Items Posted by Jim Kalb
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Thu May 1 05:06:07 EDT 1997
Article: 9634 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: whence liberalism?
Date: 1 May 1997 05:01:25 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 17
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References: <19970430032100.XAA02219@ladder01.news.aol.com>
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In <19970430032100.XAA02219@ladder01.news.aol.com> ddavis8570@aol.com (DDavis8570) writes:
>to understand american liberalism one must realize that it has its
>origion in a Debased Puritanism.
Does it make much difference in the long run, or does a fundamental
tendency toward a purely formal organization of society as a framework
for the liberation and satisfaction of impulse eventually swamp local
cultural differences?
>Civil rights, gay rights, animal rights, anti smoking hysteria etc.
These things seem to have caught on abroad as well. Hysteria about
smoking maybe less than the others, but who knows about the future?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat May 3 08:05:11 EDT 1997
Article: 9646 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Culture wars
Date: 3 May 1997 08:04:45 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 160
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Some of you may know that I have a weakness for putting up web pages,
FAQs, etc. I'm putting together a web page on the "culture wars" to be
based on the following discussion, with links added. Any comments on
the discussion?
The current culture wars are concerned equally with politics, morality
and religion. The point at issue can be phrased differently, depending
on which of the three perspectives is adopted, but in each case it is
at bottom the same: can men construct a rational social order wholly by
reference to their own knowledge and purposes, or must they accept the
order given to them by God, nature or history? Is it God and nature
that determine what is good for us, or do we decide that for ourselves?
Are we to treat God as a transcendent authority who reveals his will to
us, or as a symbolic expression of human needs and experience?
The cultural war is a war because of the political issues that are
indissolubly connected to religious and moral aspects of the conflict.
Radical differences in the understanding of man, society and government
have practical consequences. Whether government should oppose
homosexuality or homophobia depends on what the social and moral world
is like; since either choice has religious implications it does no good
to pretend that one of them "establishes religion" while the other does
not.
For conservatives, society is not something men make and remake at
will. The function of government is to enforce respect for obligations
that precede our choices rather than achieve goals we have set
ourselves, and fundamental social institutions limit will and desire
rather than express them. As an example, conservatives understand the
family -- man, wife and children -- as an institution that is natural
and blessed by God. To accept the family as natural is to accept
social attitudes and customs that define what families are and
strengthen them. These include expectations as to the specific
obligations of husband, wife and children, and the restriction of
legitimate sexual intercourse to marriage. While government does not
create the family, conservatives say, it should defend and support it,
and certainly should not undermine it. In particular, government
should respect accepted family roles and sexual morality and support
them where appropriate.
In contrast, progressives understand families as institutions that have
grown up to serve human purposes. As needs and circumstances change,
so do families. Progressives therefore reject social understandings
relating to the family that they believe now thwart human fulfillment,
for example gender stereotypes, the inequality of parent and child, and
limits on sexual expression, and believe government should help change
them. The practical political consequences of the dispute between
conservatives and progressives are obvious, and there is no neutral way
around them.
Nor do conservatives and progressives share a common method of
decision. Conservatives believe that order is given to us rather than
constructed. Desires and aversions must therefore be judged by
standards whose origin transcends human purposes. Good things are
worth wanting because of their relation to an intrinsic goodness rooted
in the nature of things. Thus, morality and politics must begin as a
practical matter with the knowledge and love of those things that
transcend us, especially those that are highest. We know the permanent
things on which the good life depends with the aid of tradition, which
accumulates and carries forward the experience of many men and many
generations. Respect for tradition is therefore fundamental for sound
politics, morals and religion.
Progressives believe on the contrary that it is what we want that makes
things valuable. Good and evil begin with our desires and aversions.
Action should be based on current views and circumstances rather than
tradition, since it is our present desires and ability to control our
environment that are the ultimate standard. Our moral life becomes a
matter of organizing available resources and our likes and dislikes in
an overall scheme that permits all to be satisfied as much and as
equally as possible. Progressive morality thus reduces to progressive
politics and progressive social engineering, which in the absence of an
external basis for judgement becomes the ultimate authority and
therefore equivalent to religion.
The culture war is thus a religious one. Since religion deals with
what is ultimately authoritative it is very different for progressives
and conservatives. Progressive religion looks to our present needs and
experience, and treats religion as a symbolic response to those things
whose content is our practical response to them. To be true to what
made our religious heritage great, progressives say, is to articulate
in religious form the aspirations of men today, just as the saints and
the prophets did for the men of their own time. In contrast,
conservative religion identifies the content of our religious heritage
as revelation with a fixed and determinate content. The understanding,
expression, and application of that content may vary somewhat over
time, but the content itself remains unchanged.
Differing understandings of government lead to differing understandings
of freedom. Conservatives identify freedom with self-government in
accordance with natural law. A free government is one that protects
the self-government of natural institutions such as families and local
communities and of voluntary associations such as businesses. It
respects private rights and property and the dispersion of power and
authority among heterogeneous institutions. In contrast, progressives
identify freedom with the absence of obstacles to the individual will.
Since particular obstacles to our wills arise most often from our
immediate environment, and since a comprehensive program of removing
such obstacles requires coordination, progressives in the end favor
radical centralization of power.
Contrary understandings of freedom lead each party to consider the
other tyrannical. Conservatives find it outrageous that central
bureaucratic power should override the authority of natural and
voluntary institutions, while progressives object vehemently to the
traditional and private institutions that override the will of
individuals.
Because the culture wars have to do with basic principles of social
organization the warring views draw support from different social
groups. The conservative viewpoint gets support from those whose way
of life is rooted in the institutions central bureaucratic rule
supplants. These include family men not associated with national
elites; married women, especially those with children; religious people
whose faith stresses personal conversion and local congregations; small
businessmen; and people in small towns and rural areas.
The progressive view appeals to those who gain from central
bureaucratic rule. These include the academically credentialed; social
scientists and other "experts"; lawyers, especially judges, legal
scholars and leaders of the elite bar; elite journalists, who become
more important as more things are treated as national public policy
issues; and religious leaders who identify with national elites and
want to be respectable, comfortable, and prophetic too. They also
include those with an uneasy relationship to the traditional and
informal institutions bureaucratic rule supplants -- many blacks,
recent immigrants, the unmarried, secular Jews, artists, and
homosexuals and others unable or unwilling to live in accordance with
traditional moral standards.
A strength of progressivism is that it can draw on the prestige that
now attaches to technology. Another is the importance today of the
mass media and formal education, both dominated by progressives. Yet
another is that progressivism increases the size and importance of the
classes that support it. For example, it multiplies the power and
numbers of "experts," whose position depends on bureaucratized rule,
and the numbers of single women with children, whose weak relation to
traditional and informal institutions leads them to rely on the
bureaucracy. Its weakness is that its own success destroys it, because
bureaucratic rule is far more expensive and far less effective than
traditional institutions when extended to the things that have
traditionally been in the sphere of family life.
The strength of conservatism is its ability to draw through tradition
on enormous breadth and depth of experience, and its resilience -- it
provides standards and habits that enable ordinary people to manage
their own lives and cooperate with others in community without much
reliance on other social machinery. In the long run it therefore seems
likely that the weakness of progressivism will lead to the victory of
conservatism. For now, however, it is the former that triumphs
everywhere. Indeed, our current culture war is only the present stage,
perhaps the final one, of a turn away from the transcendent that has
been going on for centuries.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun May 4 05:58:48 EDT 1997
Article: 9652 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Initial thoughts:
Date: 4 May 1997 05:37:55 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References: <5jokpf$st9@mahler.rev.net> <5jqe4s$cs5@panix.com> <5k1tfd$v2$1@gerry.cc.keele.ac.uk> <5k27qe$abi@panix.com> <33655EE2.2F9E@mindspring.com> <5k4o61$otl@panix.com> <3366CD46.3AC0@cajun.net> <5ketr3$6a5$1@gerry.cc.keele.ac.uk>
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In <5ketr3$6a5$1@gerry.cc.keele.ac.uk> cla04@cc.keele.ac.uk (Andy Fear) writes:
>Part of the problem of the political dialogue we engage in is that
>'right-wing' now tends to mean classical liberal which certainly seems
>to be what is implied by the above.
I don't see the implication you do. Have all political entities other
than those dominated by classical liberalism featured an obligation
>from the state to each person to provide for that person's material
requirements up to a standard of decency? Put differently, is
classical liberalism equivalent to the view that a state morally based
on ensuring to each person subject to its jurisdiction the means to a
materially decent life is going to run into insoluble problems?
>However Conservatism tends to have an organisist communtarian strand
>which would hardly make it 'left-wing'.
Organicist communitarianism is I think inconsistent with a central
state that comprehensively supports the material conditions of life for
each individual and therefore with a welfare state. On the material
side of life the latter makes people rely on an abstract bureaucratic
system, and body is not so separate from soul that the loyalties and
personal ties needed to constitute an organicist communitarian society
retain their strength.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun May 4 05:58:49 EDT 1997
Article: 9653 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: conservatism and utopistic thinking.
Date: 4 May 1997 05:55:53 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 29
Message-ID: <5khmf9$8iu@panix.com>
References: <33557970.15F6@mailbox.swipnet.se> <3356B6D4.3B44@mailbox.swipnet.se> <3358861B.492C@bellsouth.net> <335AAE44.7C61@nwu.edu> <19970424101958977849@deepblue3.salamander.com> <5jpl9d$hmt@panix.com> <19970425085141694651@deepblue6.salamander.com> <3365CD40.29C3@bellsouth.net> <5k67o1$4df@panix.com> <336BF6FF.42CA@mailbox.swipnet.se>
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In <336BF6FF.42CA@mailbox.swipnet.se> Hans Lebeck writes:
>> >Suburbs didn't just happen, they were planned and encouraged by
>> >interests who benifitted from the destruction of morally and
>> >economically coherent communities.
>mr Fiegel has a point when he talks about the social engineering.
>I mean that the existence of a state in the modern meaning of the word
>naturally leads to social engineering when the state has been a part
>of a new mythology. The souveranity of the people leads to that the
>state is built on the people, the part of the society where the civil
>society has its ground. The myth of the peoples souveranity is in
>combination with the idea of the republican state a destructive power
>in all politic.
I agree with what you say in the second paragraph I quote. As against
Mr. Fiegel my point was that the separation of the functions of life of
which suburbanization is an example can occur through unplanned market
forces as well as intentional social engineering. If you build a lot
of houses at once on raw land it's cheaper than if you build them one
at a time and fit them into an existing community. If you build them
in the simplest and therefore cheapest way what you get is a bedroom
suburb. That may be a bad thing but the evil isn't something planned
for the sake of further profits to be reaped from destruction of
organic coherence.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From alt.revolution.counter Sun May 4 08:08:21 1997
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
~From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
~Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
~Subject: Re: conservatism and utopistic thinking.
~Date: 4 May 1997 08:06:27 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
~Lines: 70
Message-ID: <5khu43$hrc@panix.com>
~References: <33593346.21C8@mailbox.swipnet.se> <5jcrg9$bbo@panix.com> <863724195wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <336BF202.96F@mailbox.swipnet.se>
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hans.lebeck@mailbox.swipnet.se writes:
> The culture is an important part of the civil society togeheter with
> a distributist view of the state and the family can it be an
> alternative to what the german sociologist Ferdinand T=F6nnies called
> "Geschellschaft" or Karl Deutsch called society in contradiction to
> community. The community is built on the connections between the
> non-neutral state and the family.
The question to my mind is where culture and community will be found in
the years to come. Since man is a social animal he lives in them or
dies. We are used to the integration of the local and particular into
national and supranational ("Christendom" or "Europe") culture and
community. In other times and places, for example Rafael Cardenas'
example of the early Muslim state, there has been no such integration.
It seems that the integration to which we have been accustomed is
coming to an end. The modern state is determinedly neutral and does
not recognize the family, which it assimilates to personal habit,
sentimental attachment and contract. The modern state can therefore
have no connection to community as you describe it.
> I agree with mr Cardenas when he means that the new uniting
> ideologies is the religions but I also mean that these
> "fundamentalisms" also is a part of an escape from politics, because
> the political has been defined in a sense which has its roots in the
> anglo-saxian world.
My suggestion was that the loss of a connection between culture,
community and state means the end of politics at least with respect to
the society as a whole and its replacement by rule of one insular
community over others based on force. Mr. Cardenas' suggestion as I
understood it was that rule is never based purely on force or even
force combined with the habit of submission because there is always
some legitimating ideology. Here I would say that the legitimating
ideology will be too thin to give rise to culture and community, so I
still see our most likely future as one of despotism and radical
particularism.
As to the particular ideology, Mr. Cardenas suggested classical
liberalism and I suggested modern welfare state/civil rights
liberalism. I of course prefer my suggestion if only because it's mine
but it may not matter because the practicalities are likely to be the
same in either case.
> The new elites has one thing common with the pre-colonial, they have
> the culture as the new ground and defintion of the political.
Your view and for all I know Professor Huntington's seems to be that
something like the Islamic revolution in Iran will be the wave of the
future, so that sovereign territorial states will organize themselves
on the basis of particular cultures. To my mind modern transportation,
communications and economic life makes that unlikely. Cultural
cohesion can now have no special connection with geography or
territory. The cultural communities of the future are more likely to
resemble the Hasidim, the Gypsies, Hindu castes, millets under the
Ottomans, and so on than classical Athens or prepostmodern Europe.
