Category Archives: Politics

Individuality

Ethics, Politics

My liberalism insists (that is, posits passionately) that every human being ought to be taken as an individual, as opposed to an example of a category of person.

With respect to policy I consider this ideal a binding law worthy of coercive action. Publicly, all individuals are obligated to observe the legal right of individuality — at the least within one’s own spheres of citizenship.

With respect to individual attitudes I consider this ideal something worth advocating persuasively, but always respecting the individual’s right to decide. Privately, individuals may regard other individuals as mere examples of categories of person, and liberals must never resort to coercion to change this.

Douche Theory 2×2 Model (R)

Brand, Design, Ethics, Politics, Symbols and diagrams

douche-theory

I plan to use this diagram to help me explain different approaches to design strategy.

Human-centered design helps Douche organizations become Keepers.

 

Persona Americana archive

Politics

I’ve been playing with the idea of creating a blog of passages taken from pre-War literature that display an American sense of identity that I feel has faded over the course of my lifetime.

I am thinking especially about two  authors I read heavily as a child, like Mark Twain and L. Frank Baum. I don’t have particular passages in mind, yet, but I do have a strong sense of Americanness that I believe I acquired from them:

  • pride in one’s own humble roots
  • a taste for directness bordering on roughness, delight in dispensing with dainty niceties
  • extreme practicality — take action without hesitation or theorizing
  • a stubborn sense of equality (often demonstrated in a disdain for class airs and thoroughgoing non-participation in aristocratic self-importance games)
  • “live and let live” elevated to the highest moral principle — commitment to defending the rights of others to think and do whatever they please with an expectation that this commitment be reciprocated
  • impish irreverence toward merely formal propriety
  • a cheerful can-do work ethic of plucky, industrious optimism
  • Settling an issue with one’s fists — followed by a handshake of respect, then friendship
  • thinking big — tastelessly big — Vegas Big
  • frankness, with non-concern for offending others with one’s opinions
  • self-sufficiency, ability to survive by one’s own wits
  • willingness to help a person in trouble, regardless of who the person is
  • disregard for irritable, moralistic, formalistic, sophisticated sensibilities

I am imagining a photoblog consisting of images of pages of books, each tagged by theme, and prominently featuring a tag cloud which hopefully over time might reflect the qualities of the ideal American character.

Images of America

Politics

An embryonic hypothesis: Most Americans subscribe to one of three images of America, each with its own political hero, philosophical hero and philosophical movement.

Founding Fathers  (Enlightenment America): Political hero: Thomas Jefferson. Philosophical hero: John Locke. Movement: The Enlightenment.

Pre-Founding Fathers (Evangelical America): Political hero: Jonathan Edwards. Philosophical hero: Martin Luther. Movement: The Great Awakening.

Re-founding Fathers (Progressive America): Political hero: Abraham Lincoln. Philosophical hero: John Dewey. Movement: Pragmatism.

 

Engineering and design

Design, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Engineering develops systems of interacting objects.

Design develops systems of interacting subjects and objects.

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When we engineer systems that ought to be designed, the systems we create demand subjective beings to function as objects. Algorithmic rule-following replaces free choice.

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Social engineering has always been a horror. Social design might be our salvation.

Cat-agoraphobic political statement

Ethics, Politics

I acknowledge only voluntary political identities, and  I condemn all involuntary identifications.

Every individual American has the right to make political alliances according to his or her own ideals, and it is on this alone the individual should be judged.

If the political body you’ve chosen to join and identify with imposes political identities on other groups defined by race, sex, class, orientation, or any other non-voluntary classification, for any reason no matter what the justification (including imputed capacities or incapacities, genes, essences, spirits, lineages, legacies, texts, behavioral probabilities, etc.) politically you are not my friend. I don’t care which direction your racism or sexism or chauvinism or xenophobia points, or why you point it in that direction. The problem is not the target — it is the targeting.

I’m prepared to be politically isolated and to suffer the consequences for refusing to treat enemies who resemble me in irrelevant ways as natural allies. I have only artificial allies: people who collaborate with their own natures to overcome mere nature to become super-natural, and who affirm other’s attempts to do the same.

The medium of action

ANT, Philosophy, Politics

Had Hannah Arendt lived to read Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump: she would never have written this:

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.

This last sentence is perfectly, elegantly wrong, and overcoming this belief is at the very heart of Design Thinking.

Latour on the Baby Boomers

Politics, Pragmatism

I found this passage from Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence persuasive and  moving.

