Category Archives: Politics

Coalition of opposites

Ethics, Politics

One group of individuals is systematically oppressed by another group of individuals. Two witnesses to the oppression are offended and moved to stop the injustice, but for opposite reasons.

The first witness sees the rights of individuals being violated by other individuals.

The second witness sees one group violating the other group’s right to equality.

What is the injustice?

For the first witness, the injustice is focused on the attempt to strip individuals of their status as citizens and to impose a different status upon them. In a liberal democracy only one category matters: citizen.

For the second witness, the offense is focused on the power imbalance between the two groups. Justice demands equality among groups.

When the two witnesses discuss the oppression, they seem to agree.

The first witness sees that the power imbalance between groups is what makes the oppression of individuals possible, and agrees with the second witness that this inequality between groups must end, but (and this is left unsaid) for the sake of the individuals whose rights are violated.

The second witness sees that the rights of individuals are being violated, and that no individual should be subjected to such indignities, but (and this is left unsaid) because no group is inferior to any other group.

Both witnesses agree that the oppressed should unite and stand together to oppose their unjust treatment. Isolated individuals cannot overcome the oppression of another group. Only individuals functioning as a group can effectively resist another group.

In the urgency of stopping the immediate oppression the two witnesses fail to notice that their differences are greater than their commonalities.

When the political conditions shift, the coalition fractures.

The first witness is shocked to discover that the second believes that all members of the oppressing category are responsible for the current crime and the entire history of oppression perpetrated by its category. The justifications are a drawn from the social sciences, but the moral impulses driving those justifications (the “motivated reasoning” as they say) are now far too close to those of the oppressors: individuals are understood as manifestations of a group, and never mind that such justifications are persuasive only to those who share that impulse, the truth is self-evident and everyone whose opinion matters sees this to be true — and now our group has the power to impose these categories.

The second witness is shocked to discover that the first witness wants to defend the rights of individuals to think whatever they want, even to believe in an essential inequality among groups, even to publicly state these opinions, even to state them with the intention of inflicting emotional distress on other groups, or even to try to persuade them of their own essential inferiority! What is not permitted is any effort, whether by an individual or group to violate any other individual’s rights.

Political Platonism

Ethics, Politics

When one person commits a crime against another, a liberal habitually sees an individual criminal and an individual victim. You can conceptually thematize the parties involved in the crime and the nature of the crime itself in myriad ways, but ultimately it is an individual responsible for the action. Liberalism views the world in terms of responsible agents with specific rights, not as examples of categories.

Whenever I hear illiberals describe crimes, I hear something very different. An example of a category has done something bad to another example of a category, and it seems that the crime is viscerally felt as a manifestation of an enduring crime of one category against another. It seems to be some sort of political Platonism where what happens on Earth is just a reflection of the real events in Heaven acted out by archetypes who are the real villains and victims who matter.

Even our differences in choice of Heavenly ideals is the action of archetypes.

When a Liberal (in the popular vulgar sense) sees a crime of White against Black or Man against Woman, a Conservative sees Liberalism once again committing its crime against America. When a Conservative sees a crime of Foreigner against American or Muslim against Christian, a Liberal sees Conservatism once again committing its crime against equality.

Very few people feel individuality anymore. What we feel far more intensely is categories and concepts.

A literary friend of mine tells me that even our novels are no longer centered on individuality. Readers want moving tales about instances of categories suffering as their categories at the hands of instances of other categories.

And increasingly we see ourselves as manifestations of categories and concepts, and we take aggressive exception to anyone who does not.

Most of us have lost our taste for individuality — and we’re too busy, scattered and degraded to notice.

 

America’s new religion is Antiracism

Ethics, Politics

John McWhorter has observed that America’s new religion is Antiracism:

…they have developed a new religion. That religion is antiracism. Of course, most consider antiracism a position, or evidence of morality. However, in 2015, among educated Americans especially, Antiracism—it seriously merits capitalization at this point—is now what any naïve, unbiased anthropologist would describe as a new and increasingly dominant religion. It is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus and, among most Blue State Americans, more so.

For the most part, I agree with him, but, being a disagreeable type of person, of course I am compelled to split some hairs: What McWhorter describes in his article is not a religion, but a fundamentalism. Anyone who knows me at all knows that I consider fundamentalisms to be pseudo-religions that work against the purpose of religion. It would be more accurate to call fundamentalism an anti-religion.