> For the european right is the main goal as I see it to re-define the
> Political and build an alliance between paleo-protestant and
> paleo-catholic traditionalist groups.
It seems to me that would end up an attempt to reestablish catholic
Christendom. I just wonder what that would be like. What can the
connection between Christianity and Europe be when every part of the
world is equally present to every other part? Could there be a
Christendom that views itself as one civilization among many?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun May 4 21:07:12 EDT 1997
Article: 9662 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Culture wars
Date: 4 May 1997 20:59:56 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 36
Message-ID: <5kjbec$pce@panix.com>
References: <5kf9kt$av7@panix.com> <19970504101028749663@deepblue5.salamander.com>
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In <19970504101028749663@deepblue5.salamander.com> wmcclain@salamander.com (Bill McClain) writes:
>For example, if an urge is genetically determined, it is "natural" and
>should be allowed, right? The Conservatives who dispute this have to
>go beyond nature to revelation or some sort of higher instruction. In
>that sense, morals are un-Natural.
>This is just central Christian dogma, isn't it? That so much knowledge
>is available to virtuous pagans through natural reason, but the rest
>must come from revelation, the prophets and holy fathers, etc.
Natural law available to virtuous pagans classically does not consist
solely in genetically determined urges and the like because the
"reason" used to determine it includes more than means/end rationality.
>I wonder if the conservative interest in sociobiology isn't an attempt
>to get what they want by moving into the Progressive camp?
It's an attempt to support conservative positions by reductionist
arguments.
>I'm probably quibbling by bringing up Voegelin, an author I understand
>so dimly. Reading him suggested to me that not only does our
>"understanding, expression, and application" of our relation with the
>Divine change over time, but the very nature of that relationship does
>also. That we are on a journey where new things occur. No doubt I
>misrepresent him. Would such an understanding be incompatible with
>conservative premises?
You could have revelatory events (Sinai, the life, death and
resurrection of Christ) that change our relationship with God and
tradition that preserves the memory of the events and articulates and
applies their significance.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun May 4 21:07:13 EDT 1997
Article: 9663 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Culture wars
Date: 4 May 1997 21:05:05 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 77
Message-ID: <5kjbo1$q3p@panix.com>
References: <5kf9kt$av7@panix.com> <19970504101028749663@deepblue5.salamander.com>
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sdrain@rev.net (Todd) writes:
>To argue over authority in any post Protestant Reformation/Revolt
>society is to miss the point. The Catholic Church alone possesses the
>SOLE authority in this world. The ultimate consequence of the
>protestant revolt was to for ever doom the concept of conservatism.
Normally tradition and authority can survive or at least reestablish
themselves after rejection of particular traditions and particular
authorities. Your view is that there is something about the Protestant
R. that makes that impossible. What is that thing?
Abraham left the land of his fathers. The revelation at Sinai
established a new law. The prophets were not tender of traditions.
Christ sometimes spoke harshly of them. The Hildebrandine reforms swept
away traditions and so did Vatican II. If conservatism has not been
doomed by any of those things why does the belief of organized bodies of
Christians not in communion with the Pope that they are part of the
catholic church mentioned in the creeds even though they have abandoned
some traditions that the church in communion with the Pope has not
abandoned doom conservatism?
>No Rabbi, no Eastern Orthodox priest or prelate, no Mulsim Sultan or
>Shah or leader, and no Buddist can claim authority because they have
>none.
Here you seem to be saying that they do not in fact have authority even
though they are regarded by their followers as having it. Be that as it
may I don't see why there couldn't be a Jewish, Eastern Orthodox,
Islamic or Buddhist tradition that functions as authority for adherents
and by reference to which adherents could be "conservative".
>No protestant can likewise argue conservatism because their churches
>are based upon a rejection of authority and tradition.
A rejection so categorical as to exclude the possibility of those things
in all protestant churchs?
>Liberalism relies on the assumption that humans are naturally good ...
>And yet, in yet another method of hypocrisy, they do not trust the
>individual to live their life. In order to have liberalism in a
>society (freedom of the will) it must be imposed by the state. Is that
>a sick irony or what?
A nonsubstantive point: the a.r.c. style sheet would require "men"
instead of "humans" and "his" instead of "their." Having no authority I
of course leave the matter to your discretion and taste.
More substantively -- it's a mistake to underestimate one's opponents or
pretend they don't have arguments. If men were naturally good bad
upbringing and bad social arrangements might nonetheless cause them to
oppress each other in large or small ways and very extensive state
control might be necessary to keep them from doing so. So I don't think
the liberal tendency to establish despotism in the name of freedom is
necessarily proof of hypocrisy. It's a sign they're wrong, but that's
different.
>The problem is that local congregations must ultimately be united in a
>common faith and traditions, or ultimately group liberalism and common
>wills emerge as one congregation diverges from another.
No doubt, but not all protestants stand for absolute congregational
independence. Neither Eastern Orthodox nor Muslims have anything like a
Pope, but they display fewer liberal tendencies than Roman Catholics.
Actually, the same could be said of Southern Baptists.
>However, conservatism can just as easily be secularized into a basic
>set of social utilitarian principals. So how does one decide which
>principals to adhere to?
Everyone already has principles, so the question is how to apply them
and whether and how to modify them. If you're conservative you tend to
resist modifying them and when you do so you emphasize maintainance of
coherence.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Mon May 5 08:01:10 EDT 1997
Article: 9671 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: conservatism and utopistic thinking.
Date: 5 May 1997 07:58:58 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 80
Message-ID: <5kki22$8bv@panix.com>
References: <33593346.21C8@mailbox.swipnet.se> <5jcrg9$bbo@panix.com> <863724195wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <336BF202.96F@mailbox.swipnet.se> <5khu43$hrc@panix.com> <481568688wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
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rafael cardenas writes:
>the present domination of globalized American culture is then
>analogous to a Roman stage, perhaps the relatively uniformitarian
>culture of the 2nd century A.D. But that culture never affected so
>much of life in the areas which it dominated as modern American
>culture has.
A side comment: globalized culture is American in about the same sense
that international banking is Jewish, not in my view a sense strong
enough to be useful. When they look around them ordinary Americans
tend to feel rather as if a coup d'etat had somehow taken place when
they weren't looking.
>> Here I would say that the legitimating ideology will be too thin to
>> give rise to culture and community,
>
>The ideology itself, yes, but there is now a commercialized global
>consumerist culture that goes with it, and spreads a universal style
>round the world.
And the question is whether that commercialized global consumerist
culture will be sufficient to restrain lawless impulse, provide social
cohesion, enable parents or single moms or TV or the state to rear the
next generation, etc. so that the system can continue. I think not.
>The despotism will be veiled, though I dare say that the privatization
>of 'security' will make it more brutal, and the particularism, though
>it will keep cropping up, will be unsuccessful and will derive much of
>its elements from the impoverished globalist culture (e.g. the use of
>American-style pop music as a form of political protest in Eastern
>Europe).
Despotism starts off veiled but after a while becomes less concerned
about appearances. The privatization of security will become an aspect
and spur to particularism since for all but those who can buy security
it will depend on visible membership in a strong network of mutual
obligation. Successful cultural particularism can not be constructed to
order but if it is possible (as I think it clearly is) it will arise and
prevail for Darwinian reasons if no other.
>Welfare states and civil rights are not in the long run compatible with
>corporate globalism. If the competitive ideology dominates, they will
>be destroyed. The form of contract law favoured by international
>business ...
I don't see why corporate globalism should triumph over globalism based
on more comprehensive bureaucratic organization. The former requires
the latter to some degree to provide it with a stable environment in
which to operate. Once the latter exists it has the usual advantages of
the state over a collection of private persons: a more unified will,
stabler and more coherent interests, possession of the means of physical
coercion and ability to use them at discretion, ability to appeal to the
people as its protector, a claim to represent the whole rather than
particular interests. Since it has those advantages why wouldn't it use
them to make itself supreme?
Within a single state comprehensive bureaucratic organization has beaten
corporations. The world market may mean that a single national
bureaucracy can no longer control multinational corporations
effectively, but it's not clear to me why there couldn't be
multinational bureaucracies. It appears that a lot of effort is going
into establishing them.
>It is worth noting that the suvival of such [particularist] groups
>depends on their toleration by the ruling order, which may not always
>be forthcoming.
The ruling order of course doesn't like such groups as a matter of
principle because they limit its pervasiveness and power, and goes so
far as to define their principle of existence as "hate." So it becomes
a question of how successful the ruling order can be in making its
principles effective. My view is that since the commercialized global
consumerist culture of which you speak is not sufficient for social
order the rulers will have to corrupt their principles and permit
particularism. Why shouldn't they? In the end their principles are
mostly an excuse anyway.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Mon May 5 10:44:55 EDT 1997
Article: 9672 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: conservatism and utopistic thinking.
Date: 5 May 1997 08:56:38 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 42
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X-Newsposter: trn 4.0-test55 (26 Feb 97)
Hans Lebeck writes:
>The classical [apparently meaning Western liberal] citizienship were
>defined by the goods and the utility but the new as we see it for
>example in the Kon-fu-tse based nationalism in China and Singapore or
>the islamic revolution in Iran. The new citizenship is not based on the
>scarity of state goods but in the plights to the state. That is one
>difference. In the secular western philosophy is the legitimiation of
>the state its production of goods. For the new fundamentalisms has the
>state another function.
The issue for me is what kind of citizenship if any is possible under
conditions of instant worldwide broadband almost cost-free
communication, which seems fatally to weaken local and moral community.
The liberal answer is to let order emerge from anarchy by basing
citizenship on maximizing the satisfactions of each citizen. That
plainly won't work because interests conflict. It won't work even if we
all attempt to feel each other's pain and find our individual
satisfaction in upholding Rawls' Difference Principle, if only because
the attempt doesn't correspond to any real pattern of human motivation.
Another answer is to preserve territorial states based on particular
culture (and therefore citizenship that has particular moral content) by
blocking communication at national boundaries. That seems to be what
they are trying to do in China, Singapore and Iran. That's technically
very difficult and is getting more difficult all the time. After all,
Khomeini overthrew the Shah with the help of casette tapes smuggled into
Iran. It didn't work when it was tried in various parts of the European
world and it's not clear to me why the new attempts should be more
successful. To me there just doesn't seem to be anything new about
these attempts. They resist modernity in a way that failed in Europe.
The only possibility for maintaining particular culture I can think of
that seems to work is basing the cultural order on the order of the
household backed by religious law and permitting participation in
communications networks only to the extent clearly consistent in the
long term. That approach seems antithetical to the notion of
citizenship though because it is too inward-turning.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Tue May 6 06:16:35 EDT 1997
Article: 9675 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: conservatism and utopistic thinking.
Date: 6 May 1997 05:32:00 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 38
Message-ID: <5kmtqg$d19@panix.com>
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In "James C. Langcuster" writes:
>> Can't help thinking about GK Chesterton's defence of suburbs when
>> reading all of this......
OK I'll bite since no one else has -- What was it?
In _What I saw in America_ I recall a comment that in suburbs as
opposed to small towns when a man gets fired he and his ex-boss don't
see each other again. The implication I thought was that in the 'burbs
(and by extension no doubt modern society in general) it's too easy to
shuck off the complexities and difficulties of human relations and that
makes for immediate comfort but is a bad thing in the long run. I
haven't read much of GKC though and don't doubt he said many other
things.
>All of these church members spend an inordinate amount of time with
>each other, organizing clubs, holding Bible studies, etc. My brother
>has remarked on how three-fourths of the neighborhood has essentially
>become one extended family.
Any comments on how common this sort of thing is? I've thought on
general grounds that the trend toward planned developments, walled
communities, etc. ought to contribute to neo-particularism, but up till
now all I've seen has been complaints to the effect that these places
are boring and sterile, the only thing they're based on is the common
desire to keep everything pretty or at least uniform so property values
will be maintained, you can't do anything in the least bit expressive
or out of the ordinary, etc., etc., etc.
>Today, the church serves as a hub for every conceivable activity:
>aerobics, basket weaving, marital counseling classes, etc. It's
>possible for one to spend every free hour of the day at this church.
How is it as a church?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Tue May 6 06:16:36 EDT 1997
Article: 9676 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Demonization of Suburbia
Date: 6 May 1997 06:14:22 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 51
Message-ID: <5kn09u$fv5@panix.com>
References: <336E8C66.2E43@gstis.net>
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In <336E8C66.2E43@gstis.net> FELIX writes:
>It sounds to me as though your gripe might be better directed against
>the Industrial Revolution and the division of labor rather than with
>your local general contractor.
The gripe I think is against the division of the various functions that
make up our lives. The man not to mention larger units such as the
family and the people gets lost in particular functions of production,
consumption, etc. that have no organic relation to each other.
As your reference to the Industrial Revolution suggests a major
contributor to that division has been the increasing use of formal
market or bureaucratic methods in carrying out those functions. Such
methods have of course increased production by facilitating the
division of labor and application of technology. The gains have cost
something though.
The gains tend to be more visible than the costs because after all the
point of the rationalized methods is that particular purposes get
carried out well. A problem is that happiness is not simply a matter
of success in particular purposes. Another is that as the predominant
method of social organization that people expect rationalized
organization and it gets applied where it doesn't work well or at all.
Enlightened attitudes toward sex (it's all a matter of choice and just
make sure you use appropriate technology to avoid specific unwanted
consequences like disease or pregnancy) would be an example.
