Items Posted by Jim Kalb
From panix!jk Mon Mar 29 13:57:57 EST 1993
Article: 251 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: So what's the plan?
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Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar27.163240.3152@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1993 16:52:54 GMT
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czarbock@cltr.uq.oz.au (C. Zarbock) writes:
>In article <1993Mar27.163240.3152@news.vanderbilt.edu> rickertj@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu (John Rickert) writes:
>>
>>of "freedom of expression," while any public expression of religious
>>piety runs the danger of being proscribed by a court.
>
>I would be interested to know how this situation has come about in
>America - the other day I spent some time looking through a copy of the
>American Constitution. In particular I was interested in the clause (I
>forget which one it was) regarding Congress and the (non-)estabishment
>of religion. As far as I could see, in my ignorance, it appeared most
>plainly that it was Congress which was prohibited from passing laws
>regarding the establishment of a religion. And thus following from this
>I would assume (perhaps naively) that there would no constitutional
>reason why an individual state would not be allowed to promote religious
>activity of one sort or another.
At the time the 1st Amendment was adopted (1791 or thereabouts) several
of the states had established churches, and my understanding is that the
1st Am. was in part intended to prevent Congress from interfering with
such state establishments.
After the Civil War (War between the States?) additional amendments were
adopted that restricted the states in various ways. In particular, the
14th Amendment was adopted, which provided that no state could deprive
any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.
This "due process" clause appears to relate to the procedures applicable
in criminal cases and the like, and not to the substance of any rights
people might have. Nonetheless, in a series of cases mostly in the
20's, 30's and 40's the Supreme Court held that the clause has the
effect of converting the first 10 amendments to the Constitution (the
"Bill of Rights") into restrictions on what the states can do. So today
the 1st Am. also prohibits the states from making any law with regard to
an establishment of religion.
The "incorporation doctrine" is the general phrase for the Court's
application of the Bill of Rights to the states by way of the Due
Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Don't ask what the Court's
reasoning has been. When I was in law school and had to choose a case
for moot court I chose a constitutional case because you don't have to
know any reasoning. All you need to know is how the Court has come out
in particular factual settings and the slogans it has applied.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Mon Mar 29 13:58:04 EST 1993
Article: 5689 of talk.philosophy.misc
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Man Overboard!
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Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1993 15:42:02 GMT
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sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>If you are claiming the law ought to punish the boat operator for not
>rescuing his passengers then I think many people would disagree with
>you. An obvious line of rebuttal to your claim: the operator did not
>"create the situation" of people having fallen in the water and being
>unable to save themselves, the poeple who freely chose to go on the boat
>ride, knowing the risks (and their talent at swimming), did. Significant
>factors will be the cause of the person falling in the water, whether
>the operator informed his passengers of the risk, etc. But in any case
>reasonable counterarguments to your position seem pretty plentiful to
>me.
It strikes me that law and custom should impose responsibilities on
people who are well placed to deal with them. In this case, the
owner/operator has control of what the boat is like and how it is
operated. He can choose his crew and his passengers and has the right
to control what people do on the boat. If someone does fall in, the
operator is in a peculiarly good position to save him and the person who
fell in is in a peculiarly bad position to make other arrangements.
There's no obvious moral risk that requiring operators to pull
passengers out will make passengers more careless. Also, it's an
emergency situation for which clear rules are needed. What harm would
it do to require the operator to pull the guy out?
I could understand the objections to such a requirement better if you
would suggest why it might be sensible for passengers and operators to
agree to the contrary or if there were instances of passengers and
operators trying to do so.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Mar 30 09:05:08 EST 1993
Article: 253 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Supreme Court and Supreme Being (was: So what's the plan?)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar27.163240.3152@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1993 12:45:39 GMT
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drw@euler.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) writes:
>In a nation where there is no dominant church, and where friction
>between religious groups has been a persistant cause of political strife
>(and sometimes street warfare), the taboo on mixing too much religion
>into politics seems to be a good one.
Why is that a taboo that the Supreme Court is peculiarly fitted to
formulate as a legal principle and enforce? And how did we manage to
get by until the present century without the Court doing so? It's worth
noting that mixing the judiciary into both religion and politics has
itself been a cause of strife and disaffection with the government, as
in the school prayer issue.
In this area, as in others, the Supreme Court is supposed to lead and
the public at large is supposed to follow. That's odd, because taboos
are normally somewhat vague, shifting and illogical things that express
the way of life of a people. Their institutional formulation is
normally of secondary importance. Presumably, the explanation is that
the Court is not expressing taboos held by a self-governing society but
rather enforcing the preferences of our ruling classes.
The "wall of separation" between Church and State would have made more
sense where it didn't exist, in the system of limited government
established in 1787, than in our present system, in which the government
claims a general power to reconstruct social customs and institutions in
accordance with the demands of ideology. Under the circumstances, the
function of the "wall of separation" appears to be less securing social
peace than ensuring that social reconstruction will proceed on
antireligious lines.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Mar 30 09:05:16 EST 1993
Article: 5721 of talk.philosophy.misc
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Man Overboard!
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar30.011838.10029@reed.edu>
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1993 12:49:49 GMT
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sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>>It strikes me that law and custom should impose responsibilities on
>>people who are well placed to deal with them.
>
>You mean, law should punish people for not doing Good Things when they
>can?
Special circumstances are required to justify punishment for not doing a
good thing. As discussed, in the "man overboard" situation there are
very special circumstances.
>The operator is no more capable of a rescue than anyone else on the boat
>with his same skills. You argued before that the operator should be
>required to perform a rescue because he was a kind of host, rather than
>that he was a good swimmer or anything functional like that.
"Host" is functional. No-one else on the boat can turn the boat around
to go pick the guy up. Also, in general the operator has some expertise
(for example, knowing where the life preservers are and what to do with
them). If he doesn't have some expertise he shouldn't take passengers.
>As for a need for clear rules: if passengers go on the boat knowing
>there are no clear rules for who will pull them out in an accident, then
>the risk is one they knowingly take. The passengers get to take that
>risk, and the operator gets to offer that deal, because people are FREE.
The second sentence suggests a different rule than the first in the
usual case, in which people don't explicitly say anything about rare
situations in which it's obvious what should be done. What do you think
should the rule be in that case? Also, if the negotiation suggested in
the second sentence actually took place, how often do you think the deal
you mention would be offered or accepted?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Mar 30 14:57:00 EST 1993
Article: 254 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: More stuff of the same general sort
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1993 14:04:43 GMT
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Why not post yet more? Here's another pep talk for my fellow reacs, as
usual from an American perspective:
Toward the Reconstruction of Conservatism
Conservatism has usually been thought of as a disposition to preserve an
order of things that has been found good. Such a disposition is useful
in many ways, but not as a guide to political action in the United
States today. In our country the dominant order of things is determined
by the love of individual material well-being and by an ideologized and
bureaucratized march toward equality. Accordingly, those who value what
is destroyed by materialistic individualism, hedonism, and
egalitarianism, who have typically been those drawn to conservatism,
must rethink what their conservatism means.
The general approach to things that leads us to form and preserve
attachments seems likely to be what is of most enduring value in
conservatism. Conservatism recognizes that ultimate truth is something
transcendent that men can only approximate, and that none of us
possesses a master key to life. Accordingly, a conservative is
reluctant to rely purely on his own reason and prefers to accept the
tradition in which he finds himself in both its authoritativeness and
its complexity and open-endedness. By doing so he may not immediately
solve any problems, but he hopes to be able better to grasp the problems
with which he is presented and to work out an appropriate response. The
conservative disposition thus takes seriously modes of thought that
thoughtful and experienced men have long found useful and opposes
ideologies, such as modern American egalitarianism, that reject both
observable fact and traditional ways of thinking in favor of some single
consideration.
Thus, conservatism is reason rather than rationalism. Although the most
reasonable response to a situation in which a conservative finds himself
will often be to do nothing or to make some relatively minor change in
the way things are done to accommodate changed views or circumstances,
there are no a priori limitations in such matters. A tradition may
become unbalanced, incoherent or self-destructive, and in such cases
quite radical changes may be needed in the outlook or way of life of a
people. The CR claim is that such a situation exists in America in
1993, and the task for CRs, to the extent they wish to influence events,
is to develop and present to the public a clear and comprehensible
account of what has gone wrong and what can be done to improve matters.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Thu Apr 1 13:37:10 EST 1993
Article: 258 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: School daze . . .
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Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1993 14:18:05 GMT
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Following are some
Reflections on College Education
In the United States, universal access to college -- higher education of
a non-technical nature -- is thought to be a necessary feature of a good
society because society needs the particular contribution the
college-educated provide and because it would be unjust to exclude
anyone from such an education.
It is therefore strange that people don't state clearly the purposes and
benefits of college. Its claim to cultivate the intellect seems
doubtful because colleges normally do not inspire in their graduates an
enduring interest in either learning or critical thought. At colleges
themselves, devotion to the life of the mind is not common and is
becoming less so as the demands of the democratic outlook makes it less
and less possible to address fundamental issues. While college does
tend to make people independent of the intellectual and moral authority
of their families and the communities in which they grew up, this
independence tends to lead not to independent thought but rather to
simple acceptance of views prevalent in academic circles or mere
careerism.
The one clear effect of college education in America is its effect on
how graduates think about themselves and how they are regarded by
others. Anyone with a college degree is _ipso facto_ at least middle
class, and anyone with a degree from one of the prestige colleges is at
least upper middle class. The college-educated dominate life in this
country, not because of what college teaches but because they expect and
are expected to do so and because people who are intelligent and
ambitious go to college.
Thus, the primary function of college in this country is not the
student's physical and spiritual development and his acquisition of
useful information and skills but rather the formation of a national
ruling class with a reasonably uniform outlook. This outlook is not one
that cultured men have traditionally had, but it does reflect the
present character of the institution that fosters it -- secular and
rationalistic; inclined to treat the world as a set of problems to be
solved by technical means; disinclined to deal with ultimate issues;
adverse to individual judgements of value and to intellectual
refinement.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Minimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissimarum, desiderabilius
est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minimis rebus." (Aquinas)
From panix!jk Thu Apr 1 13:37:17 EST 1993
Article: 12856 of talk.politics.theory
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: The growing underclass
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Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Distribution: usa
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1993 15:21:27 GMT
Lines: 41
turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:
>Second, in yesteryear, it was easier for the next generation to grow
>out of poverty. A strong back and a willingness to work were usually
>enough to move into the lower-middle class. Today, and even more in the
>future, reasonable jobs require education, adaptability, and social
>>skills [ . . . ] I think the second factor I mentioned may be more
>important: that increasingly, failure to achieve a certain level of
>education and develop certain social skills locks one out of economic
>productivity. In 19th century America, for the most part, one could earn
>one's way -- and even support a family! -- *despite* illiteracy and lack
>of other education.
Even in the 19th century single mothers and people with disabilities
presumably had a difficult time of it.
Evidence that adults who enter and stay in the labor market are rarely
poor seems relevant to this issue. One reference is "In Search of the
Working Poor", by Charles Murray, in the Fall, 1987 issue of _The Public
Interest_. He discusses a longitudinal study of 5000 families
apparently chosen to be representative in a way that satisfies social
scientists. Of the working-age adults covered by the study, only 2.7%
were poor and lived in households in which the head of household (1)
worked an hour or more in the preceeding year and (2) was not
substantially disabled. Of the people in that 2.7% who were still in
the labor force (or married to someone in the labor force) in 1980, 85%
were no longer poor and 78% had not been poor in any of the last four
years. (The article gives further references on the study if anyone's
interested.)
>The problem is a problem of the system. Dispensing blame to those who
>are caught up in the problem serves no good.
In isolation, blaming people doesn't help things. But if a problem of
the system is that people aren't treated as responsible for what they
make of their lives, then blaming those who don't carry their
responsibilities could be part of improving the system.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Minimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissimarum, desiderabilius
est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minimis rebus." (Aquinas)
From panix!jk Fri Apr 2 20:34:41 EST 1993
Article: 262 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: a familiar figure
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Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr2.041102.29653@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1993 23:54:14 GMT
Lines: 11
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>Are comic books the answer to cultural illiteracy?
I think it was Ilya Ehrenberg who commented that if the entire world
became paved over with asphalt a green shoot would break through
somewhere.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Minimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissimarum, desiderabilius
est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minimis rebus." (Aquinas)
From panix!jk Fri Apr 2 20:34:42 EST 1993
Article: 263 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr2.135720.12679@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1993 23:59:09 GMT
Lines: 33
rickertj@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu (John Rickert) writes:
>What bothers me is the kind of language the most prominent people use in
>combatting the liberal politicization of schools.
An instance of the more general point that the most depressing thing
about someone is usually what he considers his virtues.
>They also say, simplistically, I think, that we just need to introduce
>the free market to education -- let people decide where they want to go
>and the market will take care of everything.
Maybe part of the issue is what the word "market" means. If "market"
means "for profit" I feel one way about this issue. If "market" means
"relying on voluntary affiliation and support within a system of private
property and free contract" I feel rather differently.
Taken either way, markets have their flaws and limitations. But to the
extent markets control education would presumably reflect more what
parents want and less what the officially-recognized experts want.
Whether that's good or bad depends on what the parents are like and what
the experts are like. In America in 1993, I'm inclined to trust the
parents.
>Unprofitable studies, such as Classics, would be cut.
I'm not sure. It seems to me private schools are at least as likely to
offer Latin as public schools. (I'm construing "market" in my second
sense.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Minimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissimarum, desiderabilius
est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minimis rebus." (Aquinas)
From panix!jk Sat Apr 3 19:00:04 EST 1993
Article: 264 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Social justice and despotism
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Date: Sat, 3 Apr 1993 18:41:40 GMT
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Now it's time to discuss what everyone knows reacs are really after, the
total elimination of
Social Justice
To believe in social justice is to believe that institutions should be
judged in accordance with their tendency to make people equal in
material resources and in dignity, and that the fundamental command of
social morality is to remake existing institutions toward that end.
On its face, such a view seems likely to mitigate the cruder evils of
social life, and it appears consistent with rational morality because it
appears capable of being affirmed by each member of society. However,
freedom is unlikely to survive if power is not distributed among a
variety of actors, but such a distribution would violate equality
because power exists only to the extent it is unequal. In addition,
judging social arrangements in accordance with an abstract criterion
that can never be satisfied undermines existing institutions and
every-day morality, and remaking institutions in accordance with such a
criterion is a perpetual enterprise requiring irresponsible power.
Accordingly, the ideal of social justice has a natural affinity with
despotism.
This affinity can be seen by considering welfare and civil rights laws.
Such laws make us dependent on the state rather than on the people
around us, and weaken family and other institutions that rely on the
habits of responsibility and willing cooperation epitomized by
traditional morality. The more effective welfare laws are in preventing
suffering and civil rights laws in assuring equality of treatment, the
less need there is for us to aid or rely on family, friends, neighbors
or others to whom we have a special tie. Indeed, the import of civil
rights laws is that the practice of favoring those to whom we have a
special tie is wrong.
For example, a woman with small children is likely to need help in
supporting herself and bringing up her children. If there are no
welfare laws, a woman will in general avoid a relationship with a man
that is likely to lead to pregnancy unless she feels confident that he
will support her and her children. If there are welfare laws, she is
likely to be less careful and the man is less likely to feel an
obligation to her if she does become pregnant. If there are also civil
rights laws, the sex-role stereotypes that might otherwise have led him
to think he has an obligation to help her will have been authoritatively
condemned. The weakening of the family is thus a consequence of social
justice legislation; similar consequences obtain for all other social
institutions other than the state. Despotism is the natural consequence
of such a process.
In addition, man is a social animal who lives by productive ties to his
fellows. Unless an inducement other than need is found for people to
organize their lives and learn to cooperate with others, a perfect
regime of social justice, by eliminating need, would destroy the basis
of human life. By its terms, a guarantee of a materially decent life
would provide that a man's actions can never put him in a bind that he
can't extricate himself from immediately. It would therefore deprive
human actions, and especially the actions of the poor, of much of their
weight, since nothing people could do could cause them serious economic
trouble. Nor can this difficulty be solved by guaranteeing only the
opportunity to live a materially decent life; it is impossible to
guarantee the opportunity without guaranteeing the result because of the
variety of disabilities and misfortunes that may exist and the
difficulty of knowing whether they are present in a particular case.
Of course, economic need is not the only motive for acting when one is
not legally compelled to do so. People may have a variety of ethical,
religious or other motives for doing difficult things. However, in any
reasonably foreseeable state of society, economic need and legal
compulsion will be universal motives and will often be the only motives
that can be relied upon, especially for people who are socially marginal
and not much affected by things like the desire for respectability.
Accordingly, to the extent need plays a smaller role force will play a
larger one, and if need is eliminated force will play a large role
indeed.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Minimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissimarum, desiderabilius
est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minimis rebus." (Aquinas)
From panix!jk Wed Apr 7 05:11:39 EDT 1993
Article: 272 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr2.135720.12679@news.vanderbilt.edu> <1993Apr5.231917.8708@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 01:50:56 GMT
Lines: 21
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>There is nothing wrong with the market as such, if it is subordinated to
>a higher system of values which give the society meaning, purpose.