This morning, talking with Susan about a paper on diversity and multiculturalism she is writing for one of her ESOL certification courses, I had an insight. I could never understand why, despite my efforts to study, wrestle with and actually practice pluralism in my daily life, the adherents of Antiracism I’ve known have rarely been interested in what I’ve learned or what I have to say on the subject of alterity. They usually just avoid conversation, but when I do engage them, they condescendingly speak to me as someone who doesn’t yet understand what they just know, without any trace of recognition that their assumption of epistemological privilege is both odd and unsupportable. I have put many hundreds more hours of work into understanding these issues than they have. Wouldn’t it make sense to at least entertain the possibility that these hundred hours produced something worthwhile? And given the difference in motivation to learn, can they really claim to care more than I do?

But now McWhorter has helped me see what is going on: this is a religion vs. fundamentalism conflict. This is how it always goes: There are the religious people who live their religion with their whole being — feel it, love it, breathe it, and allow it to soak into their lives and to transform them. And there are those who adopt and enforce the conventional opinions, customs, language, symbols, rituals and behavioral norms of the religion and assume all deviations from these conventions must be symptoms of defective faith, or even heresy. My genuine religious faith in Pluralism looks like heresy to Antiracist Fundamentalists.

And really, I see no less irony in the puritanical, inflexibility and intolerance toward doctrinal otherness of today’s multicultural monolith than I do in the hostile insularity most Christians make of Jesus’s teachings of transcendent love.

Slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notions of interpersonal being

Anthropology, Biography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Hermeneutics, History, Philosophy, Politics

Wow, this post really sprawled out. It hits a lot of my enduring interests. I’m not sure it is suitable for reading. It might just be a personal journal entry written to myself. Feel free to eavesdrop if you wish, but I cannot promise it will make sense or yield any value.

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I listened to a fascinating Radio Open Source podcast on Hannah Arendt’s conception of evil, which ended with a wonderful discussion on empathy.

Jerome Kohn: Empathy is a fancy word or fancy theory that she argued passionately against. First of all she thought it was an impossible notion in the sense that it really means feeling what someone else feels. Sympathy, fellow feeling, is another thing. But empathy is the claim that you can actually feel what someone else is feeling. And for that Arendt found no evidence whatsoever. One could say it’s even the opposite of her notion of thinking from another person’s point of view. What you have to be able to do is to see a given issue from different points of view, to make it real. And then through those different points of view, with your own eyes, you don’t feel what the other person is feeling, you see what he is seeing through your own eyes, and then you can make a judgement. The more people you can take into consideration in this enlarged mentality, that actually is the foundation of reality for Arendt, the more valid your judgement will be.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Jerry’s exactly right. Hannah Arendt was always opposed to these slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notions about what binds people to each other. And she felt very keenly that what really binds one person to another is a commitment to try to see the world from that person’s point of view with your own eyes. Not to subscribe to their point of view or to merge with their point of view, but to be able to walk around and see what the world looks like from where they’re standing. But looking at it with your own eyes, so that you can then, as it were, discuss it with them. Not merge with them in some way, but discuss it with them. She was all about discussion. Not empathy in that sentimental way.

Christopher Lydon (host): And yet, well, there are distinctions without huge differences in some way. To put oneself in another’s mind is the beginning of something important.

EYB: To think that you can put yourself in another’s mind in the beginning of a terrible arrogance which has tremendous consequences. It’s a difference with great consequences. People who think they that they can know what another person thinks or feel what another person feels are narcissistic.

CL: Well, ok, I don’t want to make a philosophical or an endless argument about it. Isn’t it the incapacity and the lack of interest in that perspective precisely what she found at the core of Eichmann’s banality and Eichmann’s evil, really?

JK: Well, no, it was his thoughtlessness, his inability to think from any other point of view but his own.

EYB: Exactly. And these are very important distinctions.

This exchange is especially interesting to me for three reasons.

First: as a Human Centered Design researcher/strategist/designer, I am constantly telling people that I am in the “empathy business.” However, I have long been uncomfortable with the characterization of what I do as “empathy”. To characterize understanding another person subjectively as primarily a matter of experiencing how they feel misses the mark in a very modernistic way. (em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’). While feelings are important to what I do, they are not the primary focus. I would prefer to characterize my work as concrete hermeneutics, but words like that do not fly in the flatlands of business where thinking lags a minimum of three philosophical generations. So, I’ve adopted “empathy” and accepted the inevitable misconceptions that go with it, because that’s what it takes to be understood even appoximately by most people.

It is hardly surprising that I see things similarly to to Young-Bruehl and Kohn, because I belong to their tradition. Heidegger taught Arendt and Gadamer who both taught my favorite thinker Richard J. Bernstein. A Clifford Geertz quote from Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism has stayed with me as an anchor for my understanding of what a good human centered designer does.