>The forces that are destroying this country are NOT the desire of
>families to own their own home (or jet-ski for that matter). They are
>the race-mixing, anti-family, multicultural ideology of the Reds and
>Jews of the bureuacratic class, and the anti-labor, open border, free
>trade policies of the capitalists. We can restore white America to
>it's prior strength and sense of community now. All it takes is the
>will to do it.
But if the functions of life are handled separately and
technologically, and that's simply a good thing, I don't see what
difference things like race, family and culture make. A "race" is a
collection of individuals each of them made up of a bundle of
characteristics each of which is also be found among members of other
races. If the social ideal is rational technological organization the
particular characteristics and their relation to formal systems becomes
the key and "race" evaporates. McDonald's doesn't care about any of
those things. Also, I don't see how ethnicity, family and culture, or
for that matter community, can be willed directly. They depend on
things like prejudice, settled and unconscious habit, inarticulate
attitudes and so on that one can't simply choose to have.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Wed May 7 16:29:32 EDT 1997
Article: 9690 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Technological unemployment
Date: 7 May 1997 15:30:17 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 14
Message-ID: <5kql89$plp@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Here's an extract from something Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the 1840's
(_The Phalanx_ was a Fourierist periodical published in London):
Mr. Etzler's inventions, as described in the Phalanx, promise to
cultivate twenty thousand acres with the aid of four men only and
cheap machinery. Thus the laborers are threatened with starvation
if they do not organize themselves into corporations, so that
machinery may labor _for_ instead of working _against_ them.
So it seems that worries that technology would lead to unemployment and
starvation on a colossal scale are nothing new.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Wed May 7 16:29:34 EDT 1997
Article: 9693 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: initial thoughts
Date: 7 May 1997 16:25:55 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 24
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References: <19970507111101.HAA27510@ladder01.news.aol.com>
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In <19970507111101.HAA27510@ladder01.news.aol.com> ddavis8570@aol.com (DDavis8570) writes:
>The Baptist Church, at least here in the south, is a totally status
>quo church. Individual members and churches are heavily involved but
>draw their intellectual ideas from other sources, ie Francis
>Schaeffer. R. Rushdoony etc. They build no schools as an alternative
>to the public temples of Baal, they are faced with a huge internal
>liberal subversion which their congrgational system is hopless to
>combat.
A difficulty seems to be that a congregational system means an absence
of thought, and a non-congregational system means rule by a bureaucracy
that almost certainly will be liberal since contemporary liberalism is
largely an ideological projection of the interests of bureaucrats.
After all, after we get rid of "hate," "greed," "discrimination,"
"oppression," and similar horribles what political possibility will
remain other than rule by a universal all-disposing bureaucracy?
In theory you could no doubt have a non-congregational system of
synods, conventions or bishops not dominated by a bureaucracy, but that
doesn't seem to be the way things work out these days.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Thu May 8 06:46:21 EDT 1997
Article: 9697 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Culture wars
Date: 7 May 1997 22:23:24 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 18
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In <567725050wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> rafael cardenas writes:
>the transcendent threatens conservatism as much as it threatens
>progresivism.
I suppose if conservatism means "what's good is in the past" and
progressivism means "what's good is in the future" the transcendent has
about the same relation to each. That relation need not be one of
opposition since the past or future good might be a revelation or
incarnation of the transcendent.
If on the other hand progressivism means "man freely chooses his
values" it's necessarily opposed to the transcendent. I can't think of
a plausible interpretation of conservatism that would make it equally
opposed.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Thu May 8 09:41:51 EDT 1997
Article: 9705 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: conservatism and utopistic thinking.
Date: 8 May 1997 09:07:11 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 83
Message-ID: <5ksj5v$ouh@panix.com>
References: <33593346.21C8@mailbox.swipnet.se> <5jcrg9$bbo@panix.com> <863724195wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <336BF202.96F@mailbox.swipnet.se> <5khu43$hrc@panix.com> <481568688wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <5kki22$8bv@panix.com> <540798730wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
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rafael cardenas writes:
>> a more unified will, stabler and more coherent interests,
>
>Those are also possessions of undying limited-liability corporations,
>which are not merely collections of private persons.
Not of limited-liability corporations collectively, though.
>> possession of the means of physical coercion and ability to use them
>> at discretion,
>
>Increasingly a possession of large corporations too.
How so?
>> ability to appeal to the people as its protector, a claim to
>> represent the whole rather than particular interests.
>Because the corporate ideology claims the superiority of the 'market'
>over the interests of any particular national state. The arguments
>which used to be used by states against internal vested interests or
>particularisms are used against states by the corporate libertarians
Universal human rights trump the market though, and it is the universal
state that defines what those rights are and what they require.
>Yes, but the new multinational bureaucracies (eg WTO, MAI) are being
>created wholly in the interests of transnational corporations and
>investors. The older multinational bureaucracies created in the
>supposed service of various human interests (Unesco, WHO, etc.) are
>being not just cleaned up but emasculated.
Multinational bureaucracies concerned with trade are concerned among
other things with "unfair competition," which includes price advantages
based on sacrifice of various social goals. Also, the international
human rights business appears to be booming. American "most favored
nation" treatment has "human rights" preconditions. The plain
intention of the various interventions in Bosnia, human rights
treaties, world conferences on women and so on is to establish
precedents, legal authority, and an accepted ideological basis for
world government based on the principles of what Americans call
liberalism.
Governments may be created by those who are already powerful, and we can
assume for the sake of discussion they do it to serve their own
interests. Once created, however, a government is a new center of power
and what it becomes does not depend on its origin. It is likely to look
for sources of support - ideological, material and institutional - that
make it independent of its creators. Why shouldn't a world government,
even one growing mostly out of institutions intended to serve big
corporations, come to self-awareness and strive for autonomy by adopting
a welfarist ideology, playing the corporations off against each other,
and reaching out to the populace?
Also, a basic problem with your line of thought is that profit-making
corporations only deal with a part of the world -- that part that offers
opportunity for profit -- and can't call on loyalty but only contractual
rights and the desire to maintain profitable business relationships.
That's just not enough to base a government on. Possibly better
markets and technology mean more things can be done for profit now, but
the loyalty and willingness to sacrifice that are necessary for
government are a smaller feature of the corporate world than ever.
>I'm not sure that the rulers are bothered about social order beyond a
>certain minimum, and a minimum which is not fixed but may fall if
>profits can be made more 'virtually' or ethereally. If social disorder
>increases, you just sell more insurance policies, locks, guns, patent
>medicines, car alarms, computers for home-shopping, divorce-counselling
>services, etc.
The administrative and productive classes must reproduce themselves as
such so that the system can continue, and the rulers must purchase the
protective and loss-control devices as well as sell them. More to the
point, perhaps, if the rulers don't care what happens to the people
their enthusiasm for rooting out "hate" (particularism) will flag
especially if conniving at self-government makes life easier for them.
Christianity remained illegal in the Roman Empire up to Constantine's
time but the laws usually weren't enforced because it was easier that
way.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Thu May 8 09:41:52 EDT 1997
Article: 9706 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Demonization of Suburbia
Date: 8 May 1997 09:40:12 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 38
Message-ID: <5ksl3s$1fq@panix.com>
References: <336E8C66.2E43@gstis.net> <5kn09u$fv5@panix.com> <337172E5.568B@gstis.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <337172E5.568B@gstis.net> FELIX writes:
>> A problem is that happiness is not simply a matter of success in
>> particular purposes.
>It seems to me people derive a great deal of satisfaction in a job
>well done.
Sure, but the satisfaction derives both from the success and from the
setting that makes the job and success in doing it matter. The former
is something we must understand as preceding our choices and efforts.
Otherwise the latter become pointless.
>But don't we have to go back to before agriculture in order to truly
>find a well integrated existence?
It's somewhat a matter of degree. If some things are understood as a
matter of arbitrary choice life can go on; the modern enterprise though
is to make everything a matter of pure choice. No God, no essential
human nature, no nothing except atoms, the void, and our impulses and
technological skill. At some point the prosecution of that enterprise
makes life morally impossible.
>As recently as the 1950's when America was still over 90% white the
>quality of life here was incomparably better ... This was so because
>it is in the very genes of the white man to behave this way.
It's possible for white men to be brutal and degraded, even without the
aid of outsiders. Read viii and ix of Plato's _Republic_ for an
account by one of the greatest of white men of social devolution
attributable to loss of connection to the transcendent due to causes
internal to society. Or read Sade for an exploration of some of the
implications of modern thought by a nobleman in the most civilized of
white societies written before either significant immigration to Europe
or the emancipation of the Jews.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Thu May 8 06:28:48 1997
Subject: Re: Alliegance
To:
Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 06:28:48 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To:
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Status: RO
> I'm curious, are you generally unreconstructed conservatives,
> yearning for traditional heirarchy and the pre-democratic order, or
> are you in the spirit of moderate democratic conservatism? What does
> conservatism stand for now-a-days? Frankly, most of the time, I can
> never tell. Maybe you can show me, forthrightly and unequivically.
The Conservatism FAQ sets forth what I think of as the essence of
conservatism. As the FAQ observes toward the end there are lots of
different things called conservatism.
My view is that tradition, hierarchy, and non-democratic authority are
necessary parts of a tolerable society. I'm not saying that a good
society has no democratic element, just that democracy can't trump
everything else. What most people would call moderate democratic
conservatism has in the end no room for the things I think necessary.
"Moderate" for example means today that basic principles and
institutions of contemporary liberalism are accepted (e.g., secularism,
the welfare state, the civil rights laws) but there are to be
modifications to mitigate problems. The problem is that those
principles and institutions are fundamentally opposed to tradition --
they make bureaucracy rather than more organic institutions the basis
of social order.
The problem with conservatism now as at all times is that the function
of tradition is to make useable and authoritative implicit
understandings that can't be demonstrated or even made fully explicit.
Tradition therefore can't be constructed or even clearly defined and so
it is difficult to have it as the policy of a modern state or the goal
of a modern political movement. So what conservatives have to do is to
limit politics and the state and oppose things that are particularly
destructive of tradition. The result is that to other people their
fundamental policies appear to be obstructionism and obscurantism. Too
bad, but that's life.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Fri May 9 05:11:48 1997
Subject: Re: Is Distributionism counter-revolutionary
To: x
Date: Fri, 9 May 1997 05:11:48 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To:
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Status: RO
> What about my other point, about right-populism being distinct from
> left-populism in its tolerance for inequality, even though they may
> both be agrarian, anti-establishment, or "folksy"? I think its an
> important point and I'd like your thoughts on it.
Radical equality can't exist without a central authority to enforce it
except maybe in a society of hunter-gatherers. So it's hard for me to
view any populism as truly leftist. Populists may of course oppose
particular inequalities and particular right-wingers and favor
particular left-wing positions but that's a different matter.
> Also, how do you plan to coexist with us libertarian individualists
> once a traditionalist restoration is made
I'm not sure what the question is. How does any proponent of a
particular social order plan to coexist with people who have a
fundamental objection to that kind of order?
Perhaps the issue is why libertarian individualism wouldn't be a
problem in a traditionalist society, constantly calling its traditions
into question, necessitating creation of an organized and eventually
centralized and bureaucratic system for defining and enforcing them,
and thereby turning them into principles of a bureaucratic state rather
than traditional modes of thought and behavior.
The answer I think is that if libertarian individualists got their way,
so that everything were stripped away from the state except its night
watchman functions, the practical consequence would be traditionalist
conservatism. Libertarian individualists would therefore have nothing
to stand on in opposing tradition. I think that in fact something of
the sort is the most likely way for traditionalism to be reestablished.
My basic view is that the bureaucratic welfare/civil rights state
doesn't work especially in the long run so we'll get libertarianism,
and then since unvarnished libertarianism doesn't work either we'll get
traditionalism.
Contract is not enough to get us through life, since we are all
children at some point, always run the risk of sickness and other
misfortune, and as discussed need to feel part of some larger order
essentially connected to our well-being. So if bureaucracy and the
all-disposing abstract "society" it represents aren't there to meet
those needs people will develop other institutions that do the job. If
contract won't do it, and bureaucracy isn't there, the evident
alternative is family, religion and other institutions that exist
through tradition.
For example: I've already argued that a libertarian society would turn
out to be a society with at least an implicit establishment of
religion, perhaps like the informally established Protestantism we had
in the U.S. until not so long ago. Further, in the absence of public
education the only people who would succeed and therefore the dominant
type would be those brought up in families that take the obligations of
family life very seriously. No social security would give parents all
the more reason to inculcate the need for strong family bonds, and no
welfare etc would mean that people would grow up viewing family bonds
as something that has to extend beyond the nuclear family.
So already we have as necessities in what started out as a libertarian
society family values and an informal religious establishment, both
institutions that depend on a strong social traditionalist streak
(compared with what we have today) to make sense and be effective. The
question then becomes what further features ideological or
institutional must be present to support those necessities. I suspect
that in the long run the religious establishment would become more
formal, inequalities among families would develop into a more distinct
hierarchy, and we would end up with something bearing a distinct
resemblance at least from today's viewpoint to the old regime.
>, and how would you make your peace with technology?
One possibility is something like what Hasidic Jews and the Amish have,
a social order based on family life and religious law that excludes
applications of technology that are disruptive of the order. There may
be other possibilities as well, but one is enough to dispose of the
theoretical point.