So the issue is what system of values the market will be subordinated to
if it is not left free.
>So, frankly, I don't trust >most< parents (not that I trust most
>educators). Still, for the sake of the (hopefully large) minority of
>parents who do care about their children's education and know better
>than educators, I agree with you and would be willing to back school
>choice/an educational free market. Better to help the few who can save
>themselves, than let them be dragged down with the majority.
It seems to me that most parents are more sensible and responsible about
education than most education bureaucracies. Also, to the extent
parents are bad our schools aren't likely to be able to repair much of
the damage.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
From panix!jk Wed Apr 7 05:11:41 EDT 1993
Article: 273 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Social justice and despotism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr5.232534.8887@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 01:52:49 GMT
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deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>I have one question which might interest you: what about conservatives/
>right-wingers who champion "social justice" - one thinks of such people
>as Father Coughlin (sp?) during the 1930's, for instance - is the
>conception of social justice sometimes advocated by conservatives the
>same kind of "social justice" that the Left likes to talk about?
I don't know much about Coughlin. I suppose the National Socialists
might be thought of as right-wing advocates of social justice. They
were bad guys. On the other hand, quite possibly the distributivists or
integrists also favor social justice, and I don't have anything in
particular against them although I don't know much about them.
More generally, the objections to left-wing social justice in my post
had to do with the absence of substantive values (values other than
equality and freedom) from left-wing thought. As a result, social
justice becomes an unconditional and unlimited imperative and the result
is tyranny. In addition, if everyone is to be equal materially and in
dignity, and all substantive values are to be equally respected, it is
hard to see what means other than force will be available to induce
people to contribute to society.
I would imagine that social justice would play a more subordinate role
in a right-winger's thought. When tamed and put in its place it might
be a beneficial conception.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
From panix!jk Wed Apr 7 05:11:42 EDT 1993
Article: 274 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr2.135720.12679@news.vanderbilt.edu> <1993Apr5.230134.8428@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 01:55:25 GMT
Lines: 37
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>BTW - some left-wing critics of modern education argue that it is not
>liberal politicization of schools as such that is the problem, but
>rather the overall structure/values of capitalistic societies
>(Christopher Lasch, and some French writer whose name escapes me both
>make similar arguments on this point). It seems to me that this is a
>valid observation, though I think liberal politicization is an important
>element too. The idea here is that modern capitalist societies are
>educating a generation mentally incapable of challenging the hegemony of
>established values. Such people also make the perfect consumers.
The schools that would be best for capitalists would be schools that
made students hardworking and technically competent but not liberally
educated. So our present schools satisfy only half the capitalist
ideal.
No doubt the overall structure/values of capitalistic society lead,
among other things, to liberal politicization. Every society digs its
own grave. Capitalism digs its through the liberation of desire and the
relaxation of authority, discipline and standards that are
characteristic of the consumer society and of the welfare state. The
process leads to both dumb students and left-wingers.
>SAT scores have been going down, causing consternation. What people
>forget is that more and more students are taking the SAT test - pushing
>the scores down (which is not to say that there hasn't been some drop
>due to lower overall academic achievement).
"What's Really Behind the SAT-Score Decline?" by Murray and Herrnstein
in the Winter, 1992 _Public Interest_ is worth looking at in this
connection. They conclude that the smartest students really have gotten
dumber (or at least more poorly prepared) while the average ones on the
whole are holding their own. The increase in the number of students
taking the SAT, it seems, occurred before the decline in scores.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
From panix!jk Thu Apr 8 05:59:00 EDT 1993
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: abortion + stuff
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr7.154119.314@zip.eecs.umich.edu>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1993 23:31:56 GMT
Lines: 25
carnes@quip.eecs.umich.edu (Richard Carnes) writes:
>The statement
>
>(1) A human being begins at fertilization.
>
>cannot be a statement of fact UNLESS the term "a human being" HAS
>ALREADY BEEN DEFINED. In the absence of such a definition (1) is a
>stipulation, a definitional statement (part of a possible definition of
>"a human being").
Not all definitions are equally arbitrary, though. I gather from Peter
Nyikos' citations that biologists find it a lot easier to organize their
knowledge of human life if they divide the total mass of human
protoplasm in the world into individual human beings, pick fertilization
as the time at which an individual human being comes into existence, and
think of the zygote, the foetus, the neonate, the child, the adolescent
and the adult as the same organism. If people who study human life
scientifically find that their studies lead them to treat a zygote and
so on as the same thing as an adult human being, but at an earlier stage
of development, that seems relevant to whether destroying a z., f. or n.
is an act somewhat of the same kind as killing you or me. I would agree
that such considerations are not dispositive.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
From panix!jk Thu Apr 8 18:54:44 EDT 1993
Article: 283 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Email discussion of _After Virtue_
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 18:35:43 GMT
Lines: 112
I'm starting an email discussion of Alasdair MacIntyre's _After Virtue_
with a philosophy student, and it occurred to me that the book might be
of interest to some of the readers of this newsgroup. Anyone interested
should let me know. The following is a free sample of the discussion:
******************
Greetings!
I've finished rereading _After Virtue_. Without more ado, a few
comments to start off the discussion:
I believe that AM and I would agree on the following points:
1. You can't even begin to discuss human life sensibly without
evaluating actions, conditions, traits of character and so on.
Behaviorism never gets anywhere at all, and no-one is a consistent
emotivist.
2. You will also find if you try to do the necessary evaluation that
you can't do it without at least an implicit understanding as to what
the substantive goods for human beings are. Purely formal criteria such
as the categorical imperative aren't sufficient.
3. Furthermore, no simple thing (e.g., pleasure) can be specified that
can be treated as the substantive human good with respect to which
everything else is to be evaluated. Therefore, utilitarianism doesn't
work.
4. The truth of the foregoing points can be seen by reviewing what has
happened when people have tried to do what the foregoing points deny can
be done; that is, by reviewing the history of moral philosophy. If you
review that history you may also get lucky and find some line of thought
that was abandoned for reasons that looked better back then than they do
now and that looks like it might do better than the theories just
mentioned. Aristotelianism is such a line of thought.
Query -- AM seems to make a great deal of the fact that he is a
historicist and Aristotle is not, and he believes he finds the history
of moral philosophy relevant to philosophical inquiry in a way Aristotle
did not. But Aristotle says (_Nicomachean Ethics_, Bk. X: Ch. 8, l.
17-23):
"[T]he truth in practical matters is discerned from the facts of
life; for these are the decisive factor. We must therefore
survey what we have already said, bringing it to the test of the
facts of life, and if it harmonizes with the facts we must
accept it, but if it clashes with them we must suppose it to be
mere theory."
So it appears that Aristotle would have found it relevant to the truth
of (say) utilitarianism that in the long run people find that they can't
live with it. So what's AM's dispute with Aristotle on the relevance of
history? Several points come to mind:
1. AM seems to view his own beliefs as reflecting the current state of
a tradition that will continue to develop, while Aristotle viewed his
own beliefs as final. This distinction is not completely clear to me,
though, because to have a belief (about morals, the Big Bang or anything
else) is to accept the belief as true of the world and therefore as in
some sense final or close to final. In addition, Aristotle wasn't born
with his mature views into a society in which those views were generally
accepted. He was familiar with the process whereby less adequate views
get worked up into more adequate views, and the quotation above suggests
that he didn't think of that as a process that suddenly stops.
2. I suppose that all work is work within a tradition, so it's not
clear to me why people who work in a tradition have a special need to be
conscious of the history of the tradition. Possibly the answer is that
philosophy originally aimed at unconditioned knowledge of the whole, and
if that kind of knowledge can't be had then knowledge that is at least
aware of its conditions, such as the tradition in which it exists, comes
closer to satisfying the original aims of philosophy than knowledge that
is less self-aware. But does this point make any difference to the
content of ethical theory ("virtue is the good, and it consists of X, Y
and Z"), or does it merely embed it in a metaethical theory ("the view
that X, Y and Z constitute virtue and the good, like all theories about
virtue or anything else, has developed in association with the
development of a particular way of life") that leaves its substance
unaffected?
3. AM also seems interested in how the moral institutions of different
societies differ or make conflicting demands on people, and believes
that such differing moral institutions and conflicting demands can be
valid for someone at a particular stage of the tradition but transcended
by someone who has advanced further. The conception of morality as
something that develops with society might then explain why morality
does not always say the same thing. One might maintain moral
absolutism, though, by saying (e.g.) that even though the best Aristotle
could do given the state of his tradition was to treat humility as a
vice and the planet Mars as different in nature from the earth he was in
error on both points, and if in his society viewing Mars as of the same
nature as the earth or humility as a virtue was at cross-purposes to the
way all the best people thought and felt about things then that was a
deficiency in his society that we have subsequently come to understand
and in part to overcome.
4. One would expect people to have particular interest in the history
of a tradition when the tradition is in trouble and people feel they
must have taken a wrong turn somewhere or other. If so, then it's a
sign of trouble when a tradition is historically-minded and of health
when it's not.
Any comments, responses, tangents or completely unrelated views
regarding the book would be welcome!
**********************
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
From panix!jk Thu Apr 8 19:54:41 EDT 1993
Article: 285 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr5.230134.8428@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr7.213815.18583@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 22:57:40 GMT
Lines: 22
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>>The schools that would be best for capitalists would be schools that
>>made students hardworking and technically competent but not liberally
>>educated. So our present schools satisfy only half the capitalist
>>ideal.
>
>Safisfying all of the capitalist ideal would be worse in that it would
>leave future generations without the intellectual equipment necessary to
>question the assumptions of the system under which they lived. They
>would know how to do their jobs and that would be it.
Worse compared to what? If an educational system gives neither liberal
education nor effective vocational training, you haven't necessarily
hurt things if you strengthen vocational training. My own view is that
an educational system that develops intellectual strength of even an
inferior sort is better than one that doesn't develop intellectual
strength at all.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Thu Apr 8 19:54:42 EDT 1993
Article: 286 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Social justice and despotism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr5.232534.8887@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr7.215122.18891@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 22:59:08 GMT
Lines: 17
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>The National Socialists were bad guys, but the NS/Fascist problem lies
>not with their conception of social justice, I believe, but rather with
>their "leadership principle" which places the leader as undisputed
>authority, rather than relying on the authority of any form of
>tradition.
My impression from _Mein Kampf_ and _Sieg des Willens_ is that the NSDAP
wanted the greatest possible homogeneity and unity within the German
people. If so, then it seems their conception of social justice had
something of the unlimited quality that makes left-wing conceptions
objectionable.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Thu Apr 8 19:54:43 EDT 1993
Article: 287 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr5.231917.8708@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <14CCBWMQ@math.fu-berlin.de>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 23:00:50 GMT
Lines: 20
czarbock@cltr.uq.oz.au (C. Zarbock) writes:
>>So the issue is what system of values the market will be subordinated to
>>if it is not left free.
>
>Exactly. The market is an economic system, not a moral or a social
>system. Unfortunately there are those who do see the market as being all
>three - this has been the case among certain politicians here in
>Britain. To accept the market as an end in itself is to accept a purely
>materialist view of society as the moral basis of society.
It think a lot of people on the right advocate free markets not because
they believe all their own pro-free-market rhetoric but because they
like the values of the likely regulators even less than they like the
values of the market, which at least are favorable to self-discipline
and responsibility of a sort.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Fri Apr 9 11:52:21 EDT 1993
Article: 5916 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: abortion + stuff
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr7.154119.314@zip.eecs.umich.edu> <1993Apr8.060819.19137@reed.edu>
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1993 14:16:05 GMT
Lines: 39
sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>I think the greatest potential for constructive discussion lies in
>examining the nature of potential personhood. People tend to treat the
>potential for personhood as if it were morally equivalent to:
>
>1) nothing at all (pro-choice)
>2) actual personhood (pro-life)
>
>Why wouldn't it have its own nature & implications, different from
>either of the above possibilities?
I'm inclined to agree. It's worth noting here that abortion was legally
defined as a different and less serious crime than murder. Certainly,
it would be very surprising if a zygote were morally indistinguishable
from you or me.
Whatever our view of the nature and implications of potential personhood
is, though, it ought to be consistent with our views in general. It
seems important to me in this connection that we strongly identify
persons with particular biological organisms. A man is a person, and is
also a particular biological organism of the species _homo sapiens_. To
me and many other people the two seem necessarily connected so that
(same person)<=>(same biological organism), although some science
fiction stories and some religious beliefs as to reincarnation and the
like suggest that other people have other views. (Does anyone know of
any discussions of criteria for personal identity that are relevant
here?) We carry the identification so far that in general we think it's
a very serious crime to destroy biological organisms that normally have
the characteristics that confer personhood even before such
characteristics develop (as in the case of babies) or after those
characteristics have disappeared (as in the case of a man in a coma)
unless there is no hope they will reappear. Although I agree that
abortion is _sui generis_, our view of it ought somehow to be consistent
with our views on these other matters.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Sat Apr 10 12:15:31 EDT 1993
Article: 294 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr5.231917.8708@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr9.061805.17244@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1993 16:00:14 GMT
Lines: 19
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>I am thinking about the case of NYC, where, under pressure from blacks
>who accused the white/Jewish dominated school administrators & teachers
>of "racism", the practice of local control of school boards was
>instituted. It is my understanding that this has resulted in widespread
>corruption and lowering of standards, and that parents continue to vote
>back in corrupt administrators (those that bother vote, that is).
In most places in the United States the people who elect the school
board are also the people who tax themselves to support the system,
which promotes oversight and places somewhat of a limit on forms of
corruption and irresponsibility. It's worth noting that the system of
local financing of education has come under a lot of attack over the
last 20-25 years because it's not egalitarian.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Sat Apr 10 12:15:32 EDT 1993
Article: 295 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <14CCBWMQ@math.fu-berlin.de> <1993Apr9.060151.17004@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1993 16:01:52 GMT
Lines: 26
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>In article , jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>>
>>It think a lot of people on the right advocate free markets not because
>>they believe all their own pro-free-market rhetoric but because they
>>like the values of the likely regulators even less than they like the
>>values of the market, which at least are favorable to self-discipline
>>and responsibility of a sort.
>
>The fear I have is that people on the right are indeed coming to believe
>in their own rhetoric [ . . . ] And for those who, as you say, don't
>believe their own rhetoric, well, what does that say about them? They
>look like hypocrites, or idiots. They need some kind of escape route
>from the intellectual corner they have painted themselves into.
It's a problem. My own view is that right-wingers should come out of
the closet and say what they think about things. That's how they can
develop their own views and relate them to the existing state of affairs
and to what other people think. If in doing so they exclude themselves
from mainstream political discussion for the time being, that's
unfortunate but unavoidable.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Sat Apr 10 13:30:22 EDT 1993
Article: 296 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Social justice and despotism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr7.215122.18891@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr9.054942.16819@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1993 16:15:23 GMT
Lines: 30
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>I am not sure that the homogeneity and unity to which you refer are
>products of the Fascist/NS conceptions of social justice...I think the
>problem here is a serious confusion on the part of the Fascist as to
>what leadership and authority are FOR. The Fascist notion that the
>leader is always right seems to me to be the result of a loss of any
>conception of society as existing for any purpose beyond mere
>expediency.
But what was the Fascist/NS conception of social justice if they didn't
recognize any values that transcended society itself? The possibilities
that occur to me are:
(1) People are treated justly only if they are treated equally in all
respects, because there are no differences in worth that justify
differences in treatment. This is the left-wing conception of justice.
(2) People are treated justly if they are treated rationally in
accordance with the system that best promotes the success of the
society. In the absence of values transcending society, it seems
possible to determine "success" unambiguously only by reference to
success in defeating other societies in warfare and enslaving or
destroying them. So people are treated justly if their treatment
reflects their contribution to a system of unlimited militarization and
aggressive warfare.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Sat Apr 10 13:30:23 EDT 1993
Article: 297 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr7.213815.18583@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr9.053258.16591@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1993 16:17:11 GMT
Lines: 17
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>But if we accept the utilitarian capitalist argument, we might think our
>children our being educated, when in fact they will simply be being
>processed for the consumerist society capitalism is working feverishly
>towards...
Do you think the schools would be worse if "honest, hardworking and
skillful capitalist producer" replaced "sensitive, tolerant and
nonjudgmental citizen of a multicultural society" as a guiding
conception? The latter conception seems more closely related to the
consumerist outlook. Is your concern that if the former conception were
adopted it would be carried out more rigorously than the latter?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Sun Apr 11 20:03:00 EDT 1993
Article: 302 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr9.061805.17244@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr11.035143.20616@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1993 22:29:55 GMT
Lines: 18
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>The real reason for centralized funding is that it allows centralized
>control.
It mostly reduces to that. There are other reasons, though:
1. From the standpoint of local communities it seems like free money
because the benefit of getting it seems much more concrete than any
ultimate effect of state or federal tax rates.