Second, I think that when we see things this way, we tend to treat emotionally-oriented people who are very sensitive and sentimentally responsive to people around them as having some kind of monopoly on human understanding. In my experience, there are multiple stages of coming to understanding of another person, and a talent for sensing and responding does not always correspond with a talent for intuiting other people’s worldviews, nor an ability to think, speak and create from or into another worldview. It takes a fairly vast range of talents to act pluralistically with any degree of effectiveness.

I think a lot of the political problems we are experiencing today result from shoddy and retrogressive philosophical conceptions of alterity (“otherness”), which still see understanding of other people as very literally empathic, as a matter of emotions. According to this view, to know what is going on with another person, we must ourselves have had the experiences and emotions that other person has had. In an effort to understand and to demonstrate our understanding we must induce emotions similar to theirs. Two consequences follow: 1) The one who understands must try to produce the right emotions, and this production of emotion is the demonstration of understanding, which leads to some fairly repulsive public displays of political sentimentality. 2) The one who is understood is put in a position of judging the authenticity of those emotional displays, which is more or less being given the role of arbitrary judge. And if the feelings of the understood is viewed as the central datum or a special kind of insight (being “woke”) into a political situation (typically gauging the degree of prejudicial unfairness, its impact on those victimized by that prejudice and what is required to rectify that unfairness) this amounts to extreme epistemological privilege. Only the victim of prejudice has access to the reality of the situation, and those who are not the victims are incapable of perceiving how they participate in the perpetration, so to use the charming the formulation of today’s hyper-just youngsters, it is their job to STFU and to accept the truth dictated to them. It never occurs to anyone within the power hierarchy of wokeness that there’s anything superior to all this illiberal mess to awaken to. There are philosophical worldviews that are more thorough, more comprehensive and more expansive than the dwarfish ideology of the popular left, but for all the reasons they are eager to point out to anyone who defies them, they are entirely incapable of seeing beyond the motivated reasoning of their own class interests. (This does not mean I think the popular right is any better. It is not. We are in a Weimaresque situation of resentful evil left idiocy vs paranoid evil right idiocy, with the reasonable voices shoved to the margins.)

Third, I’ve found myself misunderstood by many close friends on how I view relationships, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl did a great job of capturing how people think I see them: a “slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notion about what binds people to each other.” I think the misunderstanding is rooted in this same conception of human understanding being primarily an emotional phenomenon. When my own ideal of marriage or of friendship is strained through the filter of today’s left worldview, it looks like a mystical merging of souls that arouses (and should arouse!) suspicions of domination and anxieties around loss of self. But any attempt I make to try to explain the difference between what I have in mind looks like, well, an attempt at philosophical domination and a threat to the selfhood of whoever is foolish enough to take it seriously. Who am I to tell someone something they don’t already know? And anyway, it smells very cultish to listen to someone claiming to know better than the public what is true and right. So, by the circular logic of the popular worldview of the left, it is superior to form one’s own individual opinion (never mind that this opinion on opinions is a product of an unexamined and manifestly broken worldview.)

Obviously, this means extreme alienation for anyone who adopts a sharply differing worldview that affirms the importance of collaboratively developing shared understandings with those around them. In an environment of extreme ideological conformity (with brutal social consequences for infractions) that exalts above all the importance of intellectual independence — but strictly within its own confined philosophical horizon — a philosophy of interdependence, of collaborative development of the very concepts one uses to form one’s opinions, and exalting a togetherness in shared worldview is marked for expulsion.

Anyway, what I really have in mind when I imagine ideal personal connections is, once again, that ideal sketched out by Bernstein, captured so well by Geertz, which I will now go ahead and re-re-quote.

…Accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation, if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one’s own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.

And now I will quote myself:

“Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem…” or knowing how to design for them.

A design that makes sense, which is easy to interact with and which is a valuable and welcome addition to a person’s life is proof that this person is understood, that the designer cared enough to develop an understanding and to apply that understanding to that person’s benefit.

A good design shares the essential qualities of a good gift.

The kind of merging I have in mind is just sharing a worldview and using it together to live together, what Husserl (Heidegger’s teacher) called a “lifeworld“. I’ve called the process “enworldment”.

The merging aspect of this ideal enters the stage through my belief (shared, I believe by Process Theology) that souls are universe-sized. The pragmatic consequence of what one means when one says “everything” is the scope and density of one’s soul. To enworld* with another is to bring two “everythings” into harmonious relationship, and to begin to function more like a culture than two isolated individuals within this isolating milieu so many of us, without ever choosing, without even knowing we had a choice, inhabit as prisoners of our own destitute freedom.

