatribe (not intending a negative connotation here) against liberalism, and all that has flowered from it: capitalism, industrialism, scientism, and excessive rationalism. The root of Ophuls’s account starts with Hobbes and continues, with modifications, to Locke, and then the tradition blossoms out into a wider array of thinkers. Put simply: liberal culture, which seeks to maximize the liberty of the individual and free him or her from the constraints of tradition in politics, religion, family relations, and economics, is a parasite that destroys its host. In politics and society, liberalism feeds off of family, civil society, and mythic traditions; capitalism feeds off of traditional values, and industrialism feeds off the of environment. In each of these realms, I write “feed,” but the relationship is parasitic, not symbiotic. All of these parasitic systems weaken and will eventually destroy the hosts upon which they depend. Now lest you think Ophuls a fire-breathing radical (I believe he is best described as a prophet), he is careful to base his arguments on traditional commentators and well-supported facts. Nothing that he writes here hasn’t been said before, but nowhere in a single work have I found the critique so thoroughly and convincingly expounded. (Although I must say that he mostly ignores Hegel, although he recognized Fukuyama’s riff on Hegel as a prominent alternative perspective.)

When reading this work, anyone other than the most committed intellectual radical will find something shocking in Ophuls’s contentions. Ophuls castigates the entire liberal tradition, which at least until populism—a profoundly anti-intellectual, non-rational movement that took over the Republican Party—was the basis of all American political assumptions. America is, and always has been the liberal society, par excellence. One can quibble about this observation or that, but Ophuls’s critique is radical in the most basic sense of the word: he strikes at the root. Ophuls doesn’t want to make the mistake of many radicals—destroying that which is valuable in the dominant liberal tradition. The recognition of the dignity and human rights of the individual are values that Ophuls recognizes and wants to preserve. (Ophuls gets down to the details of governance in his book Sane Polity: A Pattern Language (2012) (review forthcoming).

Some of the criticisms that Ophuls levels are not unique to liberalism or modernity. The creep of government, the liability to fall from youthful idealism to crotchety despotism—the Roman historians, Ibn Khaldun,  and Gibbon all described these conditions centuries ago. (And Francis Fukuyama has updated them in his most recent book, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (2014)). And not every fault is equal. An argument exists that the U.S. government is too big, too expensive, and too intrusive, but who wants to surrender the feed bag? The military, science, the middle class, the poor (who receive the smallest piece of the pie)? And is the intrusion, at least in economic affairs, so great? Some intervention is needed to protect consumers from corporations and to preserve the integrity and viability of markets. So while these are real concerns, they don’t rise to the level of his more fundamental critiques.

Ophuls has performed a great service with this book: he has criticized some of the key assumptions of our most cherished ideas; he has questioned the very nature of our collective enterprise, and he has done so without rancor and with a sincere care for the values worth preserving and further cultivating. This work is a profoundly mature and thoughtful work. The work is fundamental, and he describes it at the beginning:

I envision a politics of consciousness deeply rooted in a renewed erotic connection to nature and to the mysterious and sacred realm out of which both man and nature arise. But destruction is the precondition of creation. We must therefore begin by examining modernity on its funeral pyre, for it is from the ashes of the old order that the phoenix of the new will rise. (xv)

In the coming days, I’ll post some quotes from Ophuls, hoping to plant seeds of thought in interest readers.  

The Genie: Capitalism & Human Values by Frank S. Robinson

Fellow blogger Frank Robinson has posted a link to a spirited and well-argued defense of capitalism that he published (link above). Robinson makes what I consider a Churchillian argument. As Churchill is reported to have said about democracy--"it's the worst form of government, except when compared to all of the others"--so Robinson seems to be arguing for capitalism. (Side note: I prefer the term "market economy" to "capitalism" because of the strong emotional valance "capitalism" holds in some quarters, left and right, but this is a small quibble.) Robinson readily admits the shortcomings of capitalism, but it has brought us untold wealth. It has not brought us heaven on earth, but we should not expect it to do so. By the way, neither has any other form of economy, socialism, mercantilism, or the agricultural society that dominated humankind up until about 225 years ago. Compare yourself the the most powerful and wealthiest persons in history and it's likely that you enjoy a higher standard of life than any such person. A Vanderbilt, a Rothschild (19th century version), not to mention a Napoleon, any king, a caesar: all pale compared to the standard of life and wealth that the average American enjoys today, albeit without all of the social prestige. Do you want social prestige or a medical system that can treat you and a car or jet to travel rather than a horse and buggy?

So is there anything to further to ponder? The genie of capitalism, or more broadly the fruits of capitalism, economic growth, has given us a whole new way of life, full of opportunities and brave new worlds. But can we control this genie? Having unleashed the genie of unprecedented economic growth in the last 225 years or so, can we continue to live with it? As Ian Morris discusses in The Why the West Rules, we can imagine at least two very different scenarios of the future that might play out: one "nightfall" and the other, "the singularity". Which scenario will likely play out? Or will we continue to muddle through? I question whether we can continue to dump growing amounts of carbon into our atmosphere with impunity. I'd begun to think that nuclear energy might be an answer, but now the catastrophe in Japan demonstrates how the best laid plans can not anticipate all of the threats. (Fire, by the way, posed similar threats and wrecked havoc on earlier civilizations on a huge scale, but not on a scale for area and duration that compares to nuclear catastrophes.) As I'm of an age to recall Three Mile Island (not really so bad), Chernobyl (really bad), and "The China Syndrome" (scary and kind of relevant to what's happening here), I can't rest easy with this situation.

Considering the perspectives of Thomas Homer-Dixon, I wonder if we've developed an ingenuity gap that we may not prove able to bridge, or that our energy needs, the lifeblood of any human group, have grown too large and chaotic to manage and continue. During the the first 40 or so years of my life, I feared the genie of atomic weaponry, which seems to be back in the bottle, but really it's only resting in silos--we hope. Can we control the fruits of modernity and capitalism, such as atomic energy? The problem stems from the fact that we as a species haven't changed all that much since leaving the savannas of Africa about 100,000 years ago. We still have most of the same instincts and biases, the same perspectives and limitations. We've come a long way, but have we come far enough?

Can we continue to grow in knowledge and power? Can we continue to grow something that we call "the economy"? I hope so, but we should be considering how we can tame this genie lest it get the better of us.