2. Centralized funding means more money for teachers, administrators
and other people in the education biz.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Sun Apr 11 20:03:02 EDT 1993
Article: 303 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Social justice and despotism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr9.054942.16819@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr11.044652.21365@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1993 22:32:57 GMT
Lines: 71
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>Michael Walker sees the fascist notion of society as inorganic, but he
>may be using the word in a slightly different sense (i.e., organic as
>living, inorganic as a machine which can be taken apart and be changed,
>improved, etc, and put back together, like some kind of a clock).
I would follow Walker on this. There are two views, neither of which I
would call organic:
1. "Society" exists only by convention, in reality there are only atoms
and the void. The "atoms" are individuals, or rather (to carry the line
of thought to its conclusion) particular sensations, impulses and so on.
Since each sensation or impulse is equally valid as such, justice
demands that each be treated equally. (This view is obviously not
organic.)
2. Individuals have significance only by reference to the whole of
which they are parts. The whole of which a man is part is the human
society of which he is a member; his society is not part of any larger
whole (otherwise there would be values transcending society). The
significance a society attributes to one of its members or anything else
is determined by what that society in fact does, which in turn is
determined by the will of those who are able to seize and retain power.
Therefore, the will of the Leader is the supreme law and determines
justice and all other standards. (This view is not organic because a
living thing is alive only because its parts are alive, and on this view
the parts don't matter.)
>I don't know that a *lack* of values transcending society need
>*necessarily* result in militarism...there are many vaguely left-wing
>versions of utopianism which pursue an organic form of society closer
>to the fascist or right-wing conception of "social justice", than to
>the left-wing conception. These utopianism championed pacifism, not
>militarism, yet do not appear to conceive of any values transcending
>society.
Their vagueness suggests they may not have thought through their views.
It's worth noting that the collectivist left-wing revolutionary
societies that have actually existed have been quite militaristic.
My alternatives (1) and (2) raise the notoriously difficult issue of the
relationship between the One (society) and the Many (individuals). Each
alternative treats one of the members of the relationship as an absolute
and the result is catastrophe. To relate all this to transcendent
values -- it seems to me that people need to refer their thought to a
most real being. (The ENR's talk of paganism suggests not everyone
agrees with me on this point.) Recognition of a transcendent God
satisfies that need and permits people to view the claims of society and
individuals with more moderation; in the absence of something of the
sort, they will tend to treat one or the other as an absolute.
>So, anyway, it seems there is a third alternative which we have not
>discussed yet, a "right-wing" conception of social justice which is
>based on values which transcend society - organicism with values, a
>social body with a soul, if you will. This seems to be the point towards
>which this discussion is headed.
Right. One feature of such a society is that it can't be constructed,
which may limit the possibilities of political action. If you try to
accept transcendent values as a way to solve social problems you will
fail, because the point of transcendent values is that they matter more
than any social problem and therefore can't be treated as means in such
a way. To the extent your third alternative is the natural form of
human society its realization could be aided by elimination of
inconsistent political institutions, however.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Sun Apr 11 20:03:03 EDT 1993
Article: 304 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr9.053258.16591@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr11.051549.21793@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1993 22:39:00 GMT
Lines: 41
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>My biggest fear is that these "left" and "right" wing forms of education
>will ally to produce good, hard working capitalist cogs who are also
>"tolerant", "sensitive", and "non-judgemental".
A stable closed system in which human life is reduced to production and
consumption is indeed a horrifying conception. I was reading Leo
Strauss yesterday:
"Yet there is no reason for despair as long a human nature has
not been conquered completely, i.e., as long as sun and man
still generate man. There will alway be men (_andres_) who will
revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in
which there is no longer a possibility of noble action and of
great deeds. They may be forced into a mere negation of the
universal and homogeneous state, into a negation not enlightened
by any positive goal, into a nihilistic reaction. While perhaps
doomed to failure, that nihilistic revolution may be the only
action on behalf of man's humanity, the only great and noble
deed that is possible once the universal and homogeneous state
has become inevitable [ . . . ] Someone may object that the
successful revolt against the universal and homogeneous state
could have no other effect than that the identical historical
process which has led from the primitive horde to the final
state will be repeated. But would such a repetition of the
process -- a new lease of life for man's humanity -- not be
preferable to the indefinite continuation of the inhuman end?"
"Restatement on Xenophon's _Hiero_", in _On Tyranny_.
>Have I made my point clearer, or am I babbling?
The former. I have no objection to the Frankfort School going
right-wing, which is what a lot of ENR-talk seems to amount to. Also,
it can cheer you up every now and then to take the view that "the worse
the better".
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Mon Apr 12 08:37:50 EDT 1993
Article: 307 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr7.213815.18583@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr9.053258.16591@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Apr11.051549.21793@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1q9u59INNrt8@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 1993 10:55:29 GMT
Lines: 36
norris@athena.mit.edu (Richard A Chonak) writes:
>About Classics: lately, I'm noticing that, at least in my state, state
>universities fairly reliably have Classics departments, while private
>colleges -- even Catholic colleges, where one would expect Latin to be
>offered -- generally don't.
An interesting point. I would speculate:
1. State schools are bigger and better funded, and have more
departments of everything, and so are more likely to have classics
departments.
2. State schools are more responsive to political pressures, and are
inclined to compromise with the demands of every pressure group with a
plausible story, even cranks who think the classics are important.
Private schools are more likely to concentrate on what they and their
customers think is important, which apparently does not include
classics.
Mr. Deane might well argue that this example shows that multicultural
slop is better than capitalist discipline because it permits more things
to survive, including some valuable things. I suppose the response
would be that the things that survive ought to be things that people
think are important, and it would be better for the study of the
classics if there were fewer classics departments as long as the
remaining departments are in settings in which people think the classics
matter.
Is it true that you can't study Latin at most Catholic colleges? That's
the most depressing thing I've heard all day. Of course, it's only 6:50
a.m. so I haven't heard many things yet . . .
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers;
they have already been governing us for quite some time." (A. MacIntyre)
From panix!jk Tue Apr 13 13:06:45 EDT 1993
Article: 311 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Social justice and despotism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr11.044652.21365@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr13.000019.22370@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1993 12:59:14 GMT
Lines: 104
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
[Difficulties that arise if society is not viewed as subordinate to
something greater.]
>But then, any greater whole above such a society which transcends it and
>which trys to impose its own purpose/laws upon this society can also
>fall prey to a similar objection (as in objections to the claims of
>"humanity" or world government). It would seem to me that this dilemma
>goes ever upward and disappears into infinity.
Therefore, a rational understanding of society is impossible unless we
assume that there is an ultimate source of purpose/laws that stops the
regress. That ultimate source is customarily referred to as "God". It
is evident from what has been said that society itself can not be viewed
as such an ultimate.
>(were the anarchists of Spain and Russia militaristic?).
I don't know enough about them to comment.
>In any case, the existence of opposition would seem to promote
>militarism, but I do not see how militarism is a special feature of
>societies which lack transcendent values. Surely the Crusades were
>spurred on by a belief in transcendent values, for instance?
The perfection of militarism is (1) the belief that there is no value
equal to the triumph of one's own will over the will of others, together
with (2) the observation that the capacity to enslave and destroy is the
capacity to ensure that one's will will triumph over that of others.
That perfection is unavailable to those who accept values that transcend
their own desires. In particular, the Crusaders (about whom I know very
little) apparently lacked (1) since they worshipped a God who had been
tortured to death. It's quite possible, of course, that without being
perfect militarists they overestimated the virtues of force.
It seems to me that people do naturally attribute some value to getting
their own way in a dispute with others. So if they accept no values
that transcend getting what they want, and they nobly consider comfort
and pleasure insufficient goals in life, they are likely to accept (1).
(The alternatives that occur to me don't seem to work.) Once they
accept (1), perfect militarism follows because (2) is simply true.
>The ENR would say that there are many different ways of interpreting
>ultimate reality (God), and that all of them, on their own terms, are
>good because they are all different ways of life and ways of
>interpreting the ultimate reality. This, I gather, is what is meant by
>polytheism; as opposed to monotheism, which occurs when one way of
>life/way of interpreting reality declares that it is the only true
>interpretation and that all others are false.
I wouldn't call that polytheism. I would call it a form of monotheism
that emphasizes God's transcendence to the point of saying that all our
conceptions of him are equally inadequate. It seems to have a lot in
common with Hinduism.
>The ENR's view need not fall into the fallacy of radical subjectivism
>(nothing is true/everything is true) because we, as finite beings in an
>infinite universe, cannot possibly come to any final, perfect
>understanding of ultimate reality (this constitutes my own way of
>dealing with the issue of subjectivsim; I am not sure how the ENR has
>dealt with it). Since God/ultimate reality is infinite and beyond all
>categories and pairs of opposites by which our minds can understand
>things, it seems more than a bit presumptuous, to this kind of pagan
>outlook, to make dogmatic statements about any kind of ultimate being
>(and also explains the popularily of more sympathetic and accesible
>anthropomorphic deities and saints). To this kind of pagan outlook,
>there can be many paths to the same reality, and it would be impious to
>outlaw some of them in the name of a particular "truth".
But if all paths and interpretations are equally good, it seems odd to
think of them as paths to something or interpretations of something.
The relationship between a path or interpretation and the thing itself
would be wholly arbitrary if all paths and interpretations were equally
good. Also, it's hard to see how radical subjectivism is avoided if all
are equally good.
>Also, there is another sense in which the ENR uses paganism, and that is
>the form of paganism which (in their view) is natural to Europe: man,
>as an individual in history, taking responsiblity for his own fate
>without any fear or shame induced by any diety (as opposed to the
>Judeo-Christian "fear of the Lord" being the begining of wisdom). This
>would be a particular paganism rather than a generalized paganism.
Promethean Man, making himself? The point here seems to be that the
godless revolutionary is the natural outcome of European culture. Maybe
so, but I thought that was the problem.
>Hmmm...perhaps a more precise definition of transcendent would be good
>at this point.
X transcends system S if X is not part of S and X causes, explains, or
gives value to S. Examples: the rules of chess transcend particular
chess games, morality transcends positive law, the laws of physics and
the circumstances and needs of human beings transcend the principles of
engineering.
[As usual, I do not discuss the many points on which I do not differ
from you.]
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Well, then, is not the statesman's art to be sought among the arts
dealing with walking herds? Do you not think that everyone, even the
most witless, would judge this to be so?" (Plato)
From panix!jk Tue Apr 13 13:06:47 EDT 1993
Article: 312 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1q9u59INNrt8@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <1993Apr13.002417.22843@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1993 13:00:50 GMT
Lines: 28
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>And how do we convince people that the classics (and other subjects) are
>important?
Well-founded enthusiasm is contagious. So people who value the classics
should study and draw on them and take long views.
[Moaning about failure of Catholic colleges to offer Latin.]
>Did you read Thomas Fleming's piece in a recent issue of Chronicles? He
>was commenting on the cultural illiteracy of many conservative
>Christians [ . . . ]
How could any reac possibly get through the month without Tom Fleming's
grousing? I think that was the same article in which he (literally)
said "Well, thanks for nothing" to people who told him they read his
book but hadn't bought it.
More to the point, I read the article and don't doubt that things are as
bad as he says. He seemed mostly to be talking about his fellow
Protestants, though. I didn't know that the Catholics have become quite
so Americanized.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Well, then, is not the statesman's art to be sought among the arts
dealing with walking herds? Do you not think that everyone, even the
most witless, would judge this to be so?" (Plato)
From panix!jk Tue Apr 13 16:01:31 EDT 1993
Article: 10 of comp.sys.atari.advocacy
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.advocacy
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Kill ATARI!!!! Kill Kill Kill ATARI and everyone who has one!!!!
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1993 17:05:55 GMT
Lines: 19
In klasmekj@ucunix.san.uc.edu (Kevin J. Klasmeier) writes:
> | >>>> Trust me, Rush IS right! <<<< | |
Rush Limbaugh? (I think there's also a rock group called Rush.)
If the former, Mr. Klasmeier's .sig raises the issue of the political
outlook of Atari owners. I own a 1986 520ST and I'm a
foaming-at-the-mouth right-winger. Ditto for Mr. K., unless he's being
ironic or is a rock fan. Also, I understand that A. Schwartzenegger was
seen using a Portfolio in one of the Terminator movies, and the premier
Atari FTP site in the United States has "terminator" in its name. So
that's 4 for 4 for the righties. Any left-wingers dare to tell me I'm
wrong?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Well, then, is not the statesman's art to be sought among the arts
dealing with walking herds? Do you not think that everyone, even the
most witless, would judge this to be so?" (Plato)
From panix!jk Wed Apr 14 11:00:47 EDT 1993
Article: 324 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Social justice and despotism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr13.000019.22370@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr13.195612.9356@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 13:21:54 GMT
Lines: 161
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
In article , jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>>Therefore, a rational understanding of society is impossible unless we
>>assume that there is an ultimate source of purpose/laws that stops the
>>regress.
>
>Hmmm...how is a rational understanding of society possible if one
>assumes that there is such an ultimate source? Such an assumption would
>be irrational or arrational, IMO (not that I would mind, BTW).
Why? I would think that it's rational to make whatever assumptions are
needed to make systematic sense of our experience and the world. For
example, it's rational to assume that our memory and senses are not
misleading on the whole, and that in the future the world will continue
to act in the same general way it has in the past. So if in order to
make sense of human life it's necessary to assume a transcendent source
of values it is also rational to do so. (I use "rational" to refer to
thought that proceeds in an orderly way in which each step is
justifiable in some fashion. I also consider necessity a justification.)
>And would it matter whether the ultimate source was referred to as
>"God", "the ultimate source", "Diety", "the supreme being", "the greate
>spirit", "Nature", "the gods", "fate", "destiny", "karma", "wyrd", or
>what have you?
Your point here seems to be that the line of thought we are discussing
does not by itself lead to a very specific conception of God. Perfectly
true. I think there are other lines of thought that narrow things
down, but we haven't discussed them.
>[The anarchists] seemed quite prepared to be violent against those they
>considered to be standing in the way of the anarchistic society - this
>may or may not constitute militarism, but how does it differentiate
>itself from, say, Christianity, which was prepared to use violence
>against similar obstacles to a Christian society?
I just don't know enough about them. Maybe their thought was incoherent
and its incoherence was one of the explanations for their practical
failure. Maybe they implicitly accepted transcendent values. I just
don't know.
>Is it not possible to equal, or even far exceed, the violence of the
>"self-willed" militarist, if one believes that one is acting in accord
>with transcendent values which validate such acts, than if one holds to
>no higher values than one's own will and self-interest?
My claim was that rejection of transcendent values leads in particular
ways to particular bad things, not that rejection of transcendent values
is the only way bad things come about.
>I am not yet convinced that there are no alternatives to [the belief
>that there is no value equal to the triumph of one's own will over the
>will of others], if one accepts society as the basic value, in that one
>can see nature (or God) itself as the higher value, and transcendent
>values than can be derived from it
I don't understand -- if one thinks nature or God is the higher value,
how is society the basic value?
>Saying that God exists, and deriving rationality of society from that
>observation on the one hand; and saying that we observe nature and can
>draw certain rational conclusion about society from it: is there a
>fundamental difference here?
By "nature" you seem to mean an order of things with moral implications
that transcends society. If so, in this discussion I've suggested no
fundamental difference. (In a more purely theological discussion we
could talk about whether the transcendent source of value can better be
thought of as "nature" or as "God".)
>In fact, all polytheistic cultures have a notion of ultimate reality,
>above and beyond the gods, but far too absract and universal to be
>comprehended by human minds [ . . . ] But there is a difference between
>saying that some ways of life and some interpretations of ultimate good
>are better than others, or that my way of life is better for me and your
>way of life is better for you, on the one hand, and on the other,
>saying that one way of life/interpretation of reality is the one Truth,
>which is true for all peoples at all times and in all places.
Your view seems to be that the statement "there is one ultimate reality,
above and beyond all lesser beings" is true for all peoples at all times
and places, but any more particular statement about that reality is an
interpretation that will be valid for some but not others. The idea
that one could name something but not say anything true about it seems
odd. How could we identify anything without knowing at least some of
its characteristics?
Also, can anything be known about what makes an interpretation valid for
one people but not another? If it can't, it's not clear what we're
saying when we say "the Greek religion was valid for the Greeks". If it
can, then it appears that (i) one could sometimes justifiably say that
the religion of the people of Bongo Bongo isn't valid for them and they
ought to adopt religion X which would be valid for them (X might happen
to be one's own religion), and (ii) the principles governing the
validity of interpretations should tell us something about the thing
being interpreted and should therefore be a source of unconditionally
true religious doctrine. (These are interesting issues. If you wanted
to you could probably cite I Corinthians 13:8 in support of your view.)
>[T]he immanent view of God, if I understand correctly, is that it is not
>possible for God to be seperate from his creation, and interact with it,
>and yet at the same time be wholly uneffected by it.
I don't have anything to say about the immanent view because I don't
understand it.
>[I]f there is an ultimate morality which transcends all, than either God
>is above such a morality, and thus the law is not transcendant, or God
>is bound by such a morality, and thus God is not transcendant.