(Note: that “enworld” link above is a pretty old post, and I’m not sure right now how much of it I still agree with. It makes me want to engage my old self in dialogue and try to discover how much common ground we have. How enworlded am I with my 9-years-ago self?)

Bernard Loomer

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

From Bernard Loomer’s “Two Conceptions of Power”:

The world of the individual who can be influenced by another without losing his or her identity or freedom is larger than the world of the individual who fears being influenced. The former can include ranges and depths of complexity and contrast to a degree that is not possible for the latter. The stature of the individual who can let another exist in his or her own creative freedom is larger than the size of the individual who insists that others must conform to his own purposes and understandings.

…

Under the relational conception of power what is truly for the good of any one or all of the relational partners is not a preconceived good. The true good is not a function of controlling or dominating influence. The true good is an emergent from deeply mutual relationships.

Perfect. I’m going to read as much Loomer as I can.

This concept of linear/unilateral power and relational power is going to be valuable.

Critical reverence

History, Judaism, Politics

In Torah study my fellow students regard our heritage with a distinctive attitude that can be characterized as critical reverence. We are horrified by much of what the Israelites did in God’s name, but we know that this is where we, who now judge, learned our judgment. Without them, we would not be in a position to see how we would prefer them to have behaved. And we can only hope our children and all of posterity will regard us with the same attitude, gratefully accepting what we bequeath but — even better, refusing to repeat our mistakes.

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The Left and the Right seem to agree on at least one thing: they both think that criticism and reverence are incompatible. If you revere, you cannot criticize. If you can criticize, you can no longer revere. This is a side-effect of philosophical impoverishment. True reverence and criticism are mutually dependent. Criticism without reverence (or respect) is condemnation. Reverence without criticism is delusional fanaticism.

When the Left learns to revere as it criticizes, and the Right learns to criticize as it reveres we will be prepared to reconcile and recommence our national project.

Autumn 2011, when the canary died

Design, Politics

The reason I have been so upset about the state of design is that in 2011 — autumn of 2011, to be exact — all the liberal progress I’d been seeing in my field suddenly reversed. Three things happened:

  1. Steve Jobs died, (October 5, 2011), and even worse, Isaacson’s biography of him was published (October  24, 2011).
  2. Lean Startup was published (September 13, 2011).
  3. Front-end frameworks, Bootstrap (August 19, 2011 and Foundation (September 2011), hit the development world, enabling developers to make visually passable UIs without assistance from UI designers.

All three of these factors marginalized design in crucial ways that have gradually brought the digital water we users swim in to a frog-killing rolling boil.

This helps explain why our digital lives are in pleasureless turmoil. Remember back when we would count the hours to the next Apple product release, and get excited when we saw that an upgrade was available to the software tools of choice? Now it all makes us uneasy, because it means yet more disruption where what we really want is stability. New features are more likely to make things harder for us than improve our lives.

This is not an inevitable effect of the world getting more complex. It is a direct effect of design’s marginalization. Engineering-minded people now run the show — folks obsessed with the Thing they make, as opposed to the experiences real-life people have interacting with things in real-life situations. The latter is what designers are all about, and it is why we use the language of “experience” when speaking about our practices, all of which are focused on improving experiences people have. For designers the Thing is only the means to an end, which is people’s experience of it.

But now the language of design has been appropriated and emptied. Engineers call their Things “Experiences”. When they hack together a front-end using a front-end framework, they call this “designing the User Experience”.

People who lack understanding of the radical paradigm shift (meant literally, in the Kuhnian sense) at the root of HCD — a root that could not be more at odds with the objectivist Industrial Age paradigm — are blind to the relapse to which we’ve succumbed. They never made the shift anyway, and these new retro-practices make more sense to the engineering mindset.

And sadly, this relapse has spread into politics, hitting both left and right extremes of the political spectrum, each feeding on conflict with the other, and is rapidly closing in on the center. We have the brainless sophistication of children trained by disillusioned Marxists to perceive the world in the terms of racist, sexist and other identitarian sociologies (ironically called “hermeneutics” of this and that) facing off against aggressively anti-intellectual thugs. Liberalism is now widely disparaged and declared vapid, naive and obsolete by the very people who are blind to what Liberalism is, how it is done and why it is so important.

Hopefully, soon everyone will have known all these things I’m saying all along, and I will retroactively have not been the only one freaking out about the loss of liberal democracy, the loss of design and seeing very vividly the connection between the two. Until then, stuck in this present, I am isolated in my own obsessive interests and worries.