I myself belong to the generation designated as baby boomers, at least until age has earned us the dreadful replacement moniker “golden agers.” Without this indispensable reference point, it won’t be possible to tell whether it is reactionary or not to propose, as I did in the introduction, that we should “learn to respect institutions.” Unless we know the genealogical cluster in which you are located, it will be impossible to know, given that habit has so many enemies, whether you want to protect a value by instituting it or, on the contrary, whether you want to betray it, stifle it, break it down, ossify it. Now we baby boomers have drained that bitter cup to the dregs. Confronting the ruins of the institutions that we are beginning to bequeath to our descendants, am I the only one to feel the same embarrassment as asbestos manufacturers targeted by the criminal charges brought by workers suffering from lung cancer? In the beginning, the struggle against institutions seemed to be risk-free; it was modernizing and liberating—and even fun; like asbestos, it had only good qualities. But, like asbestos, alas, it also had disastrous consequences that no one had anticipated and that we have been far too slow to recognize.

In particular, it took me a long time to understand what effect such an attitude was going to have on the subsequent generations from whom we were threatening to conceal the secret of institutions owing to our own congestion (and also owing to our numbers and our appetites for living lavishly and for a long time). We expected these generations to continue (as we had?), through the vigor of their critical spirit, to hold onto the originality of their initiatives, their spontaneity, their enthusiasm, everything that institutions were no longer able (and no longer knew how) to keep going. This was to sin against blessed habit; it was to claim to be continuing institutions without offering any way to ensure continuity. We thought we were protecting values and contrasts by extracting them from institutions—from which we had profited before we destroyed them—like fishermen who claim to be saving fish from asphyxiation by bringing them out into the air. One little hypocrisy too many; we have to hope it won’t be stamped on our foreheads on Judgment Day . . .

And here is the “malign inversion”: by losing the thread of the means that could have ensured subsistence—habit being no longer able to ensure the relay—we have involuntarily pointed in the direction of a return to substance without specifying to the next generation that this return would be truly fatal, precisely for want of defining its means of subsistence. In Pierre Legendre’s words (provided that we extend them to all the modes and not just to psyches), we have broken the “genealogical principle,” that is, the search for antecedents and consequents. Being-as-other can gain its subsistence through the exploration of alterity, through multiplicity, through relations; it cannot ensure continuity by entrusting it to a substance. But without the scaffolding of habits, it cannot subsist at all! Here is where the trap closes, where the miracle product called asbestos begins to make the employees who breathe its microfibers cough their lungs out.

I may be overdramatizing the situation, but I cannot help thinking that if those who are starting to succeed us inadvertently sought to keep speaking of what is true or false, they would have no choice but to plunge headlong into a search for foundations, since institutions can no longer guarantee continuity. In other words, to those who, tired of spontaneity, are nevertheless still searching for truth, we have left no recourse but fundamentalism. Now all the contrasts I have talked about up to this point are lost forever if we set out in search of their “incontrovertible foundation”: God, of course, as we shall see, but also law, science, the psychogenics, the frenzied world itself, in short, the multiverse. If the reader has grasped the weight, or rather the lightness, of habit, he has also understood that there is nothing true except what is instituted, thus what is relative: relative to the weight, the thickness, the complexity, the layering, the multiplicity, the heterogeneity of institutions; but relative especially to the always delicate detection of the leap, the threshold, the step, the pass necessary for its extension. Exactly what Double Click teaches us to miss. By confusing the rejuvenation of institutions with their dismantling, hasn’t the baby-boomer generation made it possible to slip, almost unwittingly, from the critical spirit to fundamentalism? As if a first category mistake about blessed habit had triggered a second, infinitely more calamitous, concerning the radical distinction between what is true and what is instituted. The late modernism that thought it was digging the grave of its predecessors would thus have been digging its own grave!

I am well aware that we would be committing a new injustice, however, if we were to go on flagellating ourselves too long. If it is hard for our children to inherit our muddled passions, how could we have inherited the whole history of Modernism without difficulty? If it has seemed impossible for us to utter the words “truth” and “instituted” in the same breath, it is surely because of the lamentable state in which we had found the aforementioned institutions. If we have criticized them, it is surely because they had not been functioning for a long time—or at least because there was no longer a recipe adapted to their various regimes. If there were just one way to take habits, there would have been just one way to stand guard over institutions while keeping them from degenerating and tipping unnoticed from omission into forgetting. But as each mode has its own particular way of letting itself be omitted by habit, these are the differences that have made it so difficult for a civilization to provide the care that would have been required to maintain all the contrasts extracted by the ontological history of the Moderns.