If God is above such a morality then the morality would not be
transcendent as to God but it might be as to us. Another possibility is
that God is the same as his thought, will and knowledge. That seems to
be what it means to say God is a "spirit" -- there's nothing in him that
isn't thought, will, knowledge and the like. But if that's so, and if
morality is the will of God as to the conduct of rational beings, then
God would not be bound by morality but neither would morality be
something that God is above (a person is neither bound by nor above his
own will).
>Now, I can conceive of a transcendant, infinite God who would be above
>and beyond all comprehension and thus impersonal (in the same way that
>natural laws are impersonal), but I cannot conceive of a transcendant,
>infinite God who could at the same time be comprehensible and personal.
If God were in all respects incomprehensible I don't see how he could be
named. See above.
When you speak of an impersonal God it seems you are thinking of God as
an impersonal universal order of things. That's a puzzling conception
to me, although I don't have a fully worked-out theory on the matter.
For example, it seems that in some ways I am superior to the impersonal
universal order of things because I exist in a more concrete way and
because I am aware of that order to a degree, while that order knows
nothing of me and exists only through its manifestation by concrete
beings such as myself. (My comments are getting even vaguer and more
amateurish than usual, and the relevance to The Counterrevolution is
getting less and less obvious. If you want, we can continue the more
speculative parts of this discussion by email. Or maybe someone can
rescue us on these points.)
>Question: in what way is transcendant moral law/God comparable to the
>laws of physics, and/or in what way is it comparable to the rules of
>chess?
I would say that any moral code has both transcendent elements
comparable to the laws of physics and positive elements comparable to
the rules of chess. For example, "don't injure other people without a
good reason" states a transcendent principle but the implementation of
that principle would depend on circumstances and some arbitrary choices.
For example, whether driving on the right or driving on the left is
wrong because it creates unreasonable risks for other people depends on
arbitrarily-chosen conventions as well as on the circumstance that motor
vehicles move fast enough to be dangerous.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Well, then, is not the statesman's art to be sought among the arts
dealing with walking herds? Do you not think that everyone, even the
most witless, would judge this to be so?" (Plato)
From panix!jk Wed Apr 14 11:00:49 EDT 1993
Article: 325 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: School daze . . .
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr13.002417.22843@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr13.200739.9634@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 13:25:04 GMT
Lines: 17
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>In article , jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>>I didn't know that the Catholics have become quite
>>so Americanized.
>What do you mean by "Americanized"?
In addition to our numerous virtues we have certain vices, mostly the
vices of democracy like unwillingness to admit that there are values
that are not immediately accessible to everyone.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Well, then, is not the statesman's art to be sought among the arts
dealing with walking herds? Do you not think that everyone, even the
most witless, would judge this to be so?" (Plato)
From panix!jk Thu Apr 15 18:48:58 EDT 1993
Article: 331 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Social justice and despotism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr13.195612.9356@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr15.044435.11961@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1993 21:43:38 GMT
Lines: 98
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>I suspect that on close inspection, it will be very hard to find any
>group which did not at least implicitly accept some form of transcendent
>values. Yah, fascist militarists included.
That's no doubt true. Nietzsche's discussions of how difficult it is to
get rid of God and how everyone up to him had failed miserably to do so
are of interest on this point. However, it seems to me that attempting
to reject what transcends the world of our senses and inner experience
has consequences, even if the attempt is never really successful, and
that those consequences include a tendency to identify the highest good
either with the will of the powerful or with pleasure and the absence of
pain, as well as further political consequences.
>Taking a nominalist view, by recognizing the uniqueness of
>particularities and downplaying generalizations which group diverse
>entities into "categories" which empty the particularities of identity
>and meaning, it therefore follows that ultimate generalizations - "the
>human race", the world, the universe, nature, God - are somewhat
>suspect.
Part of what's involved in saying God is a person is saying God is not a
generalization. Also, the ultimate particularities that we find in the
world of our senses and inner experience -- particular momentary
sensations and impulses, instants in time, points in space, subatomic
particles -- do lack identity and meaning except in relation to some
larger system. You seem to accept that point in what you say next:
>It then follows that there is a heirarchy of sorts, but this does not
>mean precisely that the higher dictates to the lower - in the sense of
>transcendent laws to be obeyed. Rather, if the ultimate reality is an
>interactive system, then the relationship between "higher" and "lower"
>is mutual and interdependent.
Here, you seem to be viewing the world as a system of things in which
each part is explained and justified by the remaining parts. By using
the expression "ultimate reality" you seem to suggest that that's all
there is and that the world as so viewed is comprehensible without
reference to anything outside it. It all seems rather circular to me.
>Above this society, there are greater wholes of which the society is an
>organic part.
What? The historical progression of societies? Humanity? Life on
Planet Earth? The evolution of conscious life in the Universe? Is it
your view that such things give rise to values that transcend and
justify the values of individual societies?
>But I simply mean that society is a basic value because it lies between
>the extremes - neither so particularistic that chaos ensues and the
>individual is lost, nor so universal that the individual is dwarfed,
>nay, crushed under the burden of absolute, universal transcendent
>values.
It's true that we inhabit a middle range between particularity and
universality. I don't think of the transcendent as at one end of that
spectrum though -- that spectrum is within the world, and the
transcendent is what is not in the world that explains and justifies the
world. To speak impressionistically, I think of the transcendent as at
right angles to the spectrum and justifying each part. For example, if
I have a very particular obligation that depends on the way people live
in my society -- to see that my son is financially able to go to college
when the time comes, say -- the explanation of why that obligation is
binding does not relate solely to my society or to how my son, I or
anyone else think or feel about things. It also has a transcendent
element.
>But the issue of transcendence itself may be the problem here. Is nature
>like a chess game, played by rules imposed on it?
If God created nature, then natural law isn't imposed on nature any more
than the melody of a song is imposed on the song.
>Or is the whole greater than the parts, and the notion of natural laws a
>human term of convenience?
The issue we are dealing with is that the whole does seem to involve
more than the sum of the parts. What does that mean? That there is
something that lies outside of or transcends every collection of parts?
That the parts generate something additional and different in kind from
themselves?
>The Greek religion was valid for the Greeks in that it informed them of
>their place in the world and helped them make sense of the universe. Any
>speculation beyond this towards ultimate truth is a seperate issue,
>which does not negate the importance of having a religion which is an
>integral part of the identity and life of a people. The fact that a
>religion is valid for the people among which it develops is enough for
>me.
What does one do about one's own religion, though? Is it possible to
avoid speculations toward ultimate truth?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Well, then, is not the statesman's art to be sought among the arts
dealing with walking herds? Do you not think that everyone, even the
most witless, would judge this to be so?" (Plato)
From panix!jk Fri Apr 16 16:26:48 EDT 1993
Article: 333 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: CFV: talk.politics.conservative
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1993 18:12:29 GMT
Lines: 40
Readers of this newsgroup might be interested in the following, which
was posted in a number of the newsgroups relating to politics:
*********************************************************************
This is the official call for votes for the creation of an
unmoderated newsgroup called talk.politics.conservative. The charter
for the newsgroup is as follows:
Talk.politics.conservative is an unmoderated newsgroup dedicated
to discussions about social, cultural, and political conservatism
and discussions of all manner of social, cultural, and political
from the conservative perspective.
To vote for or against the creation of the unmoderated
newsgroup talk.politics.conservative, please send an e-mail message to:
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"I vote for the newsgroup talk.politics.conservative as proposed" or
"I vote against the creation of talk.politics.conservative." Posted
votes are not valid. If you have any trouble or questions, please
mail me at the address listed below.
The voting period begins now, and will end May 7th, 1993
at 23:59 GMT.
--
Michael Arras Bavarian Research Center
arras@forwiss.uni-erlangen.de for Knowledge-Based
Artificial Neural Network and Systems_________________
Fuzzy Logic Research Group FORWISS ERLANGEN * MUNICH * PASSAU
************************************************************************
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Well, then, is not the statesman's art to be sought among the arts
dealing with walking herds? Do you not think that everyone, even the
most witless, would judge this to be so?" (Plato)
From panix!jk Sat Apr 17 12:03:18 EDT 1993
Article: 338 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Social justice and despotism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr13.195612.9356@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr15.044435.11961@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Apr16.052805.7219@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 12:21:36 GMT
Lines: 58
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>The alternative to nihilism is not rationalism, but traditionalism - the
>acceptance of things because they are part of the traditional order of
>things, not because they can be justified according to a rational
>system. In the light of reason, all values wither.
There are a variety of understandings of "reason". One view
("rationalism") rejects all truth that can not be apprehended through
logic, clear universal or communicable concepts, and experiences that
all share and can discuss. I agree that such a view causes values to
wither. But one could also understand reason as the process whereby we
clarify and develop our understanding of the world by discussion and by
testing our beliefs for consistency with each other and with our
experience of the world. I don't see why reason as so understood would
cause values to wither.
>All parts of a system are interrelated, and the "higher" could not exist
>without the "lower". This would include any "transcendent laws".
Perhaps this statement shows the difference between the transcendent and
the immanent view of God.
>But how would you know [of a particular moral obligation] if you did
>not, as a particularity, have some kind of relation to other
>particularities, and to a greater whole (family, society) which
>instructed you on right and wrong? Are you saying these ideas come out
>of nowhere and zap you?
I doubt that I would know anything about moral obligations if I had
never been a participant in society. We know things through our senses
and our participation in society, but the things we know can't be
reduced to statements about sense or social experience.
>I still do not see how laws can exist outside of the system. My
>suspiscion is that this notion is a product of how we view things, how
>we impose our will on nature, and not how nature itself functions.
With respect to moral rather than natural law, it seems you are saying
here that morality is a matter of social convention.
>It would seem to me that a quest for God or ultimate truth by use of one's
>reason is an attempt more Faustian or Promethean than anything that any
>Nietzschean or ENR/GRECE intellectual would try to pursue.
To believe that we can fully comprehend God or ultimate truth by use of
our reason certainly seems presumptuous. But we necessarily have
beliefs about those things and it seems to me that we should try to make
those beliefs less inadequate by use of our reason and other faculties.
Good luck on your 25 1-page papers, 500 2-line epigrams, or whatever.
Remember that papers on reac-related topics or on Ireland can become
grist for the a.r.c. mill . . .
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sat Apr 17 14:30:53 EDT 1993
Article: 341 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: A few questions...
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1753400004@igc.apc.org> <1753400006@igc.apc.org>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 17:27:22 GMT
Lines: 23
Thomas Lane writes:
>What is the purpose of this conference and why would Mr. McElroy's
>original posting be inappropriate enough to censor it?
The general purpose of this conference, as I understand it, is to
discuss points of view opposed to the French Revolution and to political
developments following from or related to that event. The participants
include monarchists, Catholic Integrists, fellow-travellers of the
European New Right, assorted paleoconservatives, and the occasional
nonreactionary with something to say on the subject matter. (I think
the participants would be perfectly happy for PeaceNet subscribers to
join in.) I suppose theoretical discussions of nationalism might fit
in, but a nationalist campaign really seems aside the point.
What do you mean "censored", by the way? Did some electronic wizard
cancel Mr. McElroy's posting at your site? If so, I don't think it
happened most places.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sun Apr 18 10:12:04 EDT 1993
Article: 345 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Social justice and despotism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr13.195612.9356@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr15.044435.11961@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Apr16.052805.7219@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Apr17.210236.10363@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1993 12:12:29 GMT
Lines: 68
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>But evenually, if a society or religion is to keep from flying apart,
>it must agree on certain basic assumptions which cannot be proved, but
>from which reason can build upon.
I suppose a society or religion is in good health only as long as the
dominant group of members or adherents find they can't help but believe
its basic assumptions. When doubts and questioning becomes general the
possibilities are:
1. Celebrate pluralism. Claim it's a good thing when people disagree
on basics and downplay, ignore or misrepresent the consequences of such
disagreement (e.g., the absence of any standard for judging conduct
other than self-will and material interest). This approach can't work
forever, but maybe no other approach works forever either.
2. Crush dissent. Presumably, every society inflicts some sort of
penalty on people who dissent from its basic assumptions. However, the
history of Communist countries suggests that it only works to crush
dissent when the crushing is in good faith -- that is, when the crushers
themselves can't help but believe in the assumptions they are
protecting.
3. Investigate basics in the hope of attaining agreement on assumptions
sufficient for a new or revivified order of things. I suppose that is
the purpose of this newsgroup.
>To the extent that at some level it is based on unprovable assumptions,
>all morality is social convention.
To believe that one's own morality is social convention is to confer the
moral attributes of God on whoever has the power to determine social
convention. But why is it necessary to believe that unprovable
assumptions draw their validity only from social convention? What's
wrong with self-evidence, right reason or divine revelation?
>But at the root of such beliefs must be certain a priori assumptions,
>which are inherently irrational, in that they cannot be subject to
>rational dissection as they would lose their power.
Would you comment on whether logical analysis has certain a priori
assumptions that would lose their power if subjected to logical
dissection?
>In the modern age, equality is the key irrational, unquestioned belief
>which undergirds established thought.
Why on your view is it worse than any other irrational unquestion belief
that might undergird thought? For what it's worth, I view equality as a
refusal to make distinctions and therefore (among other things) a
rejection of an essential element of rational thought.
>>Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
>> How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
>>
>> -- W. B. Yeats
>
>Yah, that certainly sounds like Yeats. But I thought Nietzsche said something
>similar. The two do seem to share similar patterns of thought.
Yeats was quite taken with Nietzsche at one point. I remember reading a
letter to him from his father complaining about it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sun Apr 18 10:12:05 EDT 1993
Article: 346 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: How come lefties are better than us?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1993 14:08:31 GMT
Lines: 97
Readers may have noticed that in settings other than this newsgroup
leftists usually take it for granted that they are morally superior to
rightists and that the general educated public is inclined to agree.
The following seem to me to be some of the reasons for the moral
prestige and self-confidence of the left:
1. People today think of government as an agent in whose actions they
participate, and as the only agent that can represent and draw on the
resources of all of society to deal with the problems of society in
general. People thus view action by government as a simple case of
society dealing with its problems.
2. If one asks whether something should be done be done about bad
things like poverty that affect a lot of people the simplest and most
straightforward answers are those of the left -- the government (or
"we") should redistribute income, set up a jobs program, stamp out
discrimination, or whatever. People feel that criticisms of such
answers are unsatisfying because it seems better to try to do something
about bad things even though success is doubtful than to make no effort
at all.
3. Since all problems may be thought of as aspects of larger social
problems and since social problems appear to be more important than
individual problems, many people think it their most important moral
obligation to support a style of government in which all evils are
treated as a government responsibility.
4. To get more metaphysical, people today are inclined to believe that
the only aspects of human life that are ultimately real are immediate
impulse and sensation and some universal order of things. Anything else
(individual responsibility, the family, the nation, the race, Western
Civilization) that falls between these extremes of particularity and
universality seems to exist only by social convention, and people feel
that treating such fictions as important realities is superstitious and
bigoted.
a. People find demands that responsibility be assigned and
brought home one place or another in the web of intermediate
institutions to be narrow-minded and punitive in view of the
complexity of the causes that give rise to any event and the
contingency of the institutions making up the web and of their
relationships. Why treat bank robbers as criminals when the
existence of banks and the existence, value and ownership of
money results from social conventions that are arbitrary and
therefore lacking in natural justice, and when the acts of the
robbers can be viewed as a consequence of general social
conditions?
b. Assertions by conservatives that life is impossible without
taking intermediate things seriously are all very well in the
abstract, but in each case it is a particular feature of a
particular intermediate entity that is judged by the standards
of immediate impulse and universal justice and found wanting.
For example, people feel that claims that the institution of the
family must be taken seriously are cold-hearted in the face of
the demand (supported by both individualism and universal
justice as those things are now understood) that social
organization not put those for whom the family has failed at a
disadvantage.
Since the plausibility of the moral outlook of the left results from
widespread ways of thought, it is the task of rightists to criticize
those ways of thought. Some specifics:
1. Criticize the notion that what government does and what "we" do is
the same. The things that happen as a result of government action in
particular or human action generally should usually not be viewed as the
act of a collective "we". Sometimes it makes sense to view things that
way in particular respects but in most situations it does not; to think
otherwise is to deny the agency of individuals and of other actors
smaller than society at large. Also, when the collective "we" does act
it sometimes acts independently of the government, which itself only
exists by reason of a prior act of the collective "we". The collective
"we" may even act in opposition to the government.
2. Criticize notion of "social problems". The fact that many people
have a difficulty makes it a social problem only to the extent that
something can be done about it socially that will help more than it will
hurt. The claim that trying to do something about social problems is
better than doing nothing begs the question. The real issue is what
human happiness is and what government (or anything else) can contribute
to it.