 

Update on my “LEF” political model

Politics

Since my last update on my “newish political model” I have continued trying it out on different political positions and playing with new ways to conceive the various dimensions, and I’ve developed a slightly new (and, I think, improved) way of thinking about it. The difference is in the way I am thinking about the Fraternity dimension.

If you remember my descriptions of Liberty and Equality, you might want to skip to Fraternity.

Liberty (individual autonomy): freedom of individuals versus authority of collectivities. Who determines how individuals are to think, feel and act?

+) an individual alone determines individual being;

-) the collectivity determines individual being;

0) at the center an individual determines individual being within reasonable limits set by a collectivity.

What kinds of collectivity are we talking about? According to this model any group capable of imposing its will on an individual is considered a collectivity capable of curtailing individual liberty. This differs from Political Compass, which views liberty as curtailed primarily by the federal government.

And what are reasonable limits? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

Equality (power distribution): desirability of equality versus desirability of rank. How much disparity of power among individuals is acceptable and ideal?

+) each individual is given the same power and resources as every other;

-) each individual is given different amounts of power and resources according to rank;

0) at the center every individual is guaranteed a fair opportunity to acquire power and resources.

What kinds of rank are we talking about? According to this model every value system ranks differently and imposes rank according to its own logic. Societies can rank-stratify by family, class, wealth, race, education, talent, temperament, party membership — anything to which the word “deserve” can be applied. This differs from Political Compass, which casts equality issues in terms of government regulation.

And what is fair? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

Fraternity (membership in political order ): essentially universal membership versus essentially exclusive obligation.

+) membership in a universal political order is automatically extended to all of humanity;

-) membership in a particular political order is restricted to a group defined by involuntary essential characteristics ;

0) at the center potential membership in a particular political order is universal, and actual membership is entirely voluntary (and not defined by essential characteristics).

 

Illiberal delusions of depth

Politics

In general, the social sciences teach us more about societies of social scientists than it does society in general.

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Show me an example of political or sociological “realism” — a claim of inalterable facts — and I’ll show you an ideologue with an investment in society being some particular way. It might even be the key to an intellectual’s soul.

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Once the foundations of liberalism erode away, and public opinion starts asking hard questions of public truths grown complacent through luxuriation in universal acceptance, the truth of liberal values are anything but self-evident. They epitomize vapid conventionality, and all-too-conveniently, most of the people who continue to uphold them do so through inertia and timidity.

In times like these it almost requires a radical’s personality to excavate the layers of pious dust and quotidian debris that settle over generally accepted moral facts and to burrow into the ground where the wellsprings of liberal morality still flow clear. It turns out, these apparent self-evident (that is, long unexamined) moral principles, such as the ultimate value of the individual, the importance of free speech, thought and action, the exercise of reason, and above all, pluralism are not in the least self-evident once they are flooded in long-suppressed illiberal light and tag-team interrogated by left-wing and the right-wing inquisitors.

Fact is, liberalism was never the natural and inevitable state of society once tyrants are removed from the scene, but rather humankind’s hardest-won accomplishment. But the belief that liberalism exists with mere removal of impediments has led to the neglect of liberal education, and especially a self-aware philosophical explanation of morality.

Instead, the last several generation were rigorously trained to emote on demand: to sympathize as intensely as possible at sacred signifiers of its tribe (generally of categories of people) and to produce anger in equal amounts at the tribe’s categorical enemies, who are those who fail to produce the requisite emotions at key symbolic stimuli. Every tribe can produce its own elaborate supporting theories, including its own homegrown theories on why the other tribe’s theories are nonsensical and the result of nefarious influences.

And bystanders who decided to spare themselves all indoctrination and believe themselves independent observers fared no better. In fending off miseducation, they fend off necessary education as well, and fall into ideological traps they are ill-prepared to detect or to escape once they learn whatever “the truth” their habitual reading conceptually habituates them to understand.

At this point I am interested neither in expounding nor defending my views for people who are by nature or second-nature unsympathetic to liberalism. Instead, I plan to continue my private project of exposing the wellsprings of liberalism to those who have already learned to love them. And I do mean learn to love, because love of liberalism is either learned or latent, never accessible to naive or misled minds.

But it is true: as a liberal I do owe my fellow-citizens an account. But I do not owe it on their philosophical terms or their schedule. These are the things you learn when you work at education, which is another word for allowing learning to change you.

