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| Published November 2021 |
This book is an attempt to convey a way of looking at the world quite different from the one that has largely dominated the West for at least three hundred and fifty years – some would say as long as two thousand years.
We have been seriously misled, I believe, because we have depended on that aspect of our brains that is most adept at manipulating the world in order to bend it to our purposes. The brain is, importantly, divided into two hemispheres: you could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend – and thus manipulate – the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it – see it all for what it is. The problem is that the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it.
By employing the dialectical insights of polarity theory, the political philosophy I’m arguing for here brings together the polarity of self-interest and greater-than-self-interest with [Charles] Taylor’s polarity of immanence and transcendence. These two polarities are integrated through the following steps of logic: At the micro-level of individual motivation, the pursuit of self-interest, when relatively successful, moves toward forms of self-actualization that can only be found through self-transcendence.
Fiscal policy was even larger and more prompt. Central bank interventions were even more spectacular. If one married the two in one’s mind—fiscal and monetary policy together—it confirmed the essential insights of economic doctrines once advocated by radical Keynesians and made newly fashionable by doctrines like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). State finances are not limited like those of a household. If a monetary sovereign treats the question of how to organize financing as anything more than a technical matter, that is itself a political choice.
That [appreciating the reality of contingencies; the unexpected], not the application of predetermined formulas, was the mark of a great general. But accepting contingency did not mean forsaking planning or reasoned thinking. It simply meant that rationality was no panacea, that one always stood in the middle of life, not outside it, assessing and reassessing based on immediate circumstances and the best knowledge that was available at any given moment. Improvisation should be employed only when improvisation was required, and then rationally. The quality of independent, unsupported thinking that goes by the hard-to-pin-down name of “intuition” was an important element in victory.
[Arthur] Schlesinger was left with clumsy quantitative tests—it was all right to get involved in Vietnam, but not too far; to bomb, but not too much; to engage in minor warfare but not with major casualties. Yet killing is never minor—there is no minor war, any more than there is minor murder. The question is, Do you kill out of self-defense or not? Is there a real threat to the people’s existence? When that threat becomes actual (not merely possible), we can take the minimum necessary means to preserve ourselves. When the threat ceases, so should our response.
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