3. Promote acceptance of tradition as authoritative because only
through such acceptance can the intermediate institutions that depend on
particular traditions be treated as authoritative. Such acceptance is
rational because it is indispensible to a tolerable life, and we can
learn how to be rationally loyal to a tradition by living rationally in
the tradition. That is difficult to do if the tradition in which one
grew up in is committing suicide, but who said life is easy.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sun Apr 18 16:26:10 EDT 1993
Article: 347 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Opposition to Discrimination and Social Decline
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1993 17:46:50 GMT
Lines: 79
I've become curious whether anyone actually reads this newsgroup, and
have decided to investigate by posting things that are likely to offend
public sentiment even if they are found incomprehensible:
Nihilism, Social Disintegration and Anti-Discrimination
Men have no faith in themselves or their convictions today because the
bonds among them have lost their strength. No-one thinks he has firm
ground to stand on because each is dependent on others who may fail or
turn against him. The only order of things accepted as real is a
universal public realm that lacks the courage to leave anyone out
because if it had an outside it might be questioned and have to be
defended. The sole principle of that realm is that a state of universal
equality must be established. That is less a principle than a rejection
of all principle, however, and it is defended not by argument but by
contemptuous or hysterical rejection of anyone who seems to deny it.
Accordingly, the sentiments referred to as racist and sexist have
declined in recent years because men have become afraid to claim a
particular status and have become unclear as to what particular status
might be due them. Nonetheless, the various forms of anti-racism and
anti-sexism grow ever more intense, each in a way that varies in
accordance with circumstances. Although blacks have special reasons for
being anti-racist, the intensity of anti-racist feeling, the great
diversity of the situations treated as instances of racism, and the
resulting treatment of racism as both pervasive and inexpressibly evil
suggests that their opposition is based less on practical considerations
or the demand for justice than on the feeling that to fail to include
them fully in the larger society is to deprive them of existence. Such
a feeling is difficult to satisfy; without strong bonds among men there
is no larger society to be part of, and the only way blacks can be made
to feel recognized and included is therefore to grant them special
privileges.
Like blacks, feminists often seem to feel that not to be a full and
equal member of a universal public order is not to exist. However,
anti-sexism among women is more ambiguous and confused than anti-racism
among blacks. Most women have better things to do than worry about
their relationship to the social order at large. They are naturally the
center of family life, most obviously because of the tie between mother
and child, but also because of their engagement in what is immediate and
personal and their need of the support of a husband. The mother of a
small child does not disbelieve in her own existence or in the value of
what she does. However, no-one today believes completely in what he
himself experiences as valuable; the only fully persuasive source of
dignity is a formal position in the organized production and
distribution of publicly recognized and exchangeable goods -- that is, a
job. Thus arise the conflicts that give rise to feminism as it now is.
Opposition to anti-semitism among Jews and their identification with the
cause of antidiscrimination is also a rather complex matter. Judaism is
the religion of the chosen people and of a people that prospers whenever
given a chance to do so. Since Jews are a small minority, though, they
must publicly support the principle of equality. It is therefore to be
expected that Jewish attitudes toward these matters will often be
conflicted and inconsistent.
Some of the opposition to racism may reflect an understanding that
racism and egalitarianism are both natural results of nihilism. A true
egalitarian understands a true racist all too well. If nihilism is
inevitable it may be rational to believe that a majority should be
subject to special disabilities to prevent it from giving in to its
natural temptation to realize itself through the only form of excellence
available to a nihilist -- the oppression of the weak. The National
Socialists, who recognized no values beyond the will of the German
people as expressed in the will of Hitler, founded a new order on
solidarity among Germans and oppression of outsiders, and gave a very
practical interpretation to the view that to be excluded from full
membership in the public social order is not to exist. The difficulty,
though, is that a nihilistic elite powerful enough and independent
enough to suppress racism would create its own dangers. In nihilism
there are no solutions, although perhaps that doesn't matter because
there really aren't any problems either.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Tue Apr 20 16:13:12 EDT 1993
Article: 350 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Social justice and despotism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr13.195612.9356@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Apr15.044435.11961@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Apr16.052805.7219@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Apr17.210236.10363@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1993 12:09:42 GMT
Lines: 61
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes (in an article
that was apparently delayed in transmission):
>From my perspective, if God is to be identified with ultimate truth
>(which is the assumption being made here on which your rational system
>is based), then to say that God has a will (implying personality) or
>that God is will, then it would seem to me that this would nullify
>claims to being the ultimate, in that to will something is to not will
>other things; to have certain characteristics is to not have others.
You seem to be saying that to will is to choose among things that don't
depend on the will, and to pick some and reject others. I don't see why
that's necessarily true. Why couldn't someone will those things he
wills and not be concerned with those things he doesn't will? I agree
that God's will has unusual features. For example, unlike your will or
mine it's not distinct from his knowledge or his power. (God wills X)
<=> (X is) <=> (God knows X).
>An ultimate being would be beyond such conceptions, would not precisely
>will anything, but would simply *be* - which is to say, would will and
>not will, be and not be, would be the sum of all characteristics and
>non-characteristics. Does this sound paradoxical? It is; but that is
>precisely because of the limits of reason.
It's certainly difficult to apply our conceptions unequivocally to an
ultimate being. We can say true negative things about such a being,
though, for example "the ultimate being is not a sprig of parsley", or
more generally "the ultimate being is not a finite element of the world"
or equivalently "the ultimate being is transcendent and infinite".
>>If God were in all respects incomprehensible I don't see how he could be
>>named.
>
>No, I don't see it that way - we put names on all kinds of things that
>we do not understand.
But the names are meaningless unless we have some sort of knowledge of
the things named.
>As to being aware of the absolute universal order of things - such an
>ultimate entity would be beyond the categories of awareness and
>non-awareness [ . . . ]
If so, it would not be non-aware although it would have something very
different from our awareness. I would call that mode of being "the mind
of God".
>The way I am coming to see things would say that there are no
>transcendent laws in the sense you are using, i.e., as rules imposed by
>some higher being, but rather that nature is such that certain things
>happen naturally of their own accord [ . . . ]
But if nature is created (if the higher being is the cause and
explanation of nature) then the things that happen naturally of their
own accord do so because of the higher being. It's not a matter of
imposing laws on nature that are foreign to nature.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Fri Apr 23 12:54:56 EDT 1993
Article: 8171 of sci.philosophy.tech
Xref: panix sci.cognitive:1347 comp.ai.philosophy:9765 sci.lang:15091 sci.philosophy.tech:8171 talk.philosophy.misc:6105
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,comp.ai.philosophy,sci.lang,sci.philosophy.tech,talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Language is not learnable
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr20.144018.7714@news.uit.no> <1993Apr20.175720.6214@ncsu.edu> <0096B616.85A3B090@pomona.claremont.edu>
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1993 21:05:09 GMT
Lines: 40
jlamport@pomona.claremont.edu writes:
>If the aliens had a radically different "language organ" from our own,
>then we would not recognize what they do as "language", and in fact, it
>would not _be_ language, in any sense that we understand the term. We
>would therefore not be able to observe any communication between these
>aliens, for there would be no communication, by our definition of the
>term. We would have no reason to suspect that these creatures were
>intelligent, but would construct them as inanimate objects interacting
>according to some very complex, unknown, but necessarily _physical_ (as
>opposed to semantic) series of interactions.
One way of dramatizing the "different language organ" suggestion is to
suppose that you were kidnapped by man-like creatures with vocal organs
and a way of life very much like our own. They appear to speak and
write to each other and communicate information by doing so, and they
have things that look and seem to function like books and even what
seems to be a computer network very much like Usenet. Unfortunately,
when you try to learn their language or teach them yours you fail
miserably even though they seem to be trying as hard to succeed as you
are. Their "language" has what appear to be phonemes, words and
sentences that you can repeat parrot-like, but you seem unable to learn
to use it in ways that they accept or to educe meaning from it when they
use it. Eventually you isolate classes of sounds that have to do with
things like "water", "food" and "sleep", but that's as far as you ever
get. Finally, a group of what seem to be technicians bring in a device
that after much trial and error enables you to communicate with them in
a rough and ready way (you speak into it the sentence "I could really go
for a Big Mac" and it makes sounds that sound like their "language",
after which they bring you the local imitation of a hamburger).
Does the possibility of telling such a story show that a "radically
different language organ" is not conceptual nonsense in the way you
suggest?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Fri Apr 23 19:54:22 EDT 1993
Article: 351 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Thucydides
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1993 21:27:46 GMT
Lines: 36
rickertj@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu (John Rickert) writes:
[quote from Thucydides deleted]
What's horrible about the situation Thucydides describes is that social
reality and what's good have become radically opposed. Political
developments are making people's characters and lives decidedly worse
than in the past and there's no way to fight those developments because
to join in the fight is to contribute to the problem. With the loss of
common allegiance to truth and justice, language becomes degraded so it
becomes impossible even to discuss what is going on.
It's hard to know just what to do under such circumstances. The final
words of _After Virtue_ by Alasdair MacIntyre may be in point:
"What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of
cummunity within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can
be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And
if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the
last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time
however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have
already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of
consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are
waiting not for a Godot, but for another -- doubtless very different --
St. Benedict."
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Fri Apr 23 19:54:32 EDT 1993
Article: 6108 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Back to abortion
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1993 21:37:55 GMT
Lines: 92
>> > and > = Peter Nyikos
>> = Jim Kalb
>> >The theme of this thread is that an artificial sundering of a natural
>> >anti-abortion argument has taken place: a fetal human is unique in that
>> >it could well have a present level of sentience, however faint, AND have
>> >the potential to become a "person" in EVERY sense of the word.
>>
>> The argument you mention seems to be based on the view that a human
>> being is fundamentally a consciousness that maintains its identity over
>> time and that characteristically when fully developed possesses
>> rationality, a moral sense, reflexive self-awareness and so on. The
>> view I had been presenting is that a human being is an animal that
>> characteristically when fully developed possesses rationality or
>> whatever. I'm inclined to prefer my view because it's simpler and it
>> seems to deal better with the temporarily unconscious. Your view might
>> work better for someone who believed in the substantial soul.
>
>I see no need to bring souls into the picture. "A sentient animal"
>will do nicely for "subject".
But "a sentient animal" could mean either "an organism that is
characteristically sentient" or "an organism that is sentient at the
moment". If the former meaning is accepted, then zygotes and patients
under general anaesthesia would be sentient animals just as much as I am
as I am typing this. If the latter meaning is accepted, then I would
would be the only one of the three who is a sentient animal, and then
only when I am awake or at least dreaming, not in a drunken stupor, etc.
Maybe the definition you have in mind is "an organism that is
characteristically sentient and that has already been actually sentient
at least once". That definition seems somewhat artificial to me,
though.
>> >Sentience, according to Merriam Webster: (2) feeling and sensation, as
>> >distinct from perception or thought.
>> >
>> >[Note added April 22: of course this is not meaning (1) for this word
>> >but it *is* the meaning I use in this context.]
>> >
>> >As I see it, that is all personhood really should require, and if it
>> >means that most animals are "persons", so be it--however, this is not
>> >something anyone can even come close to demonstrating, except perhaps
>> >where cetecans and elephants and great apes are concerned; and for these
>> >I would support a right to life with only the life or health of a human
>> >as exceptions.
>> >
>> >[Note added April 22: this was an IMO statement; I am aware that some
>> >people in talk.abortion talk as though the legal definition of personhood
>> >were the only meaningful one in the abortion context. It is with such
>> >people in mind that I have started to use the word "subject" in place
>> >of "person."]
>>
>> How is it more difficult to demonstrate feeling and sensation in the
>> case of a chicken than in the case of an elephant?
>
>The behavior of the latter is more complicated and less easy to
>ascribe to an unconscious automaton; something Descartes did for
>all [non-human] animals, btw.
It's an interesting issue. I seem to recall that Peter Singer, of
_Animal Liberation_ fame, places the threshhold of sentience somewhere
between a barnicle and a shrimp. You seem inclined (or seemed inclined
at the time you wrote the above) to demand something like reasoning
ability as evidence of sentience in the case of animals other than
humans, but not in the case of developing humans.
>> Also, here you seem
>> to say (feeling and sensation)=>(personhood or subjecthood)=>(right to
>> life). That's different from the argument you opened with, that
>> (subjecthood and potential rationality, etc.)=>(right to life).
>
>Yes, you may note that in my other posts to this thread, I have
>moved the case of elephants and cetecans to the "[potential] rationality"
>half where it more naturally belongs. Of course one needs a rather
>broad definition of "rationality" to include these great mammals.
>
>My real viewpoint is stated in your last line above. This was an older
>thread, before I made up my mind to separate the words "subject" and "person"
>the way I do now.
This may be somewhat of an aside, but do you intend to say that the
degree of rationality that elephants and whales have gives them a moral
value comparable to the moral value a fetus or newborn has from its
potential rationality? Possibly one could develop a notion of imperfect
rationality that would cover both situations, say that Faye Wattleton
and Captain Ahab were involved in what was really the same crime, and
bring about a union between Greenpeace and Operation Rescue . . .
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sat Apr 24 15:15:42 EDT 1993
Article: 8174 of sci.philosophy.tech
Xref: panix sci.cognitive:1351 comp.ai.philosophy:9783 sci.lang:15099 sci.philosophy.tech:8174 talk.philosophy.misc:6113
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,comp.ai.philosophy,sci.lang,sci.philosophy.tech,talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Language is not learnable
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr20.144018.7714@news.uit.no> <1993Apr20.175720.6214@ncsu.edu> <0096B616.85A3B090@pomona.claremont.edu>
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1993 01:26:12 GMT
Lines: 12
In arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu (Ken Arromdee) writes:
>I can easily tell a story with contradictions: "he measured it, and he found
>that although it had four corners it passed every test of being round..."
Can you imagine with any concreteness being the person doing the
measuring and having such an experience?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sun Apr 25 06:05:35 EDT 1993
Article: 8186 of sci.philosophy.tech
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Language is not learnable
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr20.144018.7714@news.uit.no>
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1993 00:36:53 GMT
Lines: 31
In arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu (Ken Arromdee) writes:
>When I imagine something I imagine it only to a certain level of
>detail. If the experience is contradictory below such a level, the
>contradiction doesn't interfere with my ability to imagine. Anything which
>has to be _argued_ as contradictory is almost automatically going to be below
>such a level, and therefore imaginable. For instance, I can imagine myself
>proving that only finitely many prime numbers exist, since my imaginings of
>such things do not include the contents of the proof.
The suggestion was that the notion of a "radically different language
organ" (that is, a fundamentally different innate grammar such that e.g.
a human infant would not be able to learn the alien's language in the
way human infants learn human languages) was incoherent because we could
not recognize a "language" associated with a r.d.l.o. as a language.
The point of the story was that on the face of it the way we recognize
an unknown language as a language has nothing to do with its grammar or
whether the language would turn out to be easy, hard or impossible for
us to learn. You are right that there might be some deep conceptual
lunacy in the notion that there might be a language we could not learn.
The original poster gave no reason to think that is the case, though,
which was the point of my little story. All I needed was that we not be
able to see that the story is impossible at the present state of our
knowledge, as we can see that your story of the circle with corners is
impossible or (with a little more knowledge) your story of the finitude
of primes.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sun Apr 25 09:35:21 EDT 1993
Article: 6148 of talk.philosophy.misc
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Back to abortion
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr25.013021.11954@reed.edu>
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1993 12:03:22 GMT
Lines: 30
sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>You can meaningfully say that you *know* someone who is drunk or
>unconscious; you cannot meaningfully say that you know a fetus. Why?
To know someone in this sense is to be familiar from experience with the
manner in which he exercises capacities that include those
characteristic of persons (e.g., rationality), and to expect the
experiences that give rise to that familiarity to continue. So you
don't know someone in this sense if:
1. He has never exercised the necessary capacities. The word "know" in
"a two-year-old I know" means about the same as it does in "a dachshund
I know". In both cases it is probably meant humorously.
2. There is such a gap in the exercise of the necessary capacities that
the continuous familiarity vanishes. If someone said "I know Mary" who
also knew that Mary had been in a coma for the past two years but would
probably come out of it in another two years if a new therapy worked, I
wouldn't say he was using "know" in the normal way. I might say he was
expressing faith that Mary would recover.
>From these examples it appears that our ability to "know" a living thing
does not determine whether that thing qualifies for protection from
destruction.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Mon Apr 26 10:10:56 EDT 1993
Article: 353 of alt.revolution.counter
Xref: panix talk.politics.theory:12963 alt.revolution.counter:353
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 14:08:26 GMT
Lines: 62
Here's some home-made philosophizing on the fate of the American Way of
Life. (My understanding -- not based on much knowledge -- is that the
Western European Way of Life isn't all that different and is becoming
less so, and that the general world-wide hegemony of Western
Civilization seems likely to stay with us.) Any comments are welcome:
In America today people find it hard to agree on fundamental values
beyond the common desire of each to do whatever he happens to feel like
doing. Accordingly, the goal of our political thought is the maximum
satisfaction of whatever preferences people actually have, based on the
three great principles of prosperity (people should have as many
material resources as possible to do with as they please), equality
(each person should be equally able to do as he pleases, regardless of
his natural gifts, tastes or other characteristics) and liberty (no
person should be restrained from doing anything that doesn't deprive
others of material resources, equality or liberty secured to them by
law). The conflict between the first two of these principles is the
daily stuff of our political life, while the third renders illegitimate
other conceptions of politics.