Mark Lilla on the trajectory of ideologies

Philosophy, Politics

From Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind: “Successful ideologies follow a certain trajectory. They are first developed in narrow sects whose adherents share obsessions and principles, and see themselves as voices in the wilderness. To have any political effect, though, these groups must learn to work together. That’s difficult for obsessive, principled people, which is why at the political fringes one always finds little factions squabbling futilely with each other. But for an ideology to really reshape politics it must cease being a set of principles and become instead a vaguer general outlook that new information and events only strengthen. You really know when an ideology has matured when every event, present and past, is taken as confirmation of it.”

Mark Lilla on political thought today

Philosophy, Politics

From Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind (2nd edition): “Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West seemed so shallow, so clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in Western societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts and even vocabulary for describing the world we now find ourselves in. More worrisome still, we lack awareness that we lack them. A cloud of willful unknowing seems to have settled on our intellectual life. This, it seems to me, is the most significant development since The Reckless Mind was published [on September 9, 2001], and the first thing we need to understand about the present.”

I cannot wait to read Lilla’s latest book, The Once and Future Liberal, due August 15, 2017.

Bodies and categories

Ethics, Politics

If an individual elects to be part of a political body, then that individual shares responsibility for those who act on behalf of that body. It is fair to hold people responsible for what their political bodies do.

But if you classify a person as belonging to some category of person, and on that basis hold that person responsible for the actions of others who (according to you) also belong to that category, you are committing a grave sin against liberalism.

The line between belonging to a political body and being assigned to a category is a blurry and crooked one. No simple formulas exist to sharpen it. The line is not traced along the boundaries explicit declarations of membership: people are often cagy or deluded about the political significance of their actions. But neither are the lines those gridded out by ideology: every theorist has his correct schema.

The lines must be surveyed case by case through dialogue between the disputants.

Overcoming ressentiment

Ethics, Politics

I’ve been thinking a lot about ressentiment lately. It saturates the news, art, conversations, nearly everything. Or so my eyes tell me.

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What is ressentiment? It is not as some (including me) an exact synonym of resentment, but a distinct flavor of resentment. I had been blurring them into synonymity, but the differences are important enough that I intend to start using the terms more precisely. According to Wikipedia,

Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one’s own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

So my understanding is that ressentiment blames others not only for specific grievances but for one’s own existential state — how one is and how one habitually feels about life. I view it as both analogous and connected to Heidegger’s beautiful distinction between fear and angst. Fear has an object. Angst might seem to have an object, but in fact angst belongs to the subject. Remove the object of fear and the fear dissipates. Remove the object of angst and the angst must find another object. Resentments can be resolved by addressing the object of resentment. Ressentiment is insatiable.

The Dhammapada gets this right:

The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased.

The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is easily pacified.

Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.

Most people never realize that all of us here shall one day perish. But those who do realize that truth settle their quarrels peacefully. (I included this last stanza for the Heideggerians.)

Another problem: Ressentiment generates an aggressive ugliness that radiates and discolors everything and everyone around it. Sadly this ugliness is not confined to the eye of the beholder, but somehow reflects into the eyes of those beheld, which leads directly to the next point.

Ressentiment is counterproductive. The objects (the alleged causes) of ressentiment are only agitated and energized when approached with ressentiment. Resentment breeds resentment, and the infection spreads and intensifies. In combatting ressentiment it is necessary to cultivate lightness, cheer and buoyancy, and to resist succumbing to ressentiment’s natural darkness, dourness and deadweight. (Does this smell like Nietzsche to you? That is because it is Nietzsche. It is the cornerstone of his moral vision.)

All this should make it clear why I’ve recommitted to rooting out ressentiment in my own soul. Unfortunately, I have accumulated a great deal of it over the last decade. It will take some work to clean myself out. One key element of this effort has been to limit my exposure to other people’s ressentiment, especially those two antithetical ressentiment philosophies which have seemed into the mainstream from the fringes, and which have become the substance of popular politics. Staying away from social media has helped a lot.

A political suspicion

Politics

Reading Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal, I am beginning to question my belief that my objections to what I’ve called left-illiberalism is really (as I had thought) bound up with its excessively egalitarian demands. Frank now has me wondering if my concerns might have more to do with an insufficient commitment to equality, and with the tonal side-effects of preserving one form of inequality through redirection of attention toward other alleged injustices.

It seems possible, if not likely, that a strong preference for diagnosing political conflicts in subtle psychological terms (of prejudices, conscious or unconscious, multiplied over innumerable judgments and biased interactions) could in fact be an evasion tactic for neglecting blunter policy issues that do not involve attempts at controlling what goes on inside other people’s heads — a jurisdiction that is, on principle, out of bounds, and protected in liberal democracies.