If our predecessors had spent even a fraction of the energy devoted to the critique of institutions on differentiating all these cares, all these attentions, all these precautions, our generation would never have found itself before empty shells. But the very idea of care and precaution had become foreign to them, since they had hurled themselves blindly into this modernizing furor for which the time for care and attachments, as they saw it, had definitively passed. As if that archaic time were henceforth behind them and they had before them only the radiant future, defined precisely by a single emancipation, by the absence of precautions to be taken, this reign of irrational Reason whose cruel strangeness we have come to understand. I grant that it is hard for the young people born after us to inherit from the so-called May ’68 generation; but can someone tell me what we were supposed to do with the legacies left behind by the generations of “August ’14,” “October ’17,” and “June ’40”? Not an easy task, to inherit from the twentieth century! When will we be done with it? But we must try to be patient: once we have deployed all the modes, we shall know what we are to inherit and what we can, with a little luck, pass on to our descendants. In any case, in the face of what is coming, are not all generations, like all civilizations, equal in their ignorance?

Universal respect

ANT, Ethics, Politics

To disrespect the “mundane” obstacles that confront us in our attempts to meet our goals – to indignantly declare that some obstacles have no right to exist – to believe it is degrading to wrangle with them – such attitude are not only unhelpful practically for navigate these obstacles, they’re also unhelpful morally.

To believe one is too great to bother with  lowly things is a sure route to manifest pettiness. (Perhaps the only surer route to pettiness is obedience to lowly things.)

Holding obstacles in high regard elevates us and assists our progress. We are not degraded by humble obstacles when they compel us to afford them the respect they deserve.

This is not a vision of humility. It is the opposite of that.

Pro-political quotes

Politics

Bruno Latour:

Only in politics are people willing to talk of “trials of strength.” Politicians are the scapegoats, the sacrificial lambs. We deride, despise, and hate them. We compete to denounce their venality and incompetence, their blinkered vision, their schemes and compromises, their failures, their pragmatism or lack of realism, their demagogy. Only in politics are trials of strength thought to define the shape of things. It is only politicians who are thought to be dishonest, who are held to grope in the dark. … It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician.

Chantal Mouffe:

Introducing the category of the ‘adversary’ requires complexifying the notion of antagonism and distinguishing two different forms in which it can emerge, antagonism properly speaking and agonism. Antagonism is struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle between adversaries. We can therefore reformulate our problem by saying that envisaged from the perspective of ‘agonistic pluralism’ the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism. This requires providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary. An important difference with the model of ‘deliberative democracy’ is that for ‘agonistic pluralism’, the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.

One of the keys to the thesis of agonistic pluralism is that, far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence. Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order. Breaking with the symbolic representation of society as an organic body — which was characteristic of the holist mode of social organization — a democratic society acknowledges the pluralism of values, the ‘disenchantment of the world’ diagnosed by Max Weber and the unavoidable conflicts that it entails.

I agree with those who affirm that a pluralist democracy demands a certain amount of consensus and that it requires allegiance to the values which constitute its ‘ethico-political principles’. But since those ethico-political principles can only exist through many different and conflicting interpretations, such a consensus is bound to be a ‘conflictual consensus’. This is indeed the privileged terrain of agonistic confrontation among adversaries. Ideally such a confrontation should be staged around the diverse conceptions of citizenship which correspond to the different interpretations of the ethica-political principles: liberal-conservative, social-democratic, neo-liberal, radical-democratic, and so on. Each of them proposes its own interpretation of the ‘common good’, and tries to implement a different form of hegemony. To foster allegiance to its institutions, a democratic system requires the availability of those contending forms of citizenship identification. They provide the terrain in which passions can be mobilized around democratic objectives and antagonism transformed into agonism.

A well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification, as is the case with identity politics. Too much emphasis on consensus and the refusal of confrontation lead to apathy and disaffection with political participation. Worse still, the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be managed by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility.

It is for that reason that the ideal of a pluralist democracy cannot be to reach a rational consensus in the public sphere. Such a consensus cannot exist. We have to accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion. The ideas that power could be dissolved through a rational debate and that legitimacy could be based on pure rationality are illusions which can endanger democratic institutions.

Liberal versus democratic

Politics

Continuing from yesterday…

  • The liberal element of liberal-democracy is negative: Where is the majority prohibited from infringing upon the liberty of the individual (at the expense of the collective’s freedom to shape its collective life)?
  • The democratic element of liberal-democracy is positive: Where is the majority free to impose laws on individuals in order to shape its collective life (at the expense of individual liberty)?