Most of us aren't quite satisfied with a conception of politics that
treats nothing as sacred except each person's self-will, even though few
of us find any fundamentally different conception of politics thinkable.
Accordingly, we try to find something else that can be treated as sacred
without interfering with treating our own inclinations as primary. The
obvious way to do so is to posit the sacredness of things that are
outside our current social order and to require certain gestures of
respect to such things. The most successful candidates for such
treatment have been the natural order as it would exist in the absence
of man, and remnants of the human order as it existed before the rise of
our current way of life. Both the ecological and the historical
preservation movements have been successful in giving people a feeling
of relatedness to a natural or temporal order of things that transcends
present sensation, desire and impulse without making demands on us that
we don't feel like complying with. Other movements motivated by
generally similar concerns, such as the right-to-life movement, have
failed in this regard and remained the preoccupations of despised
minorities.
One obvious question is how long such compromises between the desire to
get what we want and the desire to feel part of some larger order of
things can last and how they are likely to end. My own inclination is
to think that people become stupid, grasping and contentious if they do
not view themselves as part of an order that transcends them and take
that view seriously enough that it overrides their other desires. In
the absence of such a view they become stupid because they don't think
there are objective truths to be grasped by intelligence, and grasping
and contentious because they accept no good beyond the satisfaction of
their own desires and their own desires conflict with those of other
people, and because as social animals they measure their own well-being
by comparison with that of others. Accordingly, I would expect the
current compromises to end either in social chaos or in the triumph of
some principle of transcendence, most likely a simplified principle such
as religious fundamentalism. I take it that the common view of either
social chaos or religious fundamentalism as a primary threat to our
present way of life confirms my view.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Mon Apr 26 14:26:01 EDT 1993
Article: 8199 of sci.philosophy.tech
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Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Language is not learnable
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr24.174554.29347@infodev.cam.ac.uk> <1rc4mrINNpb4@bigbird.williams.edu>
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 14:23:01 GMT
Lines: 15
arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu (Ken Arromdee) writes:
>However, if you want to phrase things that way, and say that "imagining"
>a set of contradicting things doesn't count as imagining if you
>understand the contradiction, then I have never imagined the
>hypothetical language example that started this thread, either.
You seem to be saying that the hypothetical language example was a set
of contradicting things. If so, how so?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Tue Apr 27 10:03:05 EDT 1993
Article: 6181 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Back to abortion
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1993 14:00:10 GMT
Lines: 31
nyikos@math.scarolina.edu (Peter Nyikos) writes:
>>Maybe the definition you have in mind is "an organism that is
>>characteristically sentient and that has already been actually sentient
>>at least once". That definition seems somewhat artificial to me,
>>though.
>
>Perhaps, but it is closest to my meaning, and I think it is a realistic
>one.
At present, though, you don't seem to be inclined to protect the lives
of all animals that are sentient animals by this definition. Instead,
you seem to want to protect the lives of all rational or potentially
rational animals, possibly counting what elephants and whales have as
rationality. You want to protect them only after they have been
actually sentient at least once. What is the relevance of sentience if
it is rationality that is the key? Why not protect them only after they
have been actually rational at least once?
Possibly, your answer would be that something that is a sentient animal
in your sense is a subject, and therefore has rights, is an end in
itself, or whatever. In particular, it has a right not to be robbed of
its glorious future as a rational animal if it is capable of having such
a future. If my interpretation of your views is correct up to now,
would you comment on what rights sentient animals have that aren't
capable of becoming rational animals?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Tue Apr 27 12:38:31 EDT 1993
Article: 6183 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Back to abortion
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr25.013021.11954@reed.edu> <1993Apr26.221933.4843@reed.edu>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1993 14:05:10 GMT
Lines: 44
sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>>From these examples it appears that our ability to "know" a living thing
>>does not determine whether that thing qualifies for protection from
>>destruction.
>
>I can't quite follow the conclusory leap.
The argument was:
1. We don't say we know a 2-year-old or a person in a long-term coma
who may well recover in the same sense in which we say we know another
normal adult who at the moment is drunk or unconscious. (Or if we do
say we know 2-year-olds and coma patients and babies in the necessary
sense I don't see what's wrong with saying that we could know a fetus,
for example by observing it constantly by sonogram.)
2. Nonetheless, we do not allow the killing of 2-year-olds or patients
in long-term comas for whom there is still hope.
3. Therefore the conclusion.
Which part of the argument don't you like?
>Right now it is silent where I am; there is no music. If I put on, say,
>a piano sonata, there will be music. However, the music will have parts
>which are silence--the musician will pause, come to a "musical rest"
>then commence again. During those silences, is there music in the room?
>Of course: the silence is part of the music. Whether silence is a part
>in a piece of music depends on context and history.
>
>The same is true of unconsciousness and personhood. A person in a state
>of temporary unconsciousnessis analagous to a musical piece in a moment
>of silence. Despite the temporary absence of what makes them real, both
>the person and the music still exist, and are real, ongoing things.
The example may deal with sleep and perhaps short-term unconsciousness,
but not with unconsciousness that lasts for several years and may or may
not end.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Tue Apr 27 19:55:04 EDT 1993
Article: 356 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1rjeb3$gsr@transfer.stratus.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1993 20:08:40 GMT
Lines: 41
William_Mosco@vos.stratus.com writes:
>>Accordingly, I would expect the
>>current compromises to end either in social chaos or in the triumph of
>>some principle of transcendence, most likely a simplified principle such
>>as religious fundamentalism. I take it that the common view of either
>>social chaos or religious fundamentalism as a primary threat to our
>>present way of life confirms my view.
>I agree with your assumptions up to religious fundamentalism. People a
>hundred years ago were very much motivated by religion, but today more
>and more people are falling away from religion.
It's an interesting issue. My own inclination is to think that the
religious viewpoint is a perpetual possibility, and that trends can
reverse, even trends such as the decline of religious faith in the West
that have lasted a very long time. If a crisis goes deep enough, things
that had seemed only theoretical possibilities can become practical
realities very quickly.
>I think in my opinion, the end of western society will come without the
>people realizing that they were the cause. A certain threat be it
>economy, natural disaster, plague etc. will grip the society and call
>for extreme measures by the government to change it's constitutional
>policy. This of course will be demanded by the people, and another form
>of government or society will emerge "for the betterment of the
>society". In other words we as Americans will be either tricked or
>lulled into believing that we have to trade our rights in for stable
>life.
It sounds like the other form of government or society you are speaking
of is tyranny. That's certainly a possible outcome and may be the most
probable one. I suppose the way I'd fit it into my scheme outlined
above is to say that tyranny is a manifestation of social chaos -- both
involve generalized lawlessness that in the case of tyranny takes the
form of arbitrary rule by the strongest.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Wed Apr 28 06:13:23 EDT 1993
Article: 12971 of talk.politics.theory
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr27.171305.20446@freenet.carleton.ca>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1993 01:07:21 GMT
Lines: 44
666ad354@Freenet.carleton.ca (James Owens) writes:
>In my view, belief in the sacredness of others is not incompatible with
>belief in the sacredness of self; on the contrary, it is a natural
>extension. But a sense of the unequivocal worth of others is missing
>today. The value of a stranger is measured by what he can do for you;
>how much money he makes; who or what he knows. His absolute value is
>ignored to the extent that it is in conflict with your own absolute
>value; this is called "looking out for number one." There is no
>obligation to look out for him, since he is looking out for himself. As
>a result, his infinite worth is easily and comfortably supplanted by
>relative worth on some scale or other.
This way of looking at things seems to result from the rejection of
values that are somehow given a priori or derived from some transcendent
source. If we attempt to find values within our own experience, what we
will find will be our own desires and impulses. In the absence of
anything more authoritative, these will seem to have absolute value for
us. Someone might suggest that since we are social and rational animals
we can rise above our individual experience and base our conceptions of
value on the desires and impulses of other people as well. But if we do
that, what we will have is a mass of desires and impulses that sometimes
cohere and sometimes conflict and need somehow to be sorted out without
reference to anyone's judgement of their moral worth. The obvious way
to do that is to find some numerical measure of the strength of the
desires and impulses and the capacity people and things have to
contribute to their satisfaction, and to make evaluations and decisions
based on that measure. The obvious measure, of course, is money.
>I do see a ray of hope in technologies such as the one we are using at
>the moment, which give rise to communities. We must aim to restore a
>sense that others are important, not to fulfill some function, but in
>their own right.
The sense that others are important has to be something that carries
enough authority to override one's own impulses and desires. I'm not
sure that something as voluntary as Usenet is likely to give rise to
that kind of authority. After all, if things get too serious I can
always disconnect and watch a video.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Wed Apr 28 08:11:48 EDT 1993
Article: 6194 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Back to abortion
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr26.221933.4843@reed.edu> <1993Apr27.192653.13502@reed.edu>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1993 12:08:33 GMT
Lines: 53
sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>I say I know 2 year-olds, and (hypothetically) people in comas. Knowing
>a person requires a *history* of exposure and interaction with a
>personality. It doesn't make sense to say you know a fetus because a
>fetus has no personality.
>Actually, I think it's perfectly reasonable for me to say I know
>(present tense) my father, even though he is dead, since he hasn't
>changed since I last knew him.
The issue for you, then, seems to be whether personality is present. It
appears that it is present only if an organism has displayed certain
characteristics, but the organism need not be capable of displaying
those characteristics currently.
What characteristics are necessary? A 2-year-old has personality in
your sense. Does a 1-year-old or a 1-month-old? The word "personality"
needs clarification -- dogs are said to have personality, and their
human companions say they know them. For that matter, some
neighborhoods or grapes used in making wine are said to have
personality.
It appears from your statement about your father that whether you can
know something in the sense that you know a person does not determine
for you whether that thing has rights. Would it make sense to drop the
discussion of "knowing" and concentrate on determining when something
has personality? (I am assuming you don't think your father has rights
and personality at present.)
>The aspect of this discussion that pertains to the abortion debate, via
>your comparison of the drunkenly unconscious man and the naturally
>unconscious fetus, is that the drunken person still exists as a person
>with personhood's rights, even though he lacks consciousness.
My question was why that should be so. Suppose there are two human
organisms, both of which are quite likely to display the characteristics
necessary for personhood by the beginning of next year. One of them (an
8-month fetus) needs only protection and nutrition to do so, while the
other (a child who went into a coma at age 2) won't do so without
special therapy. You would give vastly superior status to the second
organism because at some time in the past it displayed the
characteristics required for personality. Why is that view better than
Peter Nyikos' view that all that's required for that kind of superior
status is for the organism to have become sentient and so to be a
"subject" in his sense, or my view that no particular history is
required as long as (as I think we would all require) the organism will
in the future display the necessary characteristics?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Thu Apr 29 05:42:36 EDT 1993
Article: 359 of alt.revolution.counter
Xref: panix talk.politics.theory:12975 alt.revolution.counter:359
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Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr27.171305.20446@freenet.carleton.ca> <1993Apr28.140033.9240@freenet.carleton.ca>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1993 22:15:19 GMT
Lines: 40
ad354@Freenet.carleton.ca (James Owens) writes:
>It may be that the sense of others' importance is part of our normal
>impulses and desires -- it certainly appears as a universal
>characteristic of society. In out society, for reasons I suggested in
>an earlier post, this sense is compromised.
It seems to me that in order to have a view of the world in which people
and things are seen as having an importance that can't be reduced to the
satisfaction of people's actual desires and impulses we must accept some
source of value that transcends sensory and social experience. I agree
that in our society that sense of importance is suppressed, and I would
add that the consciousness of transcendent things (which I identify with
religious consciousness) is also suppressed. Both are natural, and they
are so tied together that you can't liberate the former without
liberating the latter.
>My point is that technology may have turned a corner; as we approach a
>true global village, the sense of community may have an opportunity to
>reassert itself. In any case, I think we must promote community, or
>risk chaos or religious wars.
If the sense of community reasserts itself forcefully enough to provide
people with a setting in which they can work out satisfying lives, I
doubt that it will reassert itself by creating a single worldwide
community. Instead, I would expect multiple communities to arise
differentiated (among other things) by inconsistent understandings of
what life fundamentally is about and defining themselves in part by
contrast and conflict with each other. The fact that everyone
physically could talk to everyone else via usenet doesn't mean that
everyone will do so and come to a common understanding that both is
universal and has enough content to serve as the basis of communal life.
[I hope I've made myself reasonably clear, by the way. These are topics
that one would have to write books on to deal with at all adequately.]
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Thu Apr 29 10:07:30 EDT 1993
Article: 363 of alt.revolution.counter
Xref: panix talk.politics.theory:12979 alt.revolution.counter:363
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Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr28.140033.9240@freenet.carleton.ca>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 11:43:40 GMT
Lines: 38
gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>I'm not sure what in liberalism prevents anyone from "accepting some
>source of value that transcends sensory and social experience", nor do I
>see how liberal society "suppresses consciousness of transcendant
>things."
>
>Can someone explain? What's the problem?
Since man is a social animal, we develop our understanding of the world
in large part through our dealings with other people. Apart from a few
Don Quixotes, most of us take seriously the things that the people
around us take seriously and give lip service to or ignore other things.
The essence of liberalism, as I understand it, is an attempt to treat
all tastes and ways of life as equally worthy. To join in that attempt,
as a good citizen of a liberal society would, is to reject the notion
that our tastes and inclinations should be judged by reference to some
independent standard, and thus to reject transcendent values.
More wordily: One consequence of accepting liberalism (as I understand
liberalism) is that the only fundamental interest all members of society
can be viewed as having in common is the desire of each to please
himself in accordance with his own tastes. Another is that the only
fundamental moral principle that all can be required to accept is equal
respect for the desires, pleasures and tastes of each. So a person who
takes seriously those things that are taken seriously in liberal society
will view his own interest as the satisfaction of his own desires,
whatever they may happen to be, and will feel obligated to abstain from
judging his own desires or the desires of others in accordance with some
generally-applicable standard that can't be reduced to the actual
desires of actual people. In other words, he will reject transcendent
values.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Thu Apr 29 10:07:39 EDT 1993
Article: 12980 of talk.politics.theory
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Talk.Politics.Theory.Bollocks
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr28.114739.13554@vax.oxford.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 11:47:00 GMT
Lines: 12
In article <1993Apr28.114739.13554@vax.oxford.ac.uk> orls08@vax.oxford.ac.uk writes:
> Can no-one find the intellectual BALLS !! to break out of the drab,
>dull boring greyness that is politics today and say something INTELLIGENT !!???
No doubt it would be good if someone did so. Why don't you post
something that could serve as a model for the rest of us to follow?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Fri Apr 30 12:34:52 EDT 1993
Article: 12984 of talk.politics.theory
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr28.140033.9240@freenet.carleton.ca>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 09:55:49 GMT
Lines: 17
In gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>So transcendence is violence?
Not by the usual definition of the word "violence". I suppose that to
someone who rejects it, transcendence (or a particular understanding
thereof) would involve forcing people into molds they do not naturally
fit. So if any political view based on an understanding of man with
which one fundamentally disagrees is violence, you can say that
transcendence is violence and the libertarians can say that the welfare
state is violence. That's if you and the libertarians don't mind
talking only to yourselves.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Fri Apr 30 15:29:21 EDT 1993
Article: 12986 of talk.politics.theory
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 18:03:30 GMT
Lines: 51
gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>Given the popularity of liberalism -- it just destroyed the system of
>the Soviet Union by no more than being there -- I can't agree that
>liberals talk only to themselves.
Is it so clear that what destroyed the SU is liberalism? If so, and if
the SU fell not only because of the existence of liberalism but because
of liberal talk, I would imagine the key was something other than
statements that nonliberalism is violence.
>The difference between liberals enacting the welfare state (or raising
>an army) and people who believe in transcendence doing so is that the
>former are acting on materialistic grounds, and only to secure their
>own freedom.
You seem to be saying that a liberal characteristically bases his
support of welfare measures and so on on the grounds that they all
advance his own ability to pursue his interests as he conceives them and
in his own way. Appearances are against that view, and I see no reason
to believe it is true.
>When it comes to transcendent matters, in liberal theory everyone is
>free. The fundamental political value of liberalism is freedom [ . . . ]
>To oppose liberalism, then, if you do not say with anarchists that it
>does not go far enough, it seems to me you must be saying that freedom
>is secondary to some other political value, whatever that may be.
"Freedom" can mean a variety of things, though. I think the previous
poster was indulging you by using it in your sense. It doesn't seem
crazy to say that people don't act freely when as a result of social
conditions they are ignorant of fundamental considerations relevant to
the nature of their acts. The social conditions in liberal society
teach people to view the satisfaction of their own desires, whatever
they may happen to be, as the supreme goal in life. People who grow up
and live in liberal society are not free to avoid those conditions.
