Category Archives: Politics

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.