> Sorry, I don't mean to bother you
Obviously I wouldn't be composing these answers if it didn't suit me to
do so.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Fri May 9 21:54:48 1997
Subject: Re: Is Distributionism counter-revolutionary
To: x
Date: Fri, 9 May 1997 21:54:48 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To:
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Status: RO
>I would say first of all that populism has come in a multitude of
>forms, Left, Right, and center.
OK. It's enough for anything I've said or suggested that it have a
right-wing form. It does seem to me that in 1997 in the West populism
is a reactionary force since it opposes itself to the triumphant
liberal state. In 19th century Russia things may of course have been
different.
>if you do see traditionalism as the logical outcome of the breakdown of
>the "progressive" or social-democratic state, you face the fact that
>"freedom from the state" is an Enlightenment, or at least a modernist
>concept. This makes the issue of whether conservatism could "truck"
>with a modernist concept a lot harder.
Was it freedom from the state that was an Enlightenment concept or
freedom from kings, lords and bishops? In any case, once modernism and
the Enlightenment had turned the state into their champion "freedom
from the state" became a different sort of thing.
Traditionalist conservatism today must I think look back to a form of
society that existed before the state came to its current position of
all-pervading dominance and that in many ways has been destroyed by the
state. Consider that while medieval kings were expected to defend the
right neither they nor anyone else created the right through
legislation. Kings couldn't tax either -- taxes were a gift from the
estates of the realm. From a modern point of view the state therefore
had only a very imperfect existence. So "back to" doesn't necessarily
mean "back to statism."
>I think that traditionalism can coexist with individualism if
>traditionalism were limited to the realm of choice and persuation. But
>like radicalism, traditionalism's fraternal enemy, it refuses to do
>such.
Libertarians like liberals tend to think that what orders the social
world is some combination of the state (the law, bureaucracy, systematic
force, etc.) and choice and persuasion (the market, private life,
individual taste, wealth and autonomy). That view follows I think from
viewing man as a naturally asocial being. The social world consists of
individuals who do what they individually feel like doing unless there's
a system in place to force them to do otherwise. Social contract theory
is based on some such view.
The point of traditionalism is that man is a social animal who becomes
fully human by being a member of a particular society. A third
principle of social order is therefore possible, the culture and customs
traditional in a society that make a man growing up in the society what
he is. That third possibility is not essentially dependent on the
state, but it's not dependent on individual taste and judgement either.
Ordinary standards of politeness and honesty are an example of
traditional customs and attitudes that order society. Every society
must have them, but in specifics they differ from society to society and
so can exist only through the traditions of particular societies. In a
healthy society one would in a sense be free to ignore such things,
since in most respects they would not be enforceable by law, but not
really, since if you did no one would respect you or want to have
anything to do with you and your own upbringing would lead you to view
yourself as a skunk. Someone who ignored them wouldn't be what members
of the society think is a good man or even "one of us," so most people
wouldn't be tempted to transgress and if they did they'd regret it.
Standards of sexual morality and other standards relating to family life
or the mutual obligations of friends, kinsmen and neighbors are I think
necessarily of the same type.
>A traditionalism, as well as an environmentalism, which allows itself
>to be an escape for those who can not stand urban or bourgeois life,
>yet who desire to live in a scientific, progressive, and here's my
>neutral unbiased language...free society, is a force which may be a
>positive good for society.
A problem with this formulation is that public validity is part of the
essence of tradition.
>It may be Utopian but I repeat the immortal words of Rodney King,
>"Can't we all just...get along--please?"
The issue is what the principles of cooperation are to be. Radical
libertarians say contract law is enough, contemporary liberals say
there has to be a lot of bureaucracy too, and traditionalist
conservatives say you're not going to get a tolerable society without a
lot of reliance on tradition. All three are intolerant in the sense
that people living in their societies are going to find life difficult
if they ignore the governing principles.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri May 9 22:08:00 EDT 1997
Article: 9707 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Are distributism, populism, etc. counterrevolutionary?
Date: 8 May 1997 18:20:11 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 69
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Here are some extracts from correspondence with someone who thought I
had included lots of stuff in the resource lists and on my
traditionalism page that aren't really CR. Any comments?
> I question your inclusion of Distributionism and populism in the
> catagory of counter-revolution, right along with the notion of a
> community of individualists (that's my territory) and the Montgomery
> Constitution which was as much revolutionary as
> counter-revolutionary. These are generally pro-Enlightenment, or at
> least pro-modernist.
The "revolution" I think consists in the establishment of a fully
rational social order that can be known to be such by inspection.
Distributivists believe in family and widely distributed property
ownership, both of which make full rationalization impossible. They
don't like the sovereignty of either the bureaucracy or the universal
market. They are therefore reactionary.
Populists like family, locality, and accustomed ways of doing things,
and don't like world markets, bureaucracies, or rule by experts and the
academically accredited. They're reactionary as well -- obstacles to
social rationalization.
The Montgomery Constitution as I understand it was intended to preserve
a decentralized agrarian social order marked by landed property that
supported some mixture of local social hierarchies and the independent
families and local communities the distributists like. It was
established in opposition to Northern industrialism and national
centralization, both of which were part of the process of
rationalizing the social order. It was therefore reactionary as well.
[and then:]
> > Distributivists believe in family and widely distributed property
> > ownership, both of which make full rationalization impossible.
> > They don't like the sovereignty of either the bureaucracy or the
> > universal market. They are therefore reactionary.
>
> Are these not the goals of the Enlightenment social theorists, from
> Paine to Proudhon?
An attempt to return to the political thought of 150-200+ years back
would I think plainly be reactionary. The aspirations of men like
Paine had further implications that became clearer in the subsequent
development of liberal and left-wing thought. The revolution
progresses, and to attempt a return would be to attack it in its
essence.
The earlier stages of liberalism/leftism were not stable the first time
around and they wouldn't be stable if the revolution were reversed and
they were recreated. For example, men need to feel they are at home in
the world, that they live in a world that somehow has an essential
connection to their well-being. That means that something like a
notion of providence must be part of the basis of any social order not
based on extended families, clans, tribes or the like. A fully secular
state that accepts any sort of individualism must therefore be a
welfare state. So in getting rid of the welfare state you will in the
end find that you get the rest of the program of the radical religious
right as well.
> I ... wonder if "populism" is not a strangely egalitarian concept for
> traditional conservatism
Sure. A distinguishing feature of populism is that it doesn't really
work for anyone, not even itself. That's why I treat it as related to
but not part of traditionalist conservatism.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Sat May 10 08:37:06 1997
Subject: Re: Is Distributionism counter-revolutionary
To: x
Date: Sat, 10 May 1997 08:37:06 -0400 (EDT)
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> > once modernism and the Enlightenment had turned the state into
> > their champion "freedom from the state" became a different sort of
> > thing.
>
> Hmm...Could you expound on that?
The basic moral principle of the modern western state is maximizing
individual satisfactions, whatever they may happen to be, consistent
with (1) the maintenance of the system and (2) the aspiration of equal
treatment for all persons and desires. That's the meaning of modern
democracy, modern human rights, and modern economic policy. It's
grossly inconsistent with traditionalism, so traditionalist
conservatives view radical reduction in the role of the state as a
necessity.
> Medieval kings did not have the centralizing power that axial
> emporers or post-medieval monarchs. But they would have been
> powerful if they could have been.
Sure. Traditionalist conservatism views man as a social animal. It
follows that it's destructive to make a principle of simply letting
monarchs or anyone else have what they want. A medieval king might
have wanted to be Genghis Khan but that doesn't mean it would have been
conservative to let him be so.
> > Libertarians like liberals tend to think that what orders the social
> > world is some combination of the state (the law, bureaucracy, systematic
> > force, etc.) and choice and persuasion (the market, private life,
> > individual taste, wealth and autonomy). That view follows I think from
> > viewing man as a naturally asocial being.
>
> Not at all. Being social and being coerced are two very different
> things, logically they are not synonimous.
Sure. The point of traditionalist conservatism is that the social is
no more synonymous with the contractual than with the coerced. What
makes us a society is the things we have in common before we contract.
By "naturally asocial being" I meant that both right and left libs view
man as fully human before he is a member of any society. Libs say the
individual is prior to the social. Fascists and for that matter
postmoderns say the social is prior to the individual. Trads say each
needs the other and neither can be reduced to the other. Rejection of
reductionism by the way is the reason for their rejection of
rationalism.
> I tend to think that the state may in fact not be necessary, even the
> "minimalist" state that most libertarians subscribe to. Read "The
> Machinery of Freedom" by David Friedman to see what I consider to be
> a strong possibility of securing liberty better than the State.
Don't rely on David Friedman, study the Icelandic sagas yourself to see
how the best-documented stateless society actually worked. Men were no
doubt free, but not in the way to which American libertarians seem to
aspire in 1997. Social order was maintained not by a state, because
there wasn't one, and not simply by contract, because men won't die
simply for contract, but by moral institutions such as honor,
friendship, kinship, and the concept of law. It wasn't possible for
someone to decide that those moral institutions were a lot of hogwash
and ignore them and keep living in Iceland for long. It's notable that
when Christian missionaries arrived the Icelanders came to the verge of
civil war -- they didn't think it possible to live together in peace
without a single public order based on a single religion.
> I personally would question the merits of relying on conformity for
> morals. Slavery was never ended by conformists, nor were most of
> your really radical traditional conservatives conformist, John Adams,
> Fisher Ames, and many others were flat-out eccentric.
There is conformity and conformity. Right and left libs tend to view
all conformity as external and oppressive -- the submission of the
essentially nonsocial self to something alien. Trads view at least
some conformity as constitutive of concrete humanity. Someone who was
a member of no society, who was loyal to nothing, who recognized no
standards shared with others as binding wouldn't really be a human
being. For one thing he couldn't be a rational animal because
rationality requires acceptance of evaluative standards understood as
objective and authoritative, and therefore independent of individual
choice.
> > public validity is part of the essence of tradition.
>
> I don't quite understand what you mean.
A purely optional and private practice like stamp collecting is not a
tradition even if there are a number of people who do it over a long
period of time. Something becomes a tradition when it is generally
recognized as the appropriate and right thing to do, so that if it were
omitted people would feel there was something missing. That general
recognition as something at least mildly necessary is what I mean by
public validity.
> So let each formulate the rules for their own members, and let common
> law be that which restrains harm to life, liberty, and property.
So you have a larger society based on common law embracing a variety of
particularisms. I wonder though about the moral unity required to
define the common law and keep the rulers answerable to the people.
Rights of life, liberty and property can't be defined concretely
without regard to any particular moral tradition. A common-law
tribunal composed of Confucius, Mohammed, Thomas Aquinas and John Locke
wouldn't necessarily rule unanimously on all points. Also, government
that is responsible to the people can't exist unless there is a people
with common moral conceptions enabling it to deliberate and act in
common.
I think that what your vision in fact leads to is a government
responsible to no one and based on no general principles enforcing
whatever law is easiest. Luckily history shows us what that amounts
to: a society like those traditional in the middle east, in which one
particularism - a dynasty - rules despotically over a collection of
other inward-turning particularisms, basing its rule on the rights of
the conqueror and the habit of submission, extracting what taxes it can
subject to inefficiency, laziness and force of custom, and enforcing
crude public order by crude methods. As it happens, I think that is
the kind of political world we are headed toward. So it seems we have
certain similarities in outlook.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun May 11 06:57:15 EDT 1997
Article: 9728 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: conservatism and utopistic thinking.
Date: 11 May 1997 06:52:02 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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rafael cardenas writes:
>As public space is privatized, corporations' private police forces have
>increased discretion to use force.
My point remains that corporations neither profess nor desire to deal
with the whole. Neither a shopping mall nor a private school nor a
privatized jail is a whole society.
>Surely the earliest human rights treaties go back to the beginning of
>this century; some human rights conventions (e.g. laws of war), though
>not based in formal treaties, go back to the European Middle Ages and
>to some extent to Classical Greece.
Human rights conventions, such as the ones on discrimination and on
children, that require continuous radical restructuring of every society
on earth are a novelty. The ones on laws of war of course are
international conventions dealing with international affairs.
>The world conferences on women are talking-shops with little effect
Little current effect, but so what? Establishing the moral nature of
the political world is far more important than any particular act
within it.
>I agree they represent an attempt to enforce certain current American
>prejudices on other parts of the world.
Nothing so trivial. Making the universal market and the universal
bureaucracy the sole principles of social order is far more than a
current American prejudice.
>it derives from public opinion, as stirred up by the media, and the
>elite try to divert it
You treat the media as one thing and the ruling elite as something else.
Ruling elites are of course not monolithic, but they have a certain
coherence over against the people. That is especially true now, when
elites view it as their role to continuously to remake the people.
>The elite are far more interested in preserving the economic viability
>of the arms industries than in human rights.
For a governing class there is a difference between immediate concerns
and constitutional fundamentals. "Human rights" is now a necessary part
of the justification for rule and the principle by which the elite's
international law absolutely trumps national law and everything else,
for example popular desire and custom. Such things are indispensible.
>Corporations still exploit to the full the vestigial loyalties of their
>middle-ranking employees. And mercenaries may 'save the world for pay'.
Such vestigial loyalties don't motivate radical self-sacrifice, and
they're not growing in strength. It seems to me that rule based on
money and mercenaries would end up as simple military rule. The
question would then be whether the imperators prefer welfarism or the
divine invisible hand as the public justification for their rule. It
seems to me the former; soldiers believe in doing things in a
straightforward way by command.