Someone who thought that the supreme goal in life is the beatific vision
could without hypocrisy believe that liberal society forcibly teaches
people to be slaves to false goods, that the service of God is perfect
freedom, and that the law should help free people by promoting the
propagation of religious truth instead of error. Such a person might
think, for example, that compulsory education that failed to do so, and
even inculcated principles contrary to religious truth, is a form of
violence. (It's worth noting that most education is compulsory form the
child's standpoint.) So if you feel like upping the rhetorical ante,
other people will be able to join in the fun.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sun May 2 16:55:07 EDT 1993
Article: 12988 of talk.politics.theory
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 20:07:37 GMT
Lines: 45
jredford@yggdrasil.bbn.com (John Redford) writes:
> The essence of liberalism, as I understand it, is an attempt to treat
> all tastes and ways of life as equally worthy. To join in that attempt,
> as a good citizen of a liberal society would, is to reject the notion
> that our tastes and inclinations should be judged by reference to some
> independent standard, and thus to reject transcendent values.
>
>I think this is interpreting liberalism as an overall moral philosophy
>rather than simply a philosophy of governing. Liberalism (as I
>understand it!) does not treat all ways of life as equally worthy; it
>only says that the government should not use its authority to penalize
>one way of life over another.
The distinction strikes me as rather a fine one. Presumably, people
support liberalism as a philosophy of government because they think it's
a good thing, consistent with their overall moral philosophy, for
governments to be run that way. But if they seriously think that some
ways of life are better than others it seems very likely they'll also
want the government to support those better ways of life in some
fashion. There might be a few people who will succeed in saying with
conviction "even though X is clearly better than Y I think the
government ought to be neutral as between X and Y even though it could
easily and effectually support X". That's not a viewpoint that's ever
likely to have mass appeal, though. So it seems to me that in a liberal
society in which the people at large support their form of government,
the people at large will also tend to reject the idea of objective
standards of value. It also seems to me that if the society is to
survive the people will be educated to have those viewpoints.
>So liberals are tolerant in the sense that they do not wish the
>government to penalize deviant activity. They DO wish the government to
>reward approved activities. Since one person's reward is implicitly
>somone else's punishment (even if only through diversion of taxes), this
>creates them a lot of enemies.
As you suggest, in the age of active government the distinction between
penalizing and failing to reward grows hard to find. I would add that
liberals have been in the forefront of the movement toward effacing
whatever distinction remains.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sun May 2 20:39:03 EDT 1993
Article: 367 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Mon, 3 May 1993 00:33:37 GMT
Lines: 81
Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk (Chris Holt) writes:
>jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>
>>The essence of liberalism, as I understand it, is an attempt to treat
>>all tastes and ways of life as equally worthy.
>
>That sounds too strong to me. Just because there is no absolute
>reference point doesn't mean that we're cast totally adrift. For
>instance, most liberals would disapprove of (non-consensual) murder
>to the point of interfering (like most everyone else); in that
>sense, a way of life involving unwilling human sacrifice is not
>deemed equally worthy.
Jack the Ripper's taste for murder and his victims' taste for staying
alive were inconsistent. I agree that liberals must note the
inconsistency and accept some set of rules to resolve such conflicts by
sacrificing one taste to the other (we can forget about anarchists for
now). Characteristically, though, they avoid basing such rules on the
judgement that one taste is intrinsically better than another, but
instead try to base the rules either on some notion of utility
(maximizing the aggregate satisfaction of everybody's tastes) or by
refining the notion that all tastes and ways of life are equally worthy
by adding the necessary limitation that the taste or way of life in
question must accept the equal worth of other tastes and ways of life
(it appears that a murderer does not accept that his victim's lives, and
therefore their tastes and way of living, are equal in worth to his
own). Thus, they hope to solve all political issues by reference solely
to actual preferences, factual knowledge, and logic.
>>More wordily: One consequence of accepting liberalism (as I
understand
>>liberalism) is that the only fundamental interest all members of
society
>>can be viewed as having in common is the desire of each to please
>>himself in accordance with his own tastes.
>
>But liberalism would surely accept that some people don't want
>to please themselves in accordance with their own tastes, should
>this arise.
Liberalism would treat whatever such people wanted as one personal taste
among others.
>>Another is that the only
>>fundamental moral principle that all can be required to accept is
equal
>>respect for the desires, pleasures and tastes of each.
>
>Respect as far as non-interference, rather than intellectual approval,
>I assume you mean.
I'm not sure what the intellectual approval or disapproval would consist
in from the liberal standpoint. _De gustibus non est disputandum_, so
intellect doesn't come into it.
>[T]he framework within which people aren't judged can be viewed as a
>transcendent value (or if variation there is allowed without judgement,
>the framework within which frameworks vary). Very few liberals take
the
>leap of allowing complete flexibility (I'm not sure what it would
mean).
I agree that complete flexibility would be incoherent. I've mentioned
the methods liberals prefer for handling conflicts (utilitarianism or
acceptance only of those ways of life that accept other ways of life).
I agree that each of those methods introduces a principle that is
transcendent in that its validity doesn't depend on the actual
preferences that people have. It seems to me that liberals
characteristically start with actual preferences and try to make them
politically fundamental, making as little use of transcendent principle
as possible. I suppose my argument is that the attempt to make actual
preferences (rather than, for example, "good") politically fundamental
is a mistake. From my standpoint, the more liberals are forced to
appeal to authoritative principles that depend on actual preferences the
more questionable their entire project looks.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sun May 2 20:39:04 EDT 1993
Article: 368 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr28.140033.9240@freenet.carleton.ca>
Date: Mon, 3 May 1993 00:34:54 GMT
Lines: 15
Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk (Chris Holt) writes:
>It looks to me as though James Owens is saying that it could well be a
>part of A's impulses and desires to have a sense of others' importance.
>So why are you concerned with that importance not being reducible to A's
>desires and impulses?
To have a sense of other's importance is to have a sense that something
(other people) is important without regard to what your impulses and
desires happen to be.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Mon May 3 06:08:37 EDT 1993
Article: 6249 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Back to abortion
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr27.192653.13502@reed.edu> <1993Apr30.061857.18979@reed.edu>
Date: Mon, 3 May 1993 00:38:41 GMT
Lines: 47
sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>(incidentally, Nyikos didn't equate being a subject with sentience, but
>with the "feeling" of things by the entity)
I thought that feeling was what he meant by sentience. He is the expert
on his own terminology, though.
>But in the view which equates unconscious people with never conscious
>things, which is what I take you to be advocating, the rights of a
>just-fetrilized ovum are equivalent to those of any person who will not
>regain consciousness for a time sufficient for the zygote also to
>develop consciousness. So if people in 3-year comas have rights, then
>zygotes must too.
Actually, my view is that once you have a zygote you have something
that's wrong to destroy without quite a good reason, and destroying it
gets worse when it passes the milestones that Peter Nyikos and you treat
as the times at which the right to live begins. So "equate" and
"equivalent" aren't accurate.
It seems to me odd that a morally indifferent act of destroying
something should become one of the worst possible crimes quite suddenly,
at the time the thing destroyed begins actually to exhibit capacities
that had always been in some sense innate and had been developing
continuously up to the time they are first exhibited.
>I still think the music example is a good, general illustration of my
>feeling.
Your music example is an interesting one. (It reminds me of the claim
discussed in one of Plato's dialogues that the soul is a sort of
harmony.) It's hard to know just how the z/e/f fits in, though. If
there were a kind of organ with a slow response time, so that the
organist started pressing the keys several seconds before anything was
heard, I suppose someone might say the music started before the first
sound. Also, I can imagine a type of music in which there was a rest at
the beginning of a piece that was felt as part of the piece, as long as
there was some unambiguous way to indicate that the piece had begun.
Certainly, the space surrounding a piece of visual art can be felt as
part of the composition. (I'm not sure if you consider John Cage's
piece that consists of one very long rest to be music.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Mon May 3 07:13:45 EDT 1993
Article: 370 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Mon, 3 May 1993 10:34:30 GMT
Lines: 26
gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>In article jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>| To have a sense of other's importance is to have a sense that
something
>| (other people) is important without regard to what your impulses and
>| desires happen to be.
>
>But isn't this having a sense of others' importance
>then one of your desires? I don't see how anyone can
>escape from their will, except perhaps by dying.
We can't escape from our beliefs either. Nonetheless, there are things
we regard as "true". To regard a thing as "true" is to regard it as
true regardless of what our beliefs happen to be. We regard our beliefs
as irrelevant to the truth of a statement (except statements that are
about our beliefs in some way). Similarly, I claim, we should and in
fact do treat statements about our own desires as irrelevant in general
to statements about what things are good and bad. Certainly we do that
when we make moral arguments, and it seems to me that moral arguments
are sometimes made in good faith by intellectually respectable people.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Mon May 3 17:16:41 EDT 1993
Article: 372 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Mon, 3 May 1993 16:42:29 GMT
Lines: 73
Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk (Chris Holt) writes:
>[L]iberals make a clear distinction between differences of opinion and
>differences of action; it is the latter that are constrained (in liberal
>society).
I doubt that the distinction can be made so clearly. For example,
liberalism won't survive unless it is supported by the opinions of the
people generally. Accordingly, liberal societies have made state-run
schools free, compulsory, and pro-liberal. It's true that private
schools and even homeschooling is available to to families who are
willing and able to carry the double burden of paying for private
education that they do use and public education that they don't.
Nonetheless, the legal requirement that children be schooled and the
provision of tax funding only to schools that view it as a fundamental
part of their mission to inculcate liberal values does seem to introduce
an element of constraint into matters of opinion.
Pro-equality measures also result in constraints on opinion. For
example, there are measures that require employers to establish equality
of opportunity, which practically speaking can be shown only by
demonstrable good-faith efforts to approximate equality of result. Such
efforts require managers to demonstrate approved attitudes on equal
opportunity issues, and normally require programs that inculcate similar
attitudes, or at least outward adherence to such attitudes, in all
employees. To require people to display particular attitudes, though,
is to constrain opinion.
More generally, the institutions of any society exercise a pervasive
effect on the opinions of the people of that society. People are more
comfortable when they feel that the way things are is straightforwardly
the way things should be. So if the government institutionally refuses
to support any particular religious doctrine, that refusal can hardly
fail to support the view that particular religious doctrines don't
matter a great deal. That conclusion is particularly likely to follow
in a society in which people view the government as having an open-ended
responsibility for individual well-being. Since institutions are
maintained by constraint, and since individuals have very little choice
regarding the institutions of their society, we thus have a third way in
which constraint enters matters of opinion in a liberal society.
>>It seems to me that liberals
>>characteristically start with actual preferences and try to make them
>>politically fundamental, making as little use of transcendent principle
>>as possible.
>
>This is akin to the scientific method in some sense; we start with
>observation and try to derive theories that incorporate them.
Is that really what scientific method is like? I thought scientists
start with an understanding of what the world is like and try to devise
experiments that test that understanding. I agree that scientists try
not to multiply entities without necessity. The issue, though, is what
entities we need to make sense of the social, political and moral world.
The liberals think they can get by with people's actual preferences and
principles of consistency and equality or symmetry, and can get by
without stuff like "the good for man". I don't think that's so.
>But how is an appeal to some transcendental "good" anything other than
>an appeal to authoritative principles based on whimsy? Is there a
>better alternative?
Read Aristotle's _Nicomachean Ethics_ for an example of how someone can
develop a theory of the good for man that treats the good as objective
(not reducible to or constructed from what people's preferences happen
to be) without dogma or whimsy. You start with what people say and
believe about the good, and develop a theory of what the good must be
that explains why people say and believe the things they do.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Tue May 4 11:31:47 EDT 1993
Article: 375 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Tue, 4 May 1993 11:29:46 GMT
Lines: 13
gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>But there are many who do not believe in a reality separate from some
>observer, which is what "true regardless of belief" would come down to.
I wouldn't argue that one should attribute a greater degree of
objectivity to statements about morality than he attributes to
statements about the physical world.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Tue May 4 11:31:52 EDT 1993
Article: 13011 of talk.politics.theory
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Tue, 4 May 1993 11:19:23 GMT
Lines: 28
gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>But I think what makes liberalism liberalism is its
>nucleus, in spite of the modifications -- the very high
>value placed on personal freedom. I _think_ this is
>what Jim Kalb is complaining about when he says that
>liberal states regard all value systems as equally
>valid.
Actually, I would say that the nucleus of liberalism is the attempt to
treat all desires to the extent practicable as equally worthy of
fulfillment. Initially that attempt led to emphasis on personal freedom
in the liberal sense because the main enemy seemed to be political
arrangements that in the name of some superior good kept people from
pursuing whatever desires they happened to have. After that battle had
been largely won, the focus shifted to other enemies, such as economic
and social inequality, which result in some people's desires being
treated as more important than other people's desires. So I view
civil-rights welfare-state liberalism as the legitimate successor to the
liberalism of Locke and Jefferson, and agree with modern liberals that
libertarians and present-day classical liberals (a.k.a. conservatives)
have a cramped and rigid view of what the enterprise they claim to be
part of is all about.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Wed May 5 12:56:07 EDT 1993
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Wed, 5 May 1993 13:36:27 GMT
Lines: 130
Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk (Chris Holt) writes:
>> Accordingly, liberal societies have made state-run
>>schools free, compulsory, and pro-liberal.
>
>I'm afraid I don't believe this. It may be that there's a high
>correlation between education (to the extent of being qualified to
>teach) and liberal views; but there's no conspiracy, any more than there
>is a conservative conspiracy to keep control of the military [ . . . ]
>If you say this, you must be using a definition of liberal that is so
>broad as to encompass conservativism as well.
Naturally I'm not talking about a conspiracy on the part of some
political faction. I am using "liberal" to refer to the
generally-accepted public values of liberal societies, and specifically
the view that the purpose of public life is to give people what they
want -- to maximize the satisfaction of actual preferences without
regard to judgments as to the intrinsic worth of those preferences. In
America, which is a liberal society, both those who are called liberals
and those who are called conservatives feel it necessary to justify
their positions in terms of that view, and to a large extent their
positions actually do follow from varying interpretations of that view.
The schools in America and no doubt other liberal societies train their
students in what are called democratic citizenship, tolerance,
acceptance of diversity and individual differences and so on, and in
what is called forming their own values. That kind of training is
pro-liberal in my sense, it's probably necessary to the survival and
well-being of a liberal society, and it's certainly not something
students choose to undergo. So its existence seems to show that
liberals can't make good on their claim to forgo rather direct
compulsion in matters of opinion.
>I don't think I believe that requiring "demonstrable good faith
>efforts" really constrains opinion, except again in a second order
>manner.
I don't see how you can demonstrate a good-faith effort to achieve some
goal without acting in all respects -- including explicit expressions of
opinion -- as if you thought the goal was well worth achieving. That's
especially true when the goal (as in the equal opportunity situation)
has to do with relations among the people in an organization you work in
and control.
>I think there are a lot of people perfectly capable of and happy to make
>a show of complying with the law, while thinking to themselves that it's
>pretty stupid (indeed, *most* people think that laws are pretty stupid
>most of the time; you could even say that that level of distrust is part
>of the liberal tradition :-).
Sure. And if there were a law requiring them to go to mass every
morning they could do the same. The requirement of good-faith efforts
means that the show has to be convincing, by the way.
>But in practice, most Americans think that government doesn't get
>involved in religion because it's too important to tie into politics.
>They don't think it's unimportant at all.
People rationalize away conflicts in varying ways. My claim is that
there are obvious conflicts between (for example) almost any serious
form of Christianity and Americanism. Someone who thought being a
Christian was more important than being an American might sincerely
adopt the view you suggest. Most people put being Americans first and
think religion ought to be kept out of politics because if taken
seriously it's weird. To avoid rattling any chains such people
generally give lip service to the other view, though, at least in public
pronouncements.
>>That conclusion is particularly likely to follow
>>in a society in which people view the government as having an open-ended
>>responsibility for individual well-being.
>
>But I would say that view is not a liberal one.
You would say the welfare state is anti-liberal? That's not the way the
word "liberal" is used in America, in my view correctly. (I just posted
something on this point, so I won't expand.)
>>Since institutions are
>>maintained by constraint, and since individuals have very little choice
>>regarding the institutions of their society, we thus have a third way in
>which constraint enters matters of opinion in a liberal society.
>The question is whether it does, given the liberal view that
>disagreement is not a bad thing.
Even if theoretically you think disagreement is not a bad thing, it's
exhausting and no fun to disagree with one's own society on fundamental
issues. Also, it's simply impossible to invent your own view of
everything. In order to think or act at all you have to accept most of
what you are given.
>I tend to think that stuff like "the good for man" is very dangerous,
>especially when people start to believe it. It assumes we know enough
>about "man" to form a reasonably accurate model; and I see no
>justification for such an assumption. And wrong models are worse than
>none here, IMHO.
Life is very dangerous, and in the end you die. More to the point, I
don't see how rational political action is possible at all without some
sort of view as to what the good for man is. My complaint about
liberalism is that the view that the good for man is for each man to the
extent possible to have whatever he happens to want is a stupid one.