I think Libertarians are deeply confused about their policies being most favorable to individual liberties. What makes Libertarianism essentially conservative is that deregulated markets create mechanisms for imposing law on individuals and for creating collective identity, but in the private realm. And it is no accident that the most vehemently individualistic Libertarians I know all enjoy employment arrangements that distance them from the often extreme levels of control imposed in corporate employment. They have state jobs, or bounce around (a.k.a. get bounced out of) jobs, or are un-/under-employed. Yet, without a trace of irony, they continue to extoll the liberty-bestowing powers of the deregulated market.

 

Private liberty and political freedom

Biography, Brand, Politics

I am currently reading Chantal Mouffe’s Democratic Paradox, which explores a fundamental tension inherent in all liberal-democratic societies, which can be summarized by Marvin Simkin’s famous formulation: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.”

…with modern democracy, we are dealing with a new political form of society whose specificity comes from the articulation between two different traditions. On one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of law, the defence of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relation between those two distinct traditions but only a contingent historical articulation.

…it is vital for democratic politics to understand that liberal democracy results from the articulation of two logics which are incompatible in the last instance and that there is no way in which they could be perfectly reconciled. Or, to put it in a Wittgensteinian way, that there is a constitutive tension between their corresponding ‘grammars’, a tension that can never be overcome but only negotiated in different ways. This is why the liberal-democratic regime has constantly been the locus of struggles which have provided the driving force of historical political developments. The tension between its two components can only be temporarily stabilized through pragmatic negotiations between political forces which always establish the hegemony of one of them.

One of the problems dogging discourse in the United States (though, honestly, probably not in the top 1000 problems) is that we lack precise language for distinguishing between an individual’s rights against majority views (a negative conception of liberty), and the rights of communities to provide themselves support to maintain themselves (a positive political freedom to shape one’s society).

When I think about it this way, it becomes clear to me that the primary value of the free market is not, in fact, to provide the maximum individual private liberty, but rather to establish conditions favorable to political freedom of autonomous communities, that is, companies.

It is for this reason that I have become interested in the free market. It is not enough anymore for me to have my own individual liberty. I want to do things to the world, with other people, in a community with specific values, hopes and goals. I want to belong to a branded company.

But if you think this means I’m becoming an advocate for de-regulation, you’d better think again. Just as powerless individuals ought to be protected from other stronger individuals, if we believe in corporate personhood (and why not?) then let’s go all the way and grant it to corporate persons of all sizes. Wouldn’t this mean protecting small corporate persons from being anti-competitively bullied by bigger corporate persons?

And while we are at it, if entrepreneurship is the fullest realization of American freedom, doesn’t that set a new goal? Are we not morally obligated to provide all Americans equal access to not only to individual liberty but also to true political freedom? This does not mean all risk is removed, but it should mean that there is not a gross difference in consequences of failure. As things stand where a rich man who fails will certainly be crestfallen and have to cut back on some luxuries, a poor person who fails faces loss of healthcare for her/his family, long-term credit destruction (which extends far beyond denial of credit), to an environment that is physically safe and to adequate education for her/his children. There’s a point where freedom becomes a merely theoretical possibility.

This region of thought is pretty new to me, so I’m guessing none of this is very new, but it sure is exciting.

 

Two questions for neoliberals

Politics
  1. Is the Invisible Hand of the free market really able to regulate human life to the benefit of all involved if organized labor is excluded from the conception of the free market and seen as an alien threat to its operation rather than an intrinsic and necessary part? Is organized labor perhaps one of the fingers of the Invisible Hand?
  2. Is it true what Boltanski says of Adam Smith, that Smith saw empathy as a necessary condition for the proper social functioning of the free market? This means that the common belief that things will take care of themselves in the equilibrium of opposing tensions of ruthless self-interest is a distortion of the original idea, and the emergence of the user experience profession can be seen as a restoration of Smith’s ideal from its industrial-age social Darwinist distortions.

Booj Party

Ideas, Politics

If, by some miracle, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were to cool their jets long enough to realize the common enemy is power concentrations of every form — that whether it takes the form of government, business, religion, military… any kind of power concentration is a threat to democracy — and united on the common goal of empowering and expanding the middle class, imagine what could happen.

Freedom depends entirely on even distribution of power/wealth.

I would love to see a  Booj Party, whose ideal is a universal middle class.

Universal middle class is just another way of saying “moderate prosperity for all”.