>We should gain a good deal if the present elite culture of ultra-
>busyness and workaholism was replaced by a greater willingness simply
>to rest on their laurels.
In the end dreams of remaking the world give way to personal corruption.
Consider the Clinton and Brezhnev regimes.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sun May 11 06:57:16 EDT 1997
Article: 9729 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Culture wars
Date: 11 May 1997 06:54:56 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References: <5kf9kt$av7@panix.com> <19970504101028749663@deepblue5.salamander.com> <567725050wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <5krdes$57r@panix.com> <28308088wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
rafael cardenas writes:
>But if true values are not immanent, they cannot be deduced from the
>past any more than they can from man's choice.
To be useable and remain transcendent, such values must somehow be
present in the world but only here and there. Current theorizing cannot
be the guide because in general there can be nothing special about the
present or current theorizers. The two conditions of transcendence and
usability are better satisfied if it is supposed that there have been
particular episodes of revelation that we know about through traditions
to which we must submit.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Mon May 12 20:21:29 1997
Subject: Re: Is Distributionism counter-revolutionary
To: x
Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 20:21:29 -0400 (EDT)
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> > If you're big and strong and have uncontrollable impulses and not
> > much foresight you'll find that minimal statism grossly interferes
> > with your life.
>
> Only if you interfere with others first.
Libertarians tend to believe there is a neutral definition of
"aggression." Don't see it. Are indecent exposure or blasphemy acts of
aggression? Is counterfeiting? Tax evasion? Fraud? Adultery?
Stealing from someone who'll never know the difference? Stealing a
loaf of bread if you're starving? Committing rape if you're hard up?
The issue as I see it is that you can't define "interference with
others" or "initiation of the use of force" without first assigning
rights, and how you assign rights depends on what you think is the good
life. Some might think they have a right to an environment free from
sexual harassment, others to an environment free from sexual
immorality. There's some point to each view, since one might think
that the best life can be lived only in one or the other evironment,
and if so to destroy the environment could be reasonably thought an
attack on the rights of all.
> Can we not evolve spiritually to a more evolved state?
It could happen. We could also retrogress. Or some could do one and
some the other. Government has to deal with the least evolved among
and within us. Also, evolution doesn't negate what came before. We
still have mass, shape, chemical composition etc. just like the
primordial minerals. Laws that assumed we had none of those qualities,
or none of the qualities we share with plants and lower animals, would
be unsuccessful.
> But I think that your point seems to suggest that social life
> requires force, and I say that the less of it the better our social
> lives. I think that if you agree with me on the previous point, you
> ought to rethink libertarianism and give it another try.
Less force is better than more force, but that doesn't mean that
reduction of force should always be at the top of the list.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Tue May 13 08:33:03 1997
Subject: Re: Is Distributionism counter-revolutionary
To: x
Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 08:33:03 -0400 (EDT)
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>> Libertarians tend to believe there is a neutral definition of
>> "aggression." Don't see it. Are indecent exposure or blasphemy acts of
>> aggression? Is counterfeiting? Tax evasion? Fraud? Adultery?
>> Stealing from someone who'll never know the difference? Stealing a
>> loaf of bread if you're starving? Committing rape if you're hard up?
>
>Which of these would you define as aggression? Understandable crimes?
>The right of the individual? You tell me. I think that libertarianism
>not only grounds itself in logic, but also in common sense.
As I see it, abstract reason is not nearly sufficient so as you suggest
there must be an appeal to "common sense" -- to commonly-accepted
understandings of what the things are by which the men of a particular
society live and of what violates those things. If that's the appeal
though I don't think libertarianism will be the outcome. It's
notoriously non-commonsensical.
What we live by becomes our common sense. Man lives neither by bread
alone nor by property rights and contract alone, and the same is true
of whole societies.
>All communites can coexist within a geographic area if they respect
>each other, meaning that no force is initiated.
It cannot be determined who is initiating force without a prior
determination of right and wrong which in turn depends on one's view of
social life and the nature of man. If my neighbor isn't making his
contribution to the Block Betterment Fund, and as president of the BBF I
go into his garage and take his lawnmower as a contribution in kind, and
he sees me and stops me by force, who has initiated the use of force? I
claim that since he didn't make his contribution his property has become
the BBF's up to the value of the contribution he didn't make.
>Property of individuals is a necessary convenience for all societies,
>libertarian or not, even Russian communism could not rid itself of the
>need for property recogntion. Libertarianism simply officializes this
>as a principle, upholding the right to property which, in some limited
>form at least, all systems recognize.
Lots of other things are necessary principles as well -- some form of
government able to vindicate its determinations through the use of
force, respect for a this-worldly authority beyond the individual's will
and intentions, a common understanding of politics that must rest on a
common understanding of man and the world. One could attempt to
construct a political system by taking any of those principles and
making it the sole principle. I don't see the point of the attempt
except as a thought experiment though.
>is government the most effective means of dealing with the least
>evolved?
To say government is necessary is to say that in some situations it is
the most effective means.
>Non-libertarian philosophies invite the most dominating personalities
>to rule over others, in my view.
Why? In a divine-right monarchy it's the man who's born king who rules.
The introduction of the principle of liberty would liberate the
dominating personalities so they could do their thing.
>The problem with traditionalism is that it ends up becoming the
>"nihilistic anarchism" of the Right.
Does your reliance on "common sense" have the same problem? The point
of "common sense" is that many things of substance can't be reduced to
demonstrative reasoning. The wild nonconformists of your ideal state
aren't going to have the same common sense.
>traditionalism can go further, much further, and has been used to
>justify Southern slavery, anti-Semitism, and a host of other evils.
The alternative to traditionalism is rational constructivism, which has
been used to justify far greater evils. I suppose another possibility
would be radical irrationalism, the triumph of the will as an ultimate
principle, which has problems as well. You like libertarianism, but I
don't see why it is the form of constructivism that will win once
constructivism is accepted.
Still, your question raises an issue: can traditionalism do any good if
traditions are felt to be external rules to be studied and applied
formally? Does the fact that rational constructivism and radical
irrationalism exist, so that traditionalism has had to become an
explicit doctrine, show that things have already deteriorated beyond
repair? That was the Taoist objection against the Confucianists in
China, and in fact it was the Legalists who eventually won with the
Ch'in triumph in 221 B.C.
My response is that man is naturally a social animal man and therefore a
traditionalist animal since society can exist only through traditions.
When pressed, the role of the traditionalist is less to force compliance
with a particular set of traditions by any means necessary than to work
for conditions in which tradition becomes the primary ordering principle
in society.
Today that means an end to direct dependence on the state for solutions
to the problems of individuals. It means devolution of power --
basically, emphasis on federalism and private property -- to permit
local social order to correspond more closely to particular ways of
life. It means fighting the view that religion, sex, gender, ethnicity
and personal moral standards must be treated as purely private matters
with no legitimate relevance to public concerns, since the market and
the state bureaucracy are the only principles of social order such a
view permits. So mostly it means getting rid of big government and
undermining social constructivist views.
Today traditionalist goals have many similarities to libertarian goals,
especially with regard to practical institutional measures. Most of the
differences regard a different understanding of human nature -- if you
had some ideal anarchical situation that permitted man's true nature to
manifest itself, what would you get? Would it look more like
anarchocapitalism or neotribalism? There are also of course practical
differences, in particular those related to what I think some
libertarians call the "local tyranny" issue. Is it to be states' rights
and local community rights, or individual rights enforced by some
central system?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: culture wars
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970513195805.006d8568@swva.net> from "Seth
Williamson" at May 13, 97 07:58:05 pm
Status: RO
Seth saith:
> Who was it said that all political disputes finally get down to
> religion?
Chesterbelloc were fond of saying that sort of thing. I'm sure there
have been many others.
> the typical liberal might think of himself as quite willing to
> believe in God's order or a natural order--it's just that he believes
> that the troubles in this sublunary world boil down to artificial
> distortions of that ideal order (racism, sexism, "repression,"
> whatever).
When I try to understand liberal religion it always seems to be turning
into something else. There is an ideal order that is infinitely
different from anything known to have existed, but it's wholly
this-worldly, and it's going to be brought about by human effort, but
the effort seems to include abandonment of all restraints.
Liberal religion is certainly hard to pin down. It's both pro- and
anti-technological. It likes both tribalism and radical individualism,
the matriarchal principle and the abolition of gender. And so on. The
best I can come up with is that it is the rejection of definite
principle, of concrete and stable meanings independent of our will, of
the incarnation of the transcendent in the finite. As such it is
radically anti-Christian, but it claims of course to absorb and point
to the fulfillment of everything.
> > Conservatives believe that desires and aversions must be judged
> > by standards whose origin transcends human purposes.
>
> As a practical matter, I have found it impossible to get a convinced
> liberal to concede that there might BE such standards.
It seems the key difference.
> Would you mind if I posted this with credit on a different list?
Go ahead! By the way, I've posted it with links added at the end at
http://www.panix.com/~jk/culture_wars.html
I wanted to figure out some way of integrating the links with the text
but it looks like that will be a lot of work. Maybe in the future.
> I am reading a book ostensibly on the disaster of psychological legal
> testimony but with far deeper ramifications called "Whores of the
> Court." It is an attack by an experimental psychologist, root and
> branch, on so-called clinical psychology. Unfortunately the writing
> style and overall plan are not the most felicitous, but it is worth
> looking at. As I read your analysis of the culture wars above, at
> several points I was reminded of the status that progressives assign
> to psychology today. The clinical side of it is about as scientific
> as mesmerism, but it has been a valuable propaganda tool re this
> matter of what's good = what I desire, the wicked effects of
> "repression," etc.
Clinical psychology seems inconsistent in principle with the notion of
legal responsibility. If everything is caused then blame makes no
sense. It's not a conflict the legal system has dealt with very well.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Wed May 14 21:58:48 EDT 1997
Article: 9747 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Culture wars
Date: 14 May 1997 21:29:06 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <5ldot2$cja@panix.com>
References: <5kf9kt$av7@panix.com> <19970504101028749663@deepblue5.salamander.com> <567725050wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <5krdes$57r@panix.com> <28308088wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> <5l48i0$nog@panix.com> <556203139wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk>
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In <556203139wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf379@bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>> The two conditions of transcendence and usability are better
>> satisfied if it is supposed that there have been particular episodes
>> of revelation that we know about through traditions to which we must
>> submit.
>That covers my point, but it enforces an unchanging tradition, rather
>than an organic conservatism.
The understanding and application of the revelation could develop over
time. You're right that episodic revelation is inconsistent with pure
organic conservatism but pure organic conservatism is probably
impossible anyway.
>To a rationalistic age like the present, however, there is no ground
>for supposing that past ages are more likely to be correct in their
>specific revelations than the present age.
If revelations are rare and of permanent interest the great bulk of
revelation that is important to us would be in the distant past.
>And the development of the natural sciences gives rise to the rash
>presumption that knowledge is increasing in other spheres also.
I thought we were talking about ways of thought in which the
transcendent plays an important role. The development of natural
science has given rise to the view that knowledge is something
this-worldly that we create. The assimilation of all knowledge to that
natural science gives us therefore promotes the belief in progress by
destroying that in transcendence.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Wed May 14 21:58:49 EDT 1997
Article: 9748 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: conservatism and utopistic thinking.
Date: 14 May 1997 21:56:36 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 59
Message-ID: <5ldqgk$hm6@panix.com>
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In <704351788wnr@bloxwich.demon.co.uk> raf379@bloxwich.demon.co.uk (rafael cardenas) writes:
>But under the principle of subsidiarity, no layer of government need
>profess to deal with the whole.
Government as a whole must, while corporations collectively only want
what profits them individually. Government must therefore be something
other than a set of committee of corporations.
>And since corporate policies tend to be formulated by an
>interchangeable elite with a single ethos, the fragmentation of formal
>ownership makes no difference to the threat.
Ownership is not merely formal. There's nothing formal about whose
pocket the dollars end up in. Fragmentation of ownership means real
conflicts of interest.
>> Human rights conventions, such as the ones on discrimination and on
>> children, that require continuous radical restructuring of every
>> society on earth are a novelty.
>Only a relative novelty: most surely date from the 1940s or earlier.
Most are later, but you're right that the principle was established
with the UN and the International Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
What we have now politically and socially is what won in 1945.
>> Making the universal market and the universal bureaucracy the sole
>> principles of social order is far more than a current American
>> prejudice.
>The support for the universal market has no popular depth outside the
>US;
Which supports my view that the "universal bureaucracy" component of
the NWO will at length be the dominant partner.
>The specific causes supported by your universal bureaucracy (e.g.
>feminism) are largely of American origin, even if they now have wider
>support elsewhere.
We're the leading edge of societal evolution. And feminism and for
that matter multiculturalism certainly do have wider support elsewhere.
Are there non-feminist governments in the developed world? When I was
in the UK last summer it was clear multiculturalism had taken firm root
there. I understand the same is true elsewhere in Europe, more in some
places and less in others. The EU after all necessitates
multiculturalism.
>I still think that the demand for human rights has strong popular
>support in the West.
Naturally there must be some popular support for human rights for it to
become one of the stated foundations for the NWO. The popular interest
in straightening things out in distant countries is I think limited
though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Wed May 14 06:52:27 1997
Subject: Re: Is Distributionism counter-revolutionary
To:
Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 06:52:27 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To:
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It seems to me our discussion is falling into a rut, which may show
we're nearing the end of our ability to say anything useful to each
other, at least in this format and at the present time. I'll only
comment on a few of your points.