Could it be that obsessive preoccupations with racism, sexism, and the other prejudicial -isms might serve as a big stinky red herring that draws attention away from a thoroughly self-serving classism, the classism of a new class whose good conscience depends on not recognizing its own existence and its stake in preserving inequality? I’ve got to admit, Thomas Frank’s exposition of a self-deluded “professional class” strikes me as vastly more credible than the unconscious race-/sex-/orientation-interest narrative so popular in the vulgar left ditto-sphere.

Anyway, Thomas Frank has succeeded in making me question my 3rd Way centrist worldview and and interesting me in revisiting the New Deal. He’s also making me extra-extra-bitter that Bernie didn’t get the nomination.

Equalities

Philosophy, Politics

It seems true to me that the kind of equality that matters most is legal equality — equality before the law. 

To secure full, enduring equality before the law it is necessary that some degree of social equality be maintained. Severe social inequality will lead to unjust legislation and distorted law enforcement. This principle is demonstrated dramatically in America’s “war on drugs“. 

 But I so not see legal equality as a means to acheive actual social equality. At most it is a means to potential social equality — rough (and no more than rough) equality of opportunity. It is social equality that is the means to the end of equality before the law. This priority makes me hostile to any distinctions between categories of citizen in policy.

(Just to confuse things more,  legal and social equality are different from political equality. Political equality is equality in ability to influence our collective actions, including our ability to move toward greater legal and/or social equality. Political equality also depends on social equality and preserving the right of citizens to organize in ways other than economic or governmental. Unions and public assemblies are vital to preserving or correcting the other kinds of equality. )

I think the stance I just outlined is basically conservative, but my concerns about social inequality interfering with legal (and political) equality pushes me past the middle point, into left-leaning regions of the political spectrum. At least, that is what I think. 

America is philosophically diseased

Chord, Ideas, Philosophy, Politics

America is philosophically diseased.

Most Americans perceive, believe and intuit using 19th and 20th century modes of understanding which are 1) are incompatible and irreconcilable with the others, 2) mutually hostile, and 3) inadequate for making theoretical, practical and moral sense of the realities we face.

And every one of these obsolete and broken-down philosophies assures the mind it binds that there is no need for philosophizing. Doing, not thinking, is what is needed now! Thinking is useless enough, but thinking about thinking? — That is the most pointlessly abstract, idle and meaningless thing any person could do.

The only way out of the crisis we face — (a crisis much worse than an unphilosophical mind can know how to know!) — is to learn to conceive truth very differently than we do today. We are desperate for a new popular philosophical platform, not to make us all come to the same conclusions, but to support our differences and to help us navigate them peacefully and productively.

We need, at minimum, an upgrade in a) our epistemology (and ontology), b) our ethics (and metaphysics) and c) our political practices. My own prescription is a) Bruno Latour, b) Emmanuel Levinas, c) Chantal Mouffe. But before we can build we need demolition (Friedrich Nietzsche) and ground clearing (Richard J. Bernstein).

I look at this list of thinkers, and I love seeing them together like vertebrae in a backbone.

Here is a suggested core curriculum for regeneration of philosophy for our times:

 

The privileged SJW

Politics

From my own experience, privilege manifests primarily in two ways, which apply equally to all people of every demographic:

  1. Incuriosity: Not feeling obligated to understand what your fellow citizens are trying to tell you. “I see clearly that I see things the right way, and that your view is distorted.”
  2. Imperiousness: Not feeling obligated to win the assent of your fellow citizens before doing things that affect their lives. “I don’t have to convince you.”

Privilege is not something that automatically deludes certain categories of people, nor does disprivilege enlighten other categories.

The epistemological and ethical self-privileging of our own inexhautibly irritable illiberal left fringe was in fact an effect of privilege (or perceived privilege). A set of folks thought they possessed sufficient political power (due to numbers and the thrust of history, not to mention the overwhelming privilege of the social status one gains from a degree from an elite university) to steamroll anyone who disagreed with them. They “checked their privilege” when “dialoguing” with token representatives of their favored categories, but when talking to examples of “privileged” categories, took the most privileged position possible and condescendently lectured them on how great they actually had it compared to other unfortunate categories. Or they just discharged their resentment on any demographically qualified human lightning rod that happened to be handy when it was time for lightning to strike.

Our illiberal Left did not care how people felt about “finally having the tables turned on them.”  They didn’t bother listening to opposing views because their vulgar marxoid false consciousness theories explained away the objections of dissenters to their own personal satisfaction.

The sole difference between this gang of ideologues and any other gang of conspiracy theorists is that this gang sort of favored the same people and policies we left-liberals did. Their passion was useful, so we accepted them as allies. We ought to feel ashamed that fewer of us called out their “calling out” — until it cost us what might be the most important election in this nation’s history. Now we are full of remorse and desire to self-reflect on what we were doing wrong. A year ago this self-scrutiny would have gone much further.