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The fundamental ideal of the Booj Party is: Equal access to moderate wealth for all people.

The fundamental test of every economic policy will be: Will this policy put in place conditions that will encourage equal distribution of power/wealth?

And keep in mind: the power to distribute wealth “equally” presupposes a gross inequality of power. The Booj Party does not advocate any agency distributing anything anywhere. It works entirely by policies that enable individuals, through their own initiative, to become moderately prosperous.

What is moderate prosperous?

Simple.

MODERATE PROSPERITY = TOTAL WEALTH / POPULATION

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There’s no such thing as giving everyone the same opportunity to amass obscene wealth.

The minute someone seizes that opportunity and actually amasses obscene wealth, they have the power to destroy that opportunity for others.

But if all have the same opportunity to amass moderate wealth, each individual has far less of an opportunity to disrupt the system that encourages equality.

That arrangement is sustainable.

Explaining away

Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

Worldviews include within them accounts of alien worldviews held by others. These accounts sometimes also include reasons for why these alien worldviews are invalid and do not require consideration and understanding.

Such invalidating accounts protect one’s worldview from the consequences of understanding rival worldviews and experiencing their validity. It is as if worldviews have life of their own that they preserve as biological organisms do, protecting their outer skin, taking in only that which it can digest and incorporate and repelling everything else.

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Monism, the belief that there is a singular and ultimate truth to be found, inclines people to assume that if something appears self-evidently true, that whatever appears to conflict with it is necessarily false. It is the casual and mostly unconscious tendency of people who have never experienced a shift in worldviews. But those who have experienced a single shift are the fiercest adherents of monism, because they’ve experienced this shift as a conversion from a world of illusion to one of overwhelming truth, which is taken as a discovery of the true world. This discovery is not experienced as the acquisition of new facts about the world, but as a transfiguration of the world itself. The experience is so deep and so dramatic (and pleasant) that is often fails to occur to the convert that the process could occur again, re-transfiguring the transfigured, so the convert fails to look for clues that this is the case. If it does, another conversion is likely to occur: from monism to pluralism.

Pluralism lives on practical terms with the properties of worldviews — the fact that they have “horizons” of intelligibility (which can be characterized as the set of questions the worldview knows how to ask), that they project specific patterns of relevance and irrelevance onto phenomena and fact, that the perspective by which the worldview sees always appears absolute and self-evidently right, and most importantly that worldviews naturally and perhaps inevitably generate misunderstandings which can only be detected with effort.

Consequently, a pluralist always harbors a certain amount of suspicion even toward pluralism, which inclines a pluralist to respect even monistic views, and to attempt to learn from them. But again, pluralism is practical, which means it lives on terms with reality as it experiences it, with the understanding that the surprise of transcendence is a permanent possibility, and that there is no way to predict when such events will occur and what will result from them. Pluralism, unlike skepticism, doesn’t throw up its hands, saying “what can I know?” It doesn’t think of learning as a means to the end of final knowledge. (Arendt identified orientation toward means-and-ends as belonging to the middle stratum of active life, which she called “work”, whose primary activity is the fabrication of artifacts. The stratum above work is “action”, the realm of politics which both presupposes and preserves pluralistic conditions. See Arendt quote below.) What matters, rather, is the desire for particular kinds of knowledge, which signals the next intellectual development, both for individuals and groups of people.

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Arendt, from The Human Condition:

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life. … Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

All three activities and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality. Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history. Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. However, of the three, action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.

Reality-creation community

Politics

Another passage from Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future:

In my studies of totalitarianism I tried to show that the totalitarian phenomenon, with its striking anti-utilitarian traits and its strange disregard for factuality, is based in the last analysis on the conviction that everything is possible — and not just permitted, morally or otherwise, as was the case with early nihilism. The totalitarian systems tend to demonstrate that action can be based on any hypothesis and that, in the course of consistently guided action, the particular hypothesis will become true, will become actual, factual reality. The assumption which underlies consistent action can be as mad as it pleases; it will always end in producing facts which are then “objectively” true. What was originally nothing but a hypothesis, to be proved or disproved by actual facts, will in the course of consistent action always turn into a fact, never to be disproved. In other words, the axiom from which the deduction is started does not need to be, as traditional metaphysics and logic supposed, a self-evident truth; it does not have to tally at all with the facts as given in the objective world at the moment the action starts; the process of action, if it is consistent, will proceed to create a world in which the assumption becomes axiomatic and self-evident.

Arendt is clearly someone who would have been a member of the reality-based community.