>I think that an appeal to common sense, love of liberty, and compassion
>will appeal to libertarian sensibilities, the same vein that Tom Paine
>tapped in to when he helped to shatter the ancient world forever.
To me this seems equivalent to a statement that libertarianism is the
system that works out best and people will come to understand that.
That kind of statement is OK of course but it doesn't persuade anyone
not already a libertarian.
>If society chooses to be crass and purely commercial, then it is not
>love for you or I to force our higher value system, however upset we
>might both be at the level of degredation which is accepted as popular
>culture in many cases, on an unwilling person or populace.
The issue of forcing a culture on someone is not so simple. What an act
is within a culture depends on convention, custom and expectation, so a
few people can force great changes on everyone by violating those
things. If people who get together are in the habit of talking about
Southern Sung landscapes, and then some people start making obscene
comments and animal noises whenever Chinese art is mentioned, and the
majority finds means of shutting them up or excluding them, it's not
obvious who's forcing what on whom.
>> as president of the BBF I go into his garage and take his lawnmower
>> as a contribution in kind, and he sees me and stops me by force, who
>> has initiated the use of force?
>
>You have, unless there was some sort of contract violated, which
>should have made provisions for arbtitration.
I haven't used force in any simple sense. All I did was walk up a
driveway and take a lawnmower out. Then someone stopped me by force.
Your response seems dogmatic to me.
>> The introduction of the principle of liberty would liberate the
>> dominating personalities so they could do their thing.
>
>That's the principle of electoral politics, not of liberty.
Among other things, liberty means liberty to do things that affect other
people. The libertarian claim is that as long as libertarian property
rights are observed no combination of influences on other people can
amount to domination. It seems to me that in business and in informal
politics -- family politics, organizational politics, intellectual
politics, whatever -- dominating personalities have plenty of scope to
satisfy their drives and plenty of people end up feeling dominated.
>Common sense is rational agreement and contract, a faith in human
>nature.
That's a libertarian's definition of common sense. Others might find it
commonsensical to be skeptical about human nature, and to assume that
discussions will get nowhere and contracts will be shaky unless there is
unity on important points that precedes the discussions and goes beyond
anything explicitly agreed on.
>> The alternative to traditionalism is rational constructivism, which has
>> been used to justify far greater evils.
>
>Like what?
Consider the Soviet Union.
>> Is it to be states' rights and local community rights, or individual
>> rights enforced by some central system?
>
>Individual rights, first and foremost.
And who will guard the guardians?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Thu May 15 05:30:33 1997
Subject: Re: Is Distributionism counter-revolutionary
To: x
Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 05:30:33 -0400 (EDT)
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> I think that property rights ("get out of this museum", saith the
> owner) provides the perfect convention for settling that issue.
It settles the issue only if there is to be no common culture or public
life.
> You initiated the act of theft which is a recognizable act of force
> in any society which recognizes property.
That assumes that the claim of the Block Betterment Fund to material
support from all homeowners is invalid.
> By the way, what country are you from, anyways?
The U.S. How about you?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri May 16 06:00:13 EDT 1997
Article: 214083 of rec.arts.books
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Some of Philip Nikolayev's poems
Date: 15 May 1997 05:43:43 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 14
Message-ID: <5lelsf$n8n@panix.com>
References: <337506C6.5F0A@stanford.edu> <5le854$5li$1@skynet.eecs.umich.edu>
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In <5le854$5li$1@skynet.eecs.umich.edu> bhattach@skynet.eecs.umich.edu (sayan bhattacharyya) writes:
>>Perhaps our language only comes alive in these times when it is
>>borrowed by those who must work to make it work for them.
>Any speculations on why this is happening at this particular
>time in history?
All our lives cheap mass-produced words pour over us. We learn to
ignore them, but when we use a foreign language we have to pay
attention again.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri May 16 06:00:14 EDT 1997
Article: 214135 of rec.arts.books
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Some of Philip Nikolayev's poems
Date: 15 May 1997 15:33:27 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 17
Message-ID: <5lfoe7$7ik@panix.com>
References: <5lfii6$eqc@news02.comp.pge.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <5lfii6$eqc@news02.comp.pge.com> Dylan Bryan-Dolman <@comp.pge.com> writes:
>> All our lives cheap mass-produced words pour over us. We learn to
>> ignore them, but when we use a foreign language we have to pay
>> attention again.
>Any hints on why those cheap, mass-produced words have so strongly
>influenced the style of many of our best writers like Pynchon and
>Rushdie?
It's all in what you do with them I suppose. Writers can turn
difficulties to account. That doesn't mean they aren't difficulties
that make good writing less common and the ability to step back from
the language in a way a native speaker could not an asset.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri May 16 08:20:24 EDT 1997
Article: 9762 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: conservatism and utopistic thinking.
Date: 16 May 1997 08:18:39 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 97
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X-Newsposter: trn 4.0-test55 (26 Feb 97)
rafael cardenas writes:
>> Government as a whole must [deal with "the whole"], while
>> corporations collectively only want what profits them individually.
>> Government must therefore be something other than a set of committee
>> of corporations.
>
>Why cannot government be conducted simply for corporate profit? It's
>happened before, e.g. in 18th-century Bengal. In the UK, local and
>regional quangos have boards dominated by businessmen ... they are
>precisely a 'set of committees of corporations'.
Quangos are irrelevant since I was speaking of government as a whole.
The British East India Company is far more in point, but I know too
little about it to comment. The situation has I believe always been
understood as anomalous. Also, is it really true that the 100 years of
its rule, while the Mills and Macaulay were involved for example, were
conducted as you say "simply for corporate profit?"
The difficulty is that a government is a moral unity that depends on
consent. Even governments based on conquest normally try to the extent
possible to gain the consent of the conquered. Things go easier that
way. A government has to explain to its members why they should work
for it with its interests at heart and to the ruled why they should obey
it. Saying "work for our interests because that makes big bucks for our
stockholders" is OK so long as the corporation is part of a larger
institutional and moral world in which loyal fulfillment of contractual
obligations has its place, but it doesn't seem sufficient as a final
explanation to employees and as an explanation to the people it's
extraordinarily poor.
I suppose my point is that it's even harder to base government on
property rights and contract than to base society as a whole on those
things. It doesn't give you enough solidarity to work with.
>And though there are conflicts of interest between corporations, they
>may be outweighed by the common interest of corporations vis a vis the
>public and the individual.
One of the things that's created the current economic situation is the
increasing difficulty of dealing with rogue corporations and financiers
-- the Michael Milkens of the world or what have you. That's one of the
reasons for downsizing, middle management job losses etc. It has
become much harder for established business interests to maintain a
comfortable business environment for themselves.
>Corporate control of the media, by contrast, ensures that any 'welfare
>bureaucracy' component can be vilified at will.
I don't see this in the media here. The NWO that the _New York Times_,
CBS and _Newsweek_ prefer would combine market and welfare state. Why
shouldn't it? The media are themselves a big business with its own
interests and they make themselves more important by turning things
into public issues to be decided politically instead of private issues
to be decided by the economic calculations of the particular players
involved. Also, "business leaders" by nature it seems are poorly
suited to Gramscian struggles. Their concerns are too particular, one
might even say short-sighted.
>That's so, becauss the UK is most easliy influenced by American ideas.
>But [feminism and multiculturalism have] little effect outside large
>cities.
It took a while here too, but all you need is some legal principles and
a government bureaucracy and you'll be amazed what a few local
activists can do. It helps of course for the media to be run from the
large cities and the educational establishment to be on board.
>My impression is that it's strongest in UK, Netherlands, and
>Scandinavia, weak in France (hence the attacks on Muslims there), and
>relatively weak in Germany and most Mediterranean countries.
We shall see how things develop. My impression is that it's an overall
tendency that swamps local particularisms. A few straws in the wind
I've noticed: PC German (you can't address students generally as
"Studenten" any more, it has to be "Studenten und Studentinnen"),
growing support in Germany for abandoning the ethnic definition of
German nationality, the recent "Miss Italy" contest in which a black
contestant won and many influential commentators approved because it
showed that Italy could be multicultural just like the big boys,
questions about religious symbolism in Italian schools based on the
presence of Muslims etc. there.
>> The EU after all necessitates multiculturalism.
>
>Only to a limited extent, as between European peoples. The EU is now
>adopting a 'fortress europe' policy towards immigration, and resists
>the admission of Turkey to membership.
So if the fortress Europe policy is actually carried out
multiculturalism is to apply only to Norwegians, Irishmen, Frenchmen,
Greeks etc., together with whatever immigrants are already there, and
the result is to be a pan-European culture that will maintain its
coherence over against the rest of the world. Who knows?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri May 16 15:25:33 EDT 1997
Article: 9763 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Culture wars
Date: 16 May 1997 08:21:14 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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Message-ID: <5lhjfq$jf4@panix.com>
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X-Newsposter: trn 4.0-test55 (26 Feb 97)
rafael cardenas writes:
>> >To a rationalistic age like the present, however, there is no ground
>> >for supposing that past ages are more likely to be correct in their
>> >specific revelations than the present age.
>>
>> If revelations are rare and of permanent interest the great bulk of
>> revelation that is important to us would be in the distant past.
>
>But the protasis is an assumption, isn't it?
It seems a reasonable one. To the extent revelation becomes continual
and of merely local and temporary interest it ceases to relate to
something that transcends ordinary life. It becomes part of the day-to-
day this-and-that. So views that emphasize the importance of the
transcendent and of its revelation will I think tend to say that
revelation is rare and each episode is permanently to be treasured.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat May 17 13:29:10 EDT 1997
Article: 9770 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: The Demonization of Suburbia
Date: 17 May 1997 13:26:51 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 55
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In <5lj5gn$eqt$1@nnrp01.primenet.com> greula@primenet.com (Mike Snider) writes:
>Late 19th century America resembled today in many aspects, especially
>that of crime and violence. Read any historical crime book and you
>will find the exact same pathologies around today back then , for
>example, gun toting inner city kids, rampant murders and muggings,
>blatant abuses of government power against the poor and working
>classes, race riots, terrorism, etc. As the social protection that
>America's attempt at socialism provided is being cut back, the
>violence that has characterized this nation from day one is returning
>more and more.
For a historical perspective on crime rates _Historical Statistics of
the United States_, supplemented by the _Statistical Abstract of the
United States_, and Gertrude Himmelfarb's _The Demoralization of
Society_ are useful. They tell a rather different story.
The English statistics Mrs. Himmelfarb gives are far more complete than
any American statistics that are available. Since your view that
socialism promotes social order does not seem to apply only to America
they seem relevant. What those statistics show is a rate of indictable
(that is to say serious) offenses of about 480 per 100,000 population
in 1857, when the most reliable and consistent series of statistics
started. That declined gradually to 250 by 1901, and then began to
increase in the mid-1920s, to 400 by 1931, 900 in 1941, about 1000 in
1955, 1750 in 1961, 3400 in 1971, 5600 on 1981, and 10,000 in 1991.
A similar but not identical American index stood a little under 2000 in
1960, when it first became available. It doubled within the decade and
tripled by 1980, since when it has gone up and down but has shown no
clear direction. American homicide statistics go back to the beginning
of this century, when the national rate was 1.2 per 100,000 population.
That shot up to almost 10 during prohibition and then dropped to under
5 by the 50s and early 60s and then shot up, more than doubling between
1965 and 1980.
The continental experience also seems relevant. According to Heidenson
and Farrell, eds., _Crime in Europe_ (Routledge, 1991) crime rates
increased 6 to 7-fold in most Western European countries between 1955
and 1990.
If you look at these statistics it's hard to believe that inequalities
in wealth or the absence of socialism explain crime. Welfare-state
egalitarianism seems to be associated with it though.
>Newspaper stories during the early depression talked of kids carrying
>guns and the like
According to the _Historical Statistics of the United States_ there
were *very* few arrests of juveniles for serious crimes at that times.
In the 50s when people worried about juvenile delinquency it really was
a novelty they were seeing.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Mon May 19 07:48:59 1997
Subject: Re: Remarks on "Culture Wars"
To: z
Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 07:48:59 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: z
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Thanks for the comments!
> Society is not something men make and remake, and fundamental
> social institutions limit will and desire rather than express them.
>one has ruled out in advance the possibility that one expresses one's
>will and desire when one is in accord with fundamental social
>institutions. While it is true at some level that there is an
>irremediable conflict between one's will and desire and fundamental
>social institutions (insofar as one's will and desire tends toward the
>merely individual), I think you concede too much to the progressive
>position by opposing expression and limitation.
The thought was that for progressives social institutions are to be
subservient to actual will and desire subject to practicalities of
aggregation and maybe formal criteria such as universalizability while
conservatives believe in a substantive transcendent standard. You are
right that the issue is complicated -- aggregation and
universalizability do limit will and desire, which is why Sade is still
with us and why the 60s New Left hated liberals, and conservatives tend
to believe that the Good toward which fundamental social institutions
are to be oriented is what all men really want. So I will rethink the
wording.
> conservatives understand the family -- man, wife and children -- as
> an institution that is natural and blessed by God. They therefore
> accept as part of a good society customs and social attitudes that
> strengthen families and define what they are.
>
>There is an apparent conflict here between the claim that customs and
>social attitudes can strengthen and define families and the earlier
>claim that society is not something that men make and remake. How is
>defining what families are not a making?