So we can complain all day about the Right not being vocal enough about denouncing their fringe, but how did the Left do when we felt secure in our power?

If the Right stands up to marginalize the KKK, they will have demonstrated true moral superiority to the Left, who did far too little to marginalize our SJW.

 

Pluralistic insight

Politics, Pragmatism

We use whatever concepts we have available to us to understand our experiences. When facing an unfamiliar situation, we intuitively choose a conceptualization that seems to fit in an attempt to make sense of it. And if the first pick fails to give us a handle on the situation, we might “try on” another — if one is available to us.

Having a larger conceptual repertoire gives us more options for understanding. It also raises our expectations with regard to conceptual fit. Perhaps most importantly, the practice of trying out different ways of conceiving subjects us to first-hand experience of contasting experiences of understanding, which produces the insight we conceptualize as pluralism: multiple approaches to understanding always exist, even though it seems only one truth is possible.

Inducing the pluralistic insight, and equipping citizens with a large repertoire of concepts for reaching understandings satisfactory to the greatest possible number of people is the most important function of education in a liberal-democratic society.

Those who make use of a limited set of concepts for understanding the world will be accustomed to making do with semi-adequate understandings. They lack all experience of pluralism: the world they experience is a mysterious and arbitrary world where thinking is barely relevant because it rarely does much good.

One strong argument for public education is ensuring children are taught by teachers who have a reasonably large conceptual repertoire to teach. You cannot give what you do not have. Or to put it differently “if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch” — usually the ditch of fundamentalism.

 

 

 

 

Life is unfair

Ethics, Politics, Symbols and diagrams

fairness

This scale is an attempt to diagram a framework I posted to Facebook.

Lately, I’ve been hearing more and more people declaring that “Life is unfair.” I actually grew up hearing that.

I’m starting to believe this statement is the essence of right-wing politics. Degree of renunciation of fairness is what defines the right-wing spectrum:

Centrism views fairness as one legitimate political goal, but acknowledges practical limits to the degree of achievable fairness. Centrism sees over-reaching attempts at fairness to be artifacts of naive partiality with distorted self-serving conceptions of fairness. To the degree a centrist leans right, he sees increasing levels of unfairness as inevitable and acceptable.

Middle right believes that fairness should not enter the discussion. Fairness is an inappropriate goal for politics, and an inadequate framework for thinking about it. Politics should be thought about in terms of other dynamics (such as economics). These dynamics naturally produce a healthy equilibrium which are in fact the best possible political outcomes. The distorting lens of “fairness” demands that we “fix” precisely that which is not broken (and conversely, that we preserve the hacks intended to produce fairness, but which destroy natural equilibrium).

Hard right believes that inequality is necessary — that establishing proper rank is required for the health of a society. The strongest, or wisest, or smartest or the most righteous should have more power than the weak, foolish, unintelligent, vicious masses.

I can see the self-consistent logic and validity of these positions. But as a left-leaning person, I believe the elimination of fairness from political discourse is a disaster. To say “life is unfair” is to misrepresent a moral intention as a natural fact. It pretends to say “perfect fairness is not an achievable goal” but really means: “I have no intention of treating you fairly.” I do not believe I can credibly ask a person to trust me if I do not intend to treat them fairly.

But, with all that being said, here is a troubling question: can right-wingers actually trust the left to treat them fairly? Because being fair means making the question “what is fair?” an open question for discussion, and I am not at all sure this is the case with many Clinton and Sanders supporters, who seem to have already decided unilaterally for themselves what is fair.

When asked for the left half of the scale, I added:

Hard left wants to maximize fairness by ensuring that everyone has exactly the same resources. Middle left believes politics is essentially about achieving maximum fairness. Centrism, as it leans leftward, sees fairness as one key condition of freedom for all. Fairness and freedom will never be perfect, but we are obligated to pursue it.

I do not care what you think

Philosophy, Politics

It is easy to disregard what someone thinks if that person lacks the resources to make you feel the consequences of your disrespect and disregard. We only say “I don’t give a shit how you feel” to people who are powerless either to help us or to harm us.

*

A person or a group we treat as a powerless nobody will seek opportunities to return and confront us as a powerful somebody — as somebody who can command our attention, or our respect, or — and God help us if it comes to this — to make us feel what it is like to be a powerless nobody.

*

Perhaps the biggest difference between left and right comes down to the question: Which segment of the poor and powerless mass deserves to be courted and which deserves to be despised?