Shibbolethargy

Ethics, Politics

Shibbolethargy: A form of intellectual laziness which uses the tools of thought (ideas, concepts, arguments and symbols) to create an appearance of rigorous thought, when in fact the true aim is to signal one’s membership in some particular tribe (and consequently unconditional opposition to other tribes).

At the root of shibbolethargy is the desire to evaluate ideas and actions ad hominem rather than on their own merits, while appearing to rely on principle and reason.

The attitude a shibbolethargic critic strikes is this: when confronted by an uncomfortable, semi-/un-comprehended idea, the most efficient means to evaluate it is to trace it back to the root, to see from what ground the idea has grown (rather than take the opposite course — which requires more trust, time and work — to judge the tree by its fruits). The root of the idea is the believer. If the believer is found to be a victim/perpetrator of some pernicious, delusional ideology, then by extension the idea is contaminated, and all efforts to understand the idea will at best be unfruitful and at worst can result in ideological contamination.

In the end, while many words may be used, many elaborate arguments, memorized and recited, many stories told both anecdotal and historical, no thought has been done and no new understanding has been found. The old understanding is defended and preserved, not so much through understanding and responding to other ideas, but rather through proving (solely to the satisfaction of the defender) that understanding and responding to other ideas is unnecessary — and probably dangerous to boot. In other words, that one is unwilling to see why he ought to think something he has not already thought.

Finished The Human Condition

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I finished Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition this morning.

A passage from the last chapter was especially significant, because it hit several of my own core themes from the last several years (which were, in fact, indirectly implanted by Arendt herself, via Richard J. Bernstein):

  • That humanity is most fully actualized when automatic behavior is transcended in the conscious decision to think, deliberate with others, and  act intentionally.
  • Seeing human life from an exterior position rather than an interior point has ethical consequences.
  • That behaviorism wishes to understand humanity as that which is observed from outside (empirically observed, like science observes its objects), but that only human beings restricting themselves biological-social automatism can be understood in this manner. Fully actualized human behavior requires speech, and it has the power to change the worldview of the “observer”, so that theoretical frameworks and research methods are in question, and the observer is deprived his uninvolved, neutral, outsider perspective.
  • That science is significant as a cultural phenomenon, an extremely effective method of coming to agreements, but that these agreements are not the only kind of agreements possible between human beings, nor are they the highest. (However, they are the easiest agreements to reach, and in a world starving for agreement and its attendant stability, this value can eclipse all others combined. And in fact it has, even in spheres of human activity that call for higher forms of agreement, namely in education, in government and in business. Business defines its goals strictly in terms of quantitative profits largely because this is the easiest standard to set and the hardest to argue against. It makes people feel all hard-nosed and tough to assert it against their inclinations, but in fact this is a cheap and easy move, and it is not a heroic sacrifice, but a cowardly self-betrayal.)
  • That much of commercial life is dominated by behaviorist psychology, and the scientific mode of agreement, both of which eliminate the “revelatory character of action” (which, in Arendt’s definition, includes speech). (“Revelatory character” is antithetical to predictability. Whether predictability is a defense against revelation, or suppression of revelation is a means to predictability, the need to predict and the desire to not be surprised are two of the most powerful, unquestioned and universal corporate values. (This twofold force is singlehandedly responsible for that repellent quality we call “corporateness” (and constitutes the single most obstinate impediment to innovation, which is simultaneously celebrated in word and undermined in action in most groups.)))

Here’s the passage:

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Constitution of “who”

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Politics, Pragmatism, Synesis

Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”

William James translated this maxim into American, asking of propositions: “What’s the ‘cash value’ of this belief?”

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If the pragmatic maxim is applicable to human beings, the meaning of “who” is determined by all the practical consequences a person can have. Not all people have related to other people in all possible ways, so “who” has a profoundly different meaning, depending on who says the word.

For me, the decisive question is this: How many ways has one been taught?

To be informed of a fact us one kind of learning.

To be trained in a skill is another kind of learning.

But to experience a change in your worldview under the influence of another mind — to experience a deep transfiguration of reality itself — is a kind of learning which invests the word “who” with meaning, mystery and infinite potential.

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A face is a gate.

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It might be productive to re-ask these questions from a pragmatic angle:

  • What kind of being is specifically human being?
  • What is the basis of ethics? What is ‘ought’?
  • How ought a person relate to other people?
  • How ought a person being relate to things in the world, and how should it differ from relationships with people?
  • How ought a human being relate to realities which stand beyond the limits of his understanding?