To the extent society is natural or willed by God social customs and
attitudes are so as well. Compare the principle of respect for life --
the fact it is commanded by natural and divine law does not mean we
should not accept institutions and attitudes that define and inculcate
respect for the demands of that principle. Such institutions and
attitudes are necessary for the principle to attain its full effect.
> In contrast, progressives understand families as institutions that
> have grown up to serve human purposes.
>
>Would a conservative necessarily disagree with this claim? He would
>certainly regard it as one-sided, insofar as "human" means _merely_
>human.
A conservative would I think disagree that the institution and the
purposes it serves are things we could have chosen otherwise. Maybe I
should put "contingent" in front of "institution" and "actual" in front
of "human."
>Nor do I think he would want to deny that the institution of the
>family has taken different forms in the course of history, in the sense
>that the principle of the family as a fundamental and necessary social
>institution has been realized in diverse ways.
Agreed. Man-wife-children does seem universally to be a basic social
unit, but sometimes polygyny or divorce is permitted, sometimes man and
family stay in the patriarchal household subject to its authority,
sometimes matrilocalism is customary, etc., etc., etc.
>Perhaps a way of disambiguating the contrast would be to indicate at the
>very beginning the fundamental difference in how each position conceives
>of human fulfillment. Would not the conservative want to say that the
>progressive position does not permit human fulfillment in the proper
>(i.e. conservative-religious) sense?
That would amount to an expanded discussion of what it means to say that
the good is not reducible to human purposes and might well be useful. I
will consider it.
> The permanent things on which the good life depends are known with
> the aid of tradition, which accumulates and carries forward the
> thought and experience of many men and many generations. Respect
> for tradition is therefore fundamental for sound politics, morals
> and religion.
>To the extent that the conservative affirms the existence of this
>twofold tradition, though, would he not have to admit that horizontal
>tradition can hand down dross as well as gold, just insofar as it is
>horizontal?
Tradition can't be authoritative and therefore can't exist at all
unless it is thought to have some sort of vertical component. It may
be possible for the vertical component to consist in the superiority of
the race to the generation -- the experience of many generations to
that of only one. That would give tradition the sort of authority a
parent naturally has over a child -- even though the parent *may* be
wrong the child will normally do better trusting the parent's guidance
and has no systematic way of telling when that is not the case. So
rebellion would be sporadic; when it leads to bad things the lesson
would be learned and when the opposite it would become part of
tradition itself so there would be a sort of winnowing.
Whether tradition can be atheistic is an interesting issue. I'm
inclined to say that it can when it is the property of a cultured
governing class like the Confucianists in Imperial China. As such it
can serve to moderate despotism based on force and popular superstition.
It takes on an interesting relation to countercultural mysticism. A
modern analogy might be some sort of neoconservatism.
>I don't see that the progressive position necessarily excludes _any_
>reference to _horizontal_ tradition.
No, no more than to religious symbolism or to poetry. It does
necessarily I think deny the authority of tradition and therefore
destroys tradition except as a memory. Its necessary destruction of
tradition as such is one reason the progressive viewpoint can't last at
least unless a completed and formalized social technology is possible.
It's worth noting that even if tradition is thought vertical it's
admittedly horizontal as well. That is why Catholics distinguish
between Tradition and tradition.
>Wouldn't the progressive object that, insofar as the content of
>tradition has a transcendent origin, such content is wholly external to
>human experience and therefore cannot serve as a basis for judgment?
>The proper response to this objection, I think, is that what is
>revealed of the transcendent in tradition is both external (insofar as
>it points back to its transcendent origin) and internal (insofar as it
>is revealed within the world).
It can be both because the world is of transcendent origin. It is God
who made us and not we ourselves. Another way of putting the point is
to say that grace completes nature -- the world points to something
outside itself that it can not supply. Christians deal with the
difficulty squarely through the doctrine of the Incarnation. One could
also I suppose refer to scientific theories, which provide a basis of
judgments about the world natural science deals with but can not be
reduced to observations and so have a component that transcends the
things they explain.
>What is the relation between the nature of technology and the
>progressive position such that its prestige provides support to
>progressivism? I agree that there is a relation, but it's not going to
>be obvious to the typical reader.
I will think about expanding the discussion.
Progressivism seems to me simply a generalization of the techological
attitude. There are the goals we actually have, there is the world
treated as a means to our ends, and there is know-how. Since that way
of dealing with things has been spectacularly successful on some issues
people assume it can be applied equally successfully elsewhere.
Thanks again for your comments -- you made some important points and I
expect to modify the "Culture Wars" discussion as a result.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Mon May 19 08:00:22 1997
Subject: Emerson, anyone?
To: y
Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 08:00:22 -0400 (EDT)
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Status: RO
Dear Andy,
Have you looked at Emerson in connection with your investigation of the
"culture wars?" He was also a critical counterculturalist, and he
believed in absolute openness to all sides in the belief that was the
only way a satisfactory synthesis would emerge. If I had to puzzle
over an issue I'd rather puzzle over his presentation than most others
because he writes so well.
There are a lot of people who say he is *the* representative American
thinker, which speaks well for the kind of thing you're trying to do.
On the other hand, it seems to me there were problems with his approach
which resulted in its failure even within his lifetime. If I'm right
there may be a basic problem with our national life.
To get an idea of his outlook one might read his 1838 address to the
senior class of the Harvard Divinity School, "Self-Reliance" and
"Circles" from his _Essays: First Series_, and the final part
("Illusions") of his _Conduct of Life_. I think they're all available
on the net. I should warn you that my selection is probably biased by
the view that he develops an understanding of religion and authority
that in the end gets him Nothing and Nowhere, morally and
metaphysically speaking.
This may all be old stuff for you of course, but Emerson seemed an
obvious person to mention and I don't remember your doing so, so I
thought I'd send you a note.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From jk Tue May 20 16:52:16 1997
Subject: Re: Emerson, anyone?
To: y
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 16:52:16 -0400 (EDT)
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>DOn't have Emerson around the house, but should get to a library some
>time next week.
Everything I mentioned and of course lots more is available at
gopher://gopher.vt.edu:10010/11/79
>"On the other hand, it seems to me there were problems with his
>approach which resulted in its failure even within his lifetime. If
>I'm right there may be a basic problem with our national life."
I'm trying to understand this myself. Right now it seems to me that
Emerson like all Americans has an authority problem. He can't bear not
to be God. As he says in the Harvard Divinity School address:
That is always best which gives me to myself. The sublime is
excited in me by the great stoical doctrine, Obey thyself. That
which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of
me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary
reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion
creep over me, and I shall decease forever.
Since he insists on being the source of his own being, the world and
other people become unreal to him -- he does not share with them a
common source of reality. So in his world everything becomes his own
projection and therefore nothing can matter. In the end the only
ethical principle he can have is his own integrity, but as the
implications of his views develop there is less and less for that
principle to apply to.
By "failure even within his lifetime" I mean that he ran out of things
to say. He lived a long time and kept on lecturing but his thought was
unable to continue developing and the later part of his life was
comparatively unproductive. His thought I think had internal problems
he couldn't resolve and at some point he couldn't move forward any
more.
He tried to develop his thought through absolute openness -- in _Conduct
of Life_ for example he presented various principles of organization
(physical necessity, power, wealth, culture, worship, spirit) but each
has its own laws and as he observed he wasn't able to put them together
in a way that made sense. Taking one's own subjective experience as the
standard, which is his natural inclination, eventually leads nowhere,
but taking the world of the senses and material force and fact as the
standard isn't satisfactory either. He wants a higher synthesis somehow
to emerge but it couldn't because a higher synthesis would have to be
something other than using his own subjectivity as the ultimate standard
and that would require him to stop being God.
The social situation corresponding to Emerson's philosophical outlook
would be one in which there are very weak ties among people, a lot of
people are basically concerned with money, power, status, and so on, in
part because there seems to be no comprehensible alternative, and a
smaller number pursue New Age spirituality and various forms of
irrationalism. Both groups would be quite pleased with themselves
because there would be no reason for them to take into account
standards other than their own. There would also be a lot of people
who are depressed and suicidal, addicted to intoxicants, or grossly
antisocial because they aren't satisfied by either materialism or New
Age and because social ties are so weak. People would avoid thought
because self-approval is the only standard and because thought leads
nowhere except to doubt and irreconcilable conflicts. At first there
would be a few Emersons with faith the situation will lead somewhere
but they will become rarer over time.
The obvious question to my mind (or you might say the obvious question
given the way I've presented the issues) is whether Emerson made a
mistake rejecting religious orthodoxy. A second question is then the
extent to which that rejection is bound up with the nature of American
political and social life and if so what it means to say it's a mistake
for Americans. A third question behind all this is the nature of
authority. People today are inclined to deny there is such a thing
distinct from power. That view I think makes a tolerable social life
impossible. What for example is the connection of authority to
religious orthodoxy and established religion? Can one be rejected in
principle without rejecting the other? Is it UnAmerican to accept
either? If so what do you do?
>what limits, if any, should there be on what human beings are allowed
>to do in bending the natural order to their own purposes?
Good question! It seems there ought to be some sort of general
principles but it's hard to say what they are. You could come up with
particular limitations, like don't destroy all natural habitats of a
particular kind, don't engage in abortion or things like abortion
(e.g., fertilization of eggs _ex utero_ when some will necessarily be
disposed of), don't clone human beings. Linedrawing and useable
principles are hard to come up with, though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri May 23 10:51:27 EDT 1997
Article: 11140 of nyc.announce
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: nyc.announce,nyc.politics
Subject: Re: NYC Filmmakers fighting for the Rent Laws
Date: 23 May 1997 06:34:17 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 21
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Xref: news.panix.com nyc.announce:11140 nyc.politics:9093
In <19970522151100.LAA27709@ladder02.news.aol.com> lmny@aol.com (Lmny) writes:
>Tell them you want your rent laws renewed .
>Do your part to keep NY homes safe and affordable.
And also to jack up the prices of houses in marginal areas, like mine.
I own a house on the fringes of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and the rent
control laws have been great for me. They mean the young people with
money who'd otherwise be renting in Manhattan rent here instead because
nothing's available there. The laws have done a fabulous job turning
over my neighborhood -- driving out people with less money, bringing in
people with more, and driving up property values.
Established middle-aged people should remember that rent control not
only helps those who are lucky enough to have rent-controlled
apartments but also homeowners. Like other "protective" laws it's hard
on people who aren't already established and aren't in a position to
get a special deal for themselves, but who cares about them?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Mon May 26 21:13:27 EDT 1997
Article: 9809 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Revolutionary Vanguard
Date: 26 May 1997 21:05:30 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 14
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In <5mb8kk$3n4$2@nadine.teleport.com> Chris Faatz writes:
>BTW, the late, lamented (in some corners) Rothbard put forward an
>argument for a libertarian vanguard in his intro to the Free Life
>edition of de la Boetie's classic _The Politics of Obedience_.
Makes some sense, since the libertarians have a very clear theory that
to some degree is implicit in a lot of American political thought and
can usually be counted on to generate a single answer. So by working
together libertarians in strategic locations could do a lot to affect
the course of right-wing politics here.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Mon May 26 21:13:28 EDT 1997
Article: 9810 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Revolutionary Vanguard
Date: 26 May 1997 21:11:16 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 15
Message-ID: <5mdcbk$g72@panix.com>
References: <5lm8s3$uak@r02n01.cac.psu.edu> <5mb8q9$3n4$3@nadine.teleport.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <5mb8q9$3n4$3@nadine.teleport.com> Chris Faatz writes:
>As a matter of fact, to steal a term, the Red Menace seems to have
>been pretty much a paper tiger anyway, at least as far as
>Marxism-Leninism in the US. The welfare state and the New Deal, now
>that's a different kettle of fish altogether....
It's a question though whether the statist left would have been as
effective and successful without the commies. Coordinated action, a
clear overall strategy and hard work can move things even if success is
not absolute. Also, there was something inspirational and challenging
about the example they set of leftwing statist purity.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Mon May 26 06:33:33 1997
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Rosenthal makes sense for once
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970525200006.0069b840@swva.net> from "Seth
Williamson" at May 25, 97 08:00:06 pm
Status: RO
> Rosenthal, with this single exception that I can recall now, has
> always struck me as the most knee-jerk of lbierals.
An extremely mechanical thinker. Still, there are advantages to
mechanical thought. If it's sufficiently mechanical the results are
sometimes suprising.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Mon May 26 06:46:24 1997
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Left/Right in America
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <3.0.1.32.19970525195810.006d25e0@swva.net> from "Seth
Williamson" at May 25, 97 07:58:10 pm
Status: RO
> >>an astonishingly right-wing culture
> In public radio I occasionally run into people who talk like this.
> But, as it seems to me, they are invariably so far disconnected from
> the attitudes and beliefs of ordinary people that it's like talking
> to people from Mars.
He'd agree he's radically disconnected from the attitudes and beliefs
of ordinary people.
> Was the whole American project doomed from the start because of
> mutually incompatible premises? Maybe so. But I still don't see
> that a conservative in the late 20th century has much choice than to
> try to save what has seemed to work.
The issue I think is how far back you have to go to find what seemed to
work. Some suggest pre-1964 America, others say you have to go back to
pre-1054 Christianity and the experience of ordinary family life.
