Category Archives: Politics

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:

Continue reading Finished The Human Condition →

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?

Burning and burning

Politics

From Assorted Opinion and Maxims:

From two sides. — We are hostile to an intellectual tendency and movement if we are superior to it and disapprove of its objectives, or if its objectives are too remote and we cannot understand them, that is to say when they are superior to us. Thus a party can be opposed from two sides, from above and below; and it is no rare thing for both opponents to form an alliance grounded in their common hatred that is more repulsive than anything they join in hating.

My reading: An intellectual class can grow to loathe an outlived aristocracy so intensely that it succumbs to the temptation to court the mob. Watching a cultural elite progress from decadence to degeneration might be disgusting, but demagoguery is far worse and has fewer excuses.

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Propagandists think they can burn their enemies with their fiery rhetoric, but they forget that it is not themselves, but the fire that does the burning. If a fire gets big and hot enough it burns everything indiscriminately.

Whatever reason the fire was started, it is soon irrelevant — the fire loses its head and become nothing but burning. Whatever is flammable is liberated to burn, and to burn out of control, which is freedom. And fire is equalizing; a chair and a limb burns side by side. Things are reduced to the most primordial unit and unified: it is an inferno, singular. Fuel.

A populace on fire can’t tell the difference between an arsonist and what he burns. It’s all just an opportunity to burn and to burn. Many, many people just want to lose themselves in something greater. Fire is great. It is overwhelming, all-consuming, intoxicating and effortlessly active.

Fire is not responsible; burning is what it does.

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No human passion is responsible. Only reason is responsible. But reason is flammable.

To be seen and not heard

Ethics, Etymology, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Politics, Synesis

“You are to be seen and not heard.” This means: you are to be an object, not a subject.

Whatever needs knowing about an object can be known through observation. An object belongs to a world, but a world does not belong to it.

A subject, however, while belonging to the world also has a world that belongs to him. A subject looks back.

Consider the etymology of the word “respect”.

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There is no way to understand a particular subjectivity as such objectively.

One only understands subjectivity by engaging subjectively. One attempts to share the other’s world as the other views it, which means one involves oneself. One learns from the other. In the process, one’s own view of the world changes, and that means one’s own subjectivity changes. The other’s view of the world changes, too.

In an interview two separated views converge and merge into an inter-view.

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Behavior is an objective consequence of subjectivity. The odd thing about behavior: in the end it is phenomenal, and it can be taken as a mode of speech and heard along with the other’s voice, or it can be stripped away from the other and subsumed entirely by one’s own world and simply observed. Even speech can be viewed as behavior, or as mere sound. One can explain an other away or one can illuminate an other’s own self-explanation and understand.

Hermeneutics is hearing. The-hermeneutic-of-such-and-such is resistance to hearing: aggressive mishearing.

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The most immediate and convincing evidence of otherness is dialectic.

Sanity and vision

Ethics, Etymology, Politics, Synesis, Taoism

The world is overrun with visionaries and sane people.

What is lacking is:

  1. vision which respects sanity, and
  2. sanity which recognizes vision.

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Too often, sanity poses as vision, exotically paraphrasing the same old content in the language and gestures of vision. Why? Because the sane know what the truth is, but they find the truth bland and wish to spice it up a little.

Too often, vision is ignorantly parasitic. It lives off the conditions provided by sanity while denouncing the sanity that provides it. Why? Because the visionary knows the truth about truth, and cannot go back to the stunted “truth” of the sane.

But neither the truth nor the truth about truth is true enough to support community.

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We need sanity, not because it is more objectively true than vision, but because it is stable, more communicable and therefore more readily sharable.

We need vision, because things are true as far as they go but they are never true enough for long.

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Human beings need each other — commonalities and differences, alike.

We hate this. Otherness confronts us with the fact of finitude. Individuals longs to be infinite.

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Re-spect: re– ‘back’ + specere ‘look at.’
“How does this world we share look through your eyes?”

Re-cognize: re– ‘again’ + cognoscere ‘learn.’
“Can you show me a new way to see this world we share?”

Re-duce: re– ‘back, again’ + ducere ‘bring, lead.’
“The world exists as I comprehend it.”

Com-prehend: com– ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp.’
“I am objective.”

Ob-ject: ob– ‘in the way of’ + jacere ‘to throw.’
“The world is reducible to material, to the being of the object.”

Under-stand
“Do you understand that under every object stands an experience, and upon this does an object exists as an object?”

Is experience essentially individual?

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Synesis means we stand together and see the world as together.
The subject who sees — we — is active. We see together.
The object of sight — the world — is passive.  The world is seen as together.

Synesis recognizes that the solid togetherness of the world is only apparent.
We can see this solid togetherness differently if are open to being shown.

Synesis respects the truth that we human beings need solidity.
The solidity of the world is scaffolding for the solidarity of people.

Synesis is solidity through solidarity and solidarity through solidity.

Both the solidity and the solidarily of synesis long for infinity and pursue it.
This means sometimes solidarity and solidity must be renounced, for the sake of  synesis.
Synesis is essentially self-sacrificing and self-affirming.

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On this liquid ground of experience we stand together in understanding or we sink under the surface as dissolving individuals.

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Vision opens sanity. Sanity stabilizes vision.

openstablespiral

Party hearty

Politics

At the risk of being obvious or repetitive: I wonder how many tea party attendees were enthusiastic supporters of the $660,000,000,000 war in Iraq.

70%? 80%? More? When drooling over the glory of war, were any of them thinking about the price tag?

All this tea party hype is both a red herring and an attempt to foist blame.

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“Staying focused on the future” is a euphemism for irresponsibility.

Responsibility is owning your past.

If you have made a mistake, common decency requires that you:

  1. Admit the mistake was made. Stop making up new narratives to support or justify what you did.
  2. Account for the mistake, concretely, in detail  (as opposed to a general statement of “yes, mistakes were made” or sentimental statements of general regret or shame or any mere expression of emotion, detached from concrete actions). This account is not a list of punishable offenses, but rather a record of moral lessons that have been learned.
  3. Detail how you would avoid making the mistake in the future. Translate your theoretical lessons into practical terms. Reassure everyone that you are intellectually equipped to avoid repeating your mistakes.
  4. Make things right. This is not penance. It is evidence that you are not an escapist; that you have genuine integrity – that you integrate your past and your future,  your beliefs and your actions, your individual interests with the well-being of the society in which you live.
  5. Demonstrate that you take it very seriously that you must win back the trust of the people you inadvertently harmed. If you betrayed someone, or disrespected someone – you must show that you have learned to see differently, that you have learned to care about how someone else cares. You must humbly accept the social consequences of your mistake. This acceptance means caring about what others think of you and working to change it. You must ask for forgiveness and keep asking until you have been given it. If you think the simple act of asking for forgiveness discharges your duty you still have learned nothing. The forgiveness loop is closed when the forgiveness is  given.

The conservatives have a long road ahead of them if they wish to regain dialogue (through-Logos) with their neighbors/enemies. A long stretch of that road is the recovery of the desire to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement, rather than seeking out coercive means of control over the culture.

That road is the only road that leads to winning back any soul, conservative or liberal.

The soul of conservatism isn’t any one policy. It is responsibility, and it is responsibility alone that gives any body of policy real life.