Others are somewhere in between.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From owner-newman@LISTSERV.VT.EDU Tue May 27 04:59:34 1997
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From: Jim Kalb
Subject: Re: Left/Right in America
To: NEWMAN@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
In-Reply-To: from "Francesca Murphy"
at May 27, 97 09:05:29 am
Status: RO
> > > Was the whole American project doomed from the start because of
> > > mutually incompatible premises?
> >
> > Some suggest pre-1964 America, others say you have to go back to
> > pre-1054 Christianity and the experience of ordinary family life.
> >
> When exactly did the fall into the quotidian take place?
All interesting questions. _Herzog_ raises the issue of how to make
sense of any of them.
It seems clear that a policy can fail, and if a policy then a whole
complex of policies and orientations (e.g. Marxism-Leninism), and if
that maybe failure is possible for the next stage up as well, a form of
society or line of civilizational development. The larger the scale
the harder it is of course to attain perspective or if one does attain
perspective to do anything useful.
One understanding if conservatism is that it is suspicion of grand
theories, grand judgements and grand intentional reorientations. On
that understanding a conservative could not say something like "the
civilization of the West has taken a wrong turn so we've got to go back
and start over."
A difficulty with that view as I see it is that in 1997 in America and
I think elsewhere the production of grand theories, grand judgements
and grand intentional reorientations is a fundamental cultural
understanding and government policy. That's what's involved e.g. in
multiculturalism, opposition to sexism, racism and homophobia, and
social justice generally.
Because of the bureaucratic machinery set up to enforce those things
specifically in opposition to prejudice (that is, to deeply-rooted
understandings) you can't laugh them off as a rhetorical facade for
deeper continuities of a kind conservatives can live with. The
institutionalization of the principle of antitraditionalism doesn't
appear to me a passing fad that will blow over. If that's right then
the skeptical tolerant muddling through kind of conservatism makes no
sense today.
As to the fall into the quotidian -- I have no idea about Heidegger,
but reading Emerson and for that matter other writers of the same
period (the 1840s say) it appears one thing they were responding to was
a fall into the quotidian. The social world seemed heartless, stony,
trivial, etc. Some new ideal was necessary. Presumably that outlook
had something to do with the death for many intellectuals of
traditional religion. In the case of Emerson it's plainly connected
with his rejection of the Incarnation. Something similar happened in
the 60s but involved many more people.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Egad, a base life defiles a bad age.
From alt.revolution.counter Wed May 28 08:29:09 1997
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
~From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
~Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
~Subject: Re: Revolutionary Vanguard
~Date: 28 May 1997 07:26:34 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <5meu89$aqj$1@nadine.teleport.com> Chris Faatz writes:
>In other words, they're ideologues to the core. The hard-headedness
>and closed-offedness of what passes for libertarian "theory" and
>"politics" in these latter days, its self-referential and hermetically
>sealed character, is light years from the libertarianism of a Nock or
>a Chodorov.
In their day a more federally and locally based society still existed
or at least was a living memory. In mass society ideology becomes far
more important to coordinate common action. The self-referential and
hermetically sealed character is necessary to maintain coherence since
mass society becomes mass society through its success in disintegrating
traditions, human collectivities, etc.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Egad, a base life defiles a bad age.
From alt.revolution.counter Wed May 28 08:29:09 1997
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
~From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
~Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
~Subject: Re: Revolutionary Vanguard
~Date: 28 May 1997 08:08:20 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In "James C. Langcuster" writes:
>I've found that one's position becomes increasingly harder to
>articulate after moving beyond the axiomatic approaches of, say, an
>Ayn Rand or a Ludwig von Mises.
Still, it's healthy mental exercise to articulate things that don't
reduce to slogans already in circulation.
>Furthermore, one can be a "mainstream" libertarian without really
>striking at the heart of modernism and the therapeutic state. I've
>known plenty of libertarians in my time who have no qualms about
>abortion, feminism, gay rights, etc.
If by "the heart of the therapeutic state" you mean rejection of the
notion of an objective good for man you are of course right. "Therapy"
suggests limits to self-legislation, and is inconsistent with their
belief in the clarity of motive and will, so I don't think they really
like the idea.
They do present themselves as ultramodernists. A common claim is that
the things the cultural left objects to (anti-choice, misogyny,
homophobia, what have you) would shrink to insignificance in
Libertopia. Libertarians are therefore chic as well as nerds. They
benefit from the discovery of techno nerd chic.
The evolution of concepts of fashion and chic is an interesting one, by
the way. The fundamental ideal I think was to be self-possessed and
evidently in a position to assume that one could rely on his own
judgment. That was part of the concept of the "gentleman." "Fashion"
added the element of belonging to a group that was perpetually ahead of
the vulgar and perpetually somewhat afraid of being overtaken. "Chic"
seems to have added a notion of slight surprise that throws other
people somewhat off their stride. In recent decades that notion has
stregthened so that the word suggests something with a definite
subversive edge.
So overall the shift seems to have been from confidence in what one is
to novel forms of aggression. That's why we have "heroin chic" etc.
and it's most of the reason for the cultural ascendency of homosexuals.
>it's occurred to me that calling on someone to accept the paleo world
>view is asking them to disabuse themselves of a pattern of thinking
>that was instilled in the vast majority of us at a very early age via
>public schooling, mass media, etc. I don't think popular
>libertarianism, really requires this kind of gut-wrenching conversion.
It's a fundamental problem. The propaganda in the schools and media is
nonstop. Pop libertarianism is a variation on what's propagandized
that denies some specifics but keeps most of it, especially the parts
that are never articulated. But if adoption of paleo anything is a
radical act, how is it conservative?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Egad, a base life defiles a bad age.
From alt.revolution.counter Wed May 28 08:29:09 1997
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
~From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
~Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
~Subject: Re: let's form a nation
~Date: 28 May 1997 08:25:30 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
~Lines: 17
Message-ID: <5mh87q$c4t@panix.com>
~References: <5menlu$mr4$42@news1.voicenet.com>
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In <5menlu$mr4$42@news1.voicenet.com> liberty1@voicenet.com (Ed Hertzog) writes:
>Why don't you give this month's issue a quick read and let me know
>what you think.
I tried, but you can't read it with lynx.
>Digital Anarchy is a system of non-government that is emerging due to
>rapid changes in world-wide philosophy, production, and communication.
The world will inevitably be ordered somehow. Economic activity may be
governed for example by property rights and a pricing system. The
interesting issue is therefore how those changes will affect modes of
government and other aspects of social life.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Egad, a base life defiles a bad age.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Fri May 30 14:03:59 EDT 1997
Article: 9826 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Revolutionary Vanguard
Date: 29 May 1997 16:42:10 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <5mkpn2$10d@panix.com>
References: <5lm8s3$uak@r02n01.cac.psu.edu> <5mb8kk$3n4$2@nadine.teleport.com> <5mdc0q$f64@panix.com> <5mh77k$9m1@panix.com> <199705281118111012228@deepblue12.salamander.com>
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In <199705281118111012228@deepblue12.salamander.com> wmcclain@salamander.com (Bill McClain) writes:
>> But if adoption of paleo anything is a radical act, how is it
>> conservative?
>Breaking an addiction is a radical act for the addicted. So is
>escaping prison for prisoner. I would call both acts "progress" but if
>you move to a state others call "conservative"...
The state called conservative is among other things one in which it is
recognized that society and human nature have a large irreducible
element of the given. We do not construct ourselves or our social
world. It may be possible to square the circle and lift ourselves by
our bootstraps into conservatism, and if necessary one must try to do
so, but it still seems something of a paradox.
>Do we believe that traditional societies are maintained naturally, as
>in "without effort"? It is a struggle to be a decent person; should we
>expect communities to struggle less?
It is indeed a struggle. My point if that if being a decent person
requires adopting a way of life at odds not only to what you're used to
but also to everything around you "struggle" becomes an understatement.
Maybe I'm overstating things. Abandoning radicalism might be something
like a gymnast who's been walking on his hands flipping over and
walking normally. Although giving up gymnastics would involve a
gymnastic act there would be no practical paradox. It would simply be
a matter of giving up something (walking on one's hands or trying to
deal with society technologically) that can't be done for long in any
event.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Egad, a base life defiles a bad age.
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Article: 96659 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Using the Book of Common Prayer?
Date: 26 May 1997 22:42:43 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 19
Sender: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu
Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu
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References: <5lofkv$b7b@geneva.rutgers.edu> <5ltq1l$grn@geneva.rutgers.edu> <5m0ckk$j70@geneva.rutgers.edu> <5mb3b7$rlk@geneva.rutgers.edu>
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In <5mb3b7$rlk@geneva.rutgers.edu> Michael Ervolina writes:
>Actually the '79 BCP was revised to bring it closer to the original
>BCP in form. Of course some of it was updated in language like Rite
>2.
If anyone's interested there's a discussion of the '79 changes at:
http://www.episcopalnet.org/TractsForOurTimes/Politzer.html
The writer of the discussion doesn't like the changes but since the
discussion consists largely of quotes from an essay by one of the men
involved in making them it ought to be useful whether one likes the '79
BCP or not. It seems clear that the changes were not simply formal or
linguistic, but involved very substantial changes in theology.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard.
From news.panix.com!not-for-mail Sat May 31 08:34:06 EDT 1997
Article: 9838 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Revolutionary Vanguard
Date: 31 May 1997 08:31:55 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 45
Message-ID: <5mp5nr$f50@panix.com>
References: <5lm8s3$uak@r02n01.cac.psu.edu> <5mb8kk$3n4$2@nadine.teleport.com> <5mdc0q$f64@panix.com> <5meu89$aqj$1@nadine.teleport.com> <5mh4pa$4u1@panix.com> <5mo61h$fvk$3@nadine.teleport.com>
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In <5mo61h$fvk$3@nadine.teleport.com> Chris Faatz writes:
>: In mass society ideology becomes far more important to coordinate
>: common action. The self-referential and hermetically sealed
>: character is necessary to maintain coherence since mass society
>: becomes mass society through its success in disintegrating
>: traditions, human collectivities, etc.
>Agreed (is that the first time this has been said on this ng? )
It is, and I hope it's no trend. "Revolution" together with "counter"
ought to mean disagreement squared.
Going back to the substance, it seems that a contradiction sufficient
in itself to destroy mass society is that it can't tolerate
particularism.
Particularism - small-scale local social coherence - is necessary for
effective collective action. Any particularism able to maintain itself
in mass society therefore has enormous power within its grasp because
it has no competitors in acting effectively. Mass society is of course
aware of the threat; that's why it views "hate" (particularism) as the
ultimate sin.
At present the particularism of small minorities (the Amish, Hasidic
Jews, what have you) is protected, but that's part of the process of
destroying the particularism of the local majorities. To say the ways
of the minority must be respected is to say that the ways of the
majority must be treated as private prejudices without public validity.
The indulgence is however temporary. When the whole population except
the Amish become welfare clients on workfare attention will turn to the
illiberalism of the Amish. After all, isn't it true that Amish social
structures deny the self-worth and self-determination of homosexual
youth? Can that be tolerated? Isn't the protection of the individual
>from local and traditional tyranny basic to human rights?
So what will happen is that the NWO will attack all particularisms.
The attack will not be altogether effective, since the the NWO lacking
small-scale local social coherence will be inefficient and corrupt. It
will however be sufficient to destroy the tolerant and reasonable
particularisms so that it will be self-referential and hermetically
sealed fanaticisms that inherit the earth.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Egad, a base life defiles a bad age.
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Article: 96762 of soc.religion.christian
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Using the Book of Common Prayer?
Date: 29 May 1997 21:46:40 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 45
Sender: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu
Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu
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In <5mgen2$5q6@geneva.rutgers.edu> Warren Steel writes:
>> The writer of the discussion doesn't like the changes but since the
>> discussion consists largely of quotes from an essay by one of the men
>> involved in making them it ought to be useful whether one likes the '79
>> BCP or not. It seems clear that the changes were not simply formal or
>> linguistic, but involved very substantial changes in theology.
>It is clear from the frequent references to ancient and medieval
>sources that the revisers' intent was nothing like what Politzer
>asserts, but was in many ways a restoration of a catholic liturgy to
>one branch of the Anglican communion.
>In my view, the 1979 book makes possible a fitting and ordered cycle
>of worship for the entire church year
I don't understand the line of argument. A book of common prayer can
hardly avoid expressing an understanding of God, church and world and
therefore a theology. In revising such a book one could intend both
theological changes and something that is in many ways restoration of a
catholic liturgy. A theologically changed BCP could make possible a
fitting and ordered cycle of worship, at least if you don't mind the
changes.
The article consists largely of lengthy quotes from one of the revisers
(Dean Holmes of the School of Theology of the University of the South)
about the first aspect of their intentions, or at least the intentions
of those among the revisers who cared about such things and were clear
as to what they were doing. (In rewriting a book of prayer it is of
course possible to make large theological changes without having clear
and specific intentions on the subject.) That is why I cited it -- by
its nature it seemed unlikely to be altogether one-sided on the issue
of whether theological changes were in fact made and in very general
terms the nature of the changes.
I suggest that anyone interested in the subject read the article. If
there is an analysis showing that Dean Holmes and his traditionalist
opponents are both wrong in believing there were important theological
changes I would be interested in a reference. It seems irrelevant
though to point out that the revision had many important purely
liturgical and linguistic aspects.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: Egad, a base life defiles a bad age.
Do let me know if you have comments of any kind.
Back to my archive of posts.