>But why do you think people rejected the Aristotelean approach? I think
>it's because there is so much diversity of opinion as to what people
>think about the good, that such a unifying theory is a long way off (if
>it will ever arrive); and it would need to encompass so many different
>kinds of "good" that it would end up being of little help in actually
>deciding what the best action in any given circumstance is. "The only
>rule is that applying rules is a mistake."
The modern demand is for intellectual structures built from observations
that can be duplicated by any trained observer and concepts and rules
that can be made formally precise with reference to such observations
and simpler concepts and rules. I suppose that demand arose because
things were rather a mess at the end of the medieval period and people
wanted to escape from the mess somehow, and it has continued because it
has led to some striking practical successes, notably modern natural
science, modern industry and the modern bureaucratic state. The problem
with applying that approach to ethics and politics is that indispensible
concepts like "the good" can't be dealt with in that way, and if people
refuse to deal with fundamental issues because they can't be made exact
enough they will implicitly adopt stupid views on those issues (for
example, they may accept the liberal definition of the good for man).
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Thu May 6 13:46:37 EDT 1993
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Thu, 6 May 1993 14:35:50 GMT
Lines: 62
gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>One problem I see with criticizing liberalism is that I don't see any
>evidence of a credible alternative.
A lot of people agree with you. In its strongest form, the view that no
successor to liberal society can be conceived becomes the "end of
history" thesis. Of course, it's not clear how to interpret the
inability of inhabitants of liberal society to imagine alternatives.
>I happen to agree that liberal society will not last, for reasons I gave
>in my "Singularity" postings, but this is not because the liberal system
>doesn't work but because it works _too_well_ and will eventually put
>itself out of business, to be supplanted by a kind of anarchy. I am
>sure that under the conditions of this transformation, many people will
>attempt to institute authoritarian regimes, but I think we have moved,
>culturally speaking, beyond the possibility of implementing them.
I don't expect the success of liberal society to continue indefinitely,
mostly because unrestrained diversity in values leads to incompatible
claims that can't be resolved in a mutually agreeable way, and because
issues relating to children can't be satisfactorily dealt with within
liberal theory. I agree that when liberal society breaks down many
people will attempt to institute authoritarian regimes, and I suspect
you are right that we have moved culturally beyond the possibility of
implementing them. So the most likely outcome, as you say, seems to be
a kind of anarchy.
The issue, then, is what that anarchy will look like. I would expect
anarchy arising in the absence of all legitimate authority and accepted
values and moral standards to approximate the state of nature envisioned
by that ancestor of liberal political theorists, Thomas Hobbes. I would
also expect such an anarchic state of war of all against all to end in
the way Hobbes envisioned, through the establishment of an unlimited
despotism. (Compare books viii-ix of Plato's _Republic_, which describe
in part the origins of an egalitarian democratic consumer society and
its transformation into a tyranny.)
If the foregoing analysis is correct, the questions then become (1) can
liberal society can be saved from the too-thorough working out of its
basic premise, (2) need the successor society take the form I suggest,
and (3) if the worst happens, can anything can be saved through the
wreck in hopes of better times to come. Most discussions of the issues
by reputable people have dealt with the first question; discussions of
the second and third have mostly been by fringe types like myself. An
exception is Alasdair MacIntyre, a well-known academic philosopher, who
thus concludes his book _After Virtue_:
"What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms
of cummunity within which civility and the intellectual and
moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are
already upon us [ . . . ] This time however the barbarians are
not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been
governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of
consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.
We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another -- doubtless
very different -- St. Benedict."
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Sat May 8 05:44:01 EDT 1993
Article: 382 of alt.revolution.counter
Xref: panix talk.politics.theory:13021 alt.revolution.counter:382
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Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993May7.140752.14998@kadsma.kodak.com>
Distribution: usa
Date: Sat, 8 May 1993 00:33:21 GMT
Lines: 73
pajerek@telstar.kodak.com (Don Pajerek) writes:
>One thing I haven't seen in your analysis so far is a recognition of
>where current economic and technological (not political) trends are
>taking us. If you look in this direction, you see two dominant factors:
>
>1. Technology is making tremendous new power available to the individual.
There's an issue whether that power will be used in ways that add up to
a tolerable life. The neighborhood I live in is rather mixed, and I can
see that people choose the technologies that help them do what they want
to do. Some make their living in the hi-tech financial services
industry and occupy their vacant time with TVs, VCRs and CDs. Others
who don't have that kind of job use beepers to help them make drug deals
and amuse themselves with crack or malt liquor and boom boxes. Still
others choose usenet connections. All wonderful products of technology,
but I'm not sure they add up to the good life. The mosque where the guy
used to worship who used his tremendous new power to bomb the World
Trade Center (after he had arrived here in that technological marvel,
the jet aircraft) is 4 or 5 blocks away, and Al Sharpton (who owes his
eminence to the technological marvels of electronic communications) used
to live next door but one to me. So I can see what you're talking about
all around me, but I'm not sure it will lead to happiness and social
stability.
More generally, the tremendous power granted by technology has enabled
people to become far more independent of the people immediately around
them. Judging by statistics and by what I see that hasn't been all to
the good either, especially in the case of people who are necessarily
dependent on those immediately around them, like children. Since we are
all children at one time or another, and since our childhood is a lot of
what makes us what we are, that could be a problem.
>2. The industrial economies are breaking out of their old national
> boundaries and beginning to form a single global industrial economy.
>
>The loser in this formula is the nation-state as we have known it. There
>is simply no function for it in a world where individuals can participate
>directly in a world society (i.e., political economy).
>
>So the successor to liberal society way very well be another liberal society,
>but organized on a world scale rather than a 'national' scale. There will
>of course still be small-scale societies, but they will probably be:
>
>* much smaller than today's nation-states
>* voluntary in their membership rather than compulsory
>* capable of forming around principles other than geographic proximity
>
>The larger world society will probably not have any formal organizational
>structure for quite a while, if ever. Rather, it will operate as a
>series of ad-hoc 'negotiations', rather than as a continuous 'state', that
>manages to exist even if there is nothing for it to do.
You seem to visualize the New World Order as something an
anarcho-libertarian would approve of, in which everything is handled by
contract among individuals and voluntary organizations. The idea seems
to be (excuse me if I am reading too much into what you say) that things
will turn out that way because the development of technology has made
that the most efficient way to organize production.
I'm very dubious. Past societies have tended not to be
anarcho-libertarian in nature and I don't see why the chances of one
existing and maintaining itself are increased by making it worldwide.
There are a lot of crazies in the world, and some of them have weapons.
Quite apart from the crazies, there are a lot of people who find things
like getting the better of other people, getting back at them for past
injuries, or getting them first before they get you more important than
economic efficiency.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Mon May 10 06:23:40 EDT 1993
Article: 390 of alt.revolution.counter
Xref: panix talk.politics.theory:13028 alt.revolution.counter:390
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Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Sun, 9 May 1993 14:05:19 GMT
Lines: 89
j.turner@lynx.coe.northeastern.edu (Jeffrey Turner) writes:
> Liberalism and its reliance on capitalist economics is
>inherently flawed, even self-contradictory. The idea that
>everyone is politically equal cannot coexist with vast
>economic inequality and the political power that springs
>from economic power.
It seems to me that the idea and the reality can coexist and that the
idea can have important effects on the reality. For example, I think
liberal societies tend to favor social spending and economic regulation
in general, which have a redistributive effect in favor of the majority
(the middle classes), as long as productivity and employment don't seem
to suffer too much as a result and as long as taxes on the majority
don't get too high. In this respect modern societies differ from those
of antiquity, in which total production was basically fixed and
universal suffrage therefore led either to expropriation of the rich by
the poor or an oligarchic revolution by the rich.
In addition, political equality and capitalism both support liberalism
on social issues. Feminism, for example, which is intended to make men
and women equal in power, raises the proportion of production and
consumption that takes place within the capitalist system, enlarging
markets and making women fully available as human resources for
capitalists.
>Alternatives HAVE been imagined, however the control of the media by the
>beneficiaries of the status quo, and their control of grant funds, etc.,
>is so complete that other ideas do not infiltrate the mass consciousness
>to any great degree. It is thought control and behavioral conditioning
>that serve, also, to promote this illusion. The Big Lie (tm) also plays
>its part.
What alternatives do you have in mind? The chief alternative people on
usenet seem to talk about is anarcho-libertarianism, which is more
capitalistic than the current system, and if usenet is not an
uncontrolled medium of communication I don't know what is. Also, your
account of what determines the content of political discussion needs
some work to be at all plausible. Any 5 people with ideas and a very
little money (you say later that in the USA 93% are employed and 83% are
fully employed) can publish a magazine. You seem to be using the
phrases "thought control", "behavioral conditioning" and "Big Lie"
somewhat metaphorically. My impression is that many people find Gramsci
interesting on this kind of issue, although I haven't read him.
>Around here unemployment is running 7% (USA), underemployment is closer
>to 17%, homelessness is rampant, malnutrition and hunger are all around,
>many people are without health insurance or the ability to obtain proper
>health care (both pre- and post- acute condition), etc.,. If that is
>success, what constitutes failure?
The situation in the former socialist countries and most of the third
world constitutes failure. Success or failure in dealing with
complicated things like the economic life of a whole society is hard to
determine except by comparison. To what non-liberal society are you
comparing the situation in the USA?
>The number of prisons/prison inmates in the US is, and has been, growing
>rapidly.
Do you think people are in jail for slighter crimes or that a higher
proportion of crimes result in prison time now than 30 years ago? It
seems to me the increase points to a society that is less orderly and
disciplined than that of the past rather than to any recent increase in
authoritarianism.
>Germany in the '20s was the pinnacle of Western learning, a haven and
>breeding ground for philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, etc.,
>obviously too culturally advanced for authoritarianism.
If so, it might explain why what it ended up with was so much stronger
than authoritarianism. If either culture or social order has to go,
culture won't be the survivor. So if a society culturally can't accept
authority, it will shortly to be ruled by men who, when they hear the
word "culture", reach for their guns.
> Anarchy is much too difficult, requires too much effort, to obtain
>long.
Quite apart from the difficulty of running one's own life (which seems
to be what you are referring to here) there is the difficulty of dealing
with people who aren't willing to live and let live on some generally
acceptable basis. It is the latter difficulty that in my view makes
anarchy unworkable in any extensive and diverse society.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Mon May 10 06:23:41 EDT 1993
Article: 391 of alt.revolution.counter
Xref: panix talk.politics.theory:13029 alt.revolution.counter:391
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Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Apr30.150314.17819@freenet.carleton.ca> <1shdulINNavl@snoopy.cis.ufl.edu>
Date: Sun, 9 May 1993 14:09:53 GMT
Lines: 34
jfh@beach.cis.ufl.edu (James F. Hranicky) writes:
>The idea that we are free to me means most importantly that *I* matter.
In a sense this is right. The fact that we have free will means we
matter in a way (say) trees or computers don't. The reason free will
makes us matter, though, is that our choices matter. But I don't see
how our choices can matter if any choice we might make, simply because
it is a choice, is as good as any other choice would have been. So it
seems that our freedom makes us matter only if there is something that
does not depend on the choices we actually make that makes our choices
good or not good.
>What you seem to be saying is that man is basically helpless and empty,
>so let's grab some arbitrary transcendent stuff to give our lives
>meaning.
I think the point is that the reason man is not empty is that he is part
of and constituted in part by a larger moral world. The ability to make
moral choices, for example, is part of what it is that makes man what he
is, and that ability can exist only in such a world. So the
transcendent stuff that ultimately gives man's life meaning is not
arbitrary, because man can not exist as man without reference to that
stuff.
>But--life itself is already the meaning.
Basically true, because it wouldn't be human life without a relation to
the transcendent.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Mon May 10 06:23:42 EDT 1993
Article: 392 of alt.revolution.counter
Xref: panix talk.politics.theory:13030 alt.revolution.counter:392 alt.society.anarchy:1381
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory,alt.revolution.counter,alt.society.anarchy
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Sun, 9 May 1993 14:54:15 GMT
Lines: 32
gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>When 9-year-old can get Uzis and deal designer drugs, anarchy is
>inevitable. It's already here, transforming social relations at the
>margins of our society. It's not a choice -- in fact, if it were a
>choice, it wouldn't be anarchy but some elite's project. Both of you
>seem to want a society where (unlike a liberal society) individuals are
>protected from having to compete with their neighbors. Well, you're
>going to get one, I think, but not because the individuals in it are
>sequestered from competition, but because no one is going to be able to
>agree what field they're on or what game is being played.
The obvious questions are whether anarchy can sustain itself and if not
what comes thereafter. To the extent anarchy results from advances in
techniques of transportation, communication and information processing,
it seems likely to be self-limiting. For example, I understand that
transportation and communication became more difficult, and accurate
information harder to come by, after anarchy was instituted in Somalia.
Since government depends on a mixture of consent and force, and since as
you point out people aren't going to be able to agree on much, I would
expect the next step to be the establishment of a government based
mostly on force and willing to use at least the force needed to put an
end to anarchy. The First Emperor, who ended the centuries-old Warring
States period in China, found it appropriate to do things like bury
scholars alive. Maybe communications and data processing technologists
can look forward to something similar.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Mon May 10 21:33:55 EDT 1993
Article: 397 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: left and right wing liberals
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993May6.035245.1043@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Mon, 10 May 1993 22:39:30 GMT
Lines: 37
TROTTEJE@ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu () writes:
>Economic liberalism is, within the spectrum of American political
>discourse, only relatively "conservative" insofar as it defends the
>principles of the free-market (a liberal notion) against equalitarian
>ideas of social "progress" which would seek to police the market iname
>of a secular compassion which is ultimately rooted in Judeo-Christian
>morality. Economic liberalism strikes at the root of all religious
>and/or secular conceptions of the common good by exalting the role of
>selfishness as an incentive to production and, thus, "growth."
Is your point that historically economic liberalism has been associated
with the things you mention, or is it the more general point that the
prospect that it might coexist with some notion of the common good is
chimerical? If economic liberalism is understood simply as a legal
regime of private property, free contract, and limitation of government
involvement in economic matters to the suppression of force and fraud,
it does not as such exalt anything. Someone might support it for
reasons having nothing to do with selfishness, for example out of the
desire to limit government power for one reason or another. My own
inclination is to think that economic liberalism combined with rapid
technological progress is likely to result in the things you mention
because too many of those in leading positions get there by being clever
at enriching themselves, but it would be interesting to hear other
views.
Also, egalitarian secular compassion is sometimes viewed as inconsistent
with notions of individual responsibility. I'm inclined to think that
view is true in any society in which each person has the right to live
as he pleases, because in such a society the only remaining
responsibility is to pay for whatever choices you make. Any other
views?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Wed May 12 05:46:45 EDT 1993
Article: 401 of alt.revolution.counter
Xref: panix talk.politics.theory:13049 alt.revolution.counter:401
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Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Can liberal society last?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Wed, 12 May 1993 02:17:37 GMT
Lines: 90
j.turner@lynx.coe.northeastern.edu (Jeffrey Turner) writes:
> Liberals do tend to use a small amount of "social spending"
>to buy off the lower classes [ . . . ]
I am told that most liberal societies put a considerably larger portion
of their national income into social programs than the United States
does. Even here, though, and under the Bush Administration, 1991
Federal outlays included $266,395,000,000 in Social Security payments
and $205,776,000,000 in expenditures by the Health Care Financing
Administration for Medicare and the like. There was also
$19,649,000,000 for food stamps and $28,434,000,000 for the Unemployment
Trust Fund. In addition, the states spent $628,795,000,000 that year,
of which 21% was for welfare. That seems like more than a "small
amount" for income support and healthcare, and it doesn't include the
very large expenditures for things like education and housing programs,
which also have the effect of redistributing income toward the middle
class. (For the sake of comparison, the Department of Defense got
$261,925,000,000 in 1991.)
> The best, and best thought out alternative in my experience
>is from Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. They discuss a classless
>system of negotiation between producers and consumers in which
>each person would be able to determine his/her own level of work,
>leisure and consumption.A group of producers would determine how
>much they would be willing to produce and what the costs would be,
>consumers of the product would determine how much they would like
>to consume and what they would be willing to spend. Through a
>series of negotiations final levels of production and prices
>would be set. Innovation which improved production would be
>encouraged in much the way it is today but true costs and
>externalities would be easier to account for. There would be
>no excess value or profit.
To the extent producers and consumers like to do things this way they
can do things this way today. What controls on the contractual process
do Albert & Hahnel think would be needed to prevent large, centrally
managed enterprises and standardized employment and sales contracts from
arising? Who would impose such controls and how? Suppose some
producers needed money to buy a machine. Would they get the money by
negotiating with other people with money to invest? Would the investors
be able to negotiate rights to control the business (so they could
protect their investment) and a share of the profits?
> A very little money? Have you any experience or are you
>just extemporizing? A real magazine, including printing and
>distribution (not to mention research and writing) costs is a
>fairly expensive endeavor.
My high school literary magazine was produced very cheaply, and that was
before the days of desktop publishing. It's true the paper wasn't
glossy and the circulation was rather small, but we could always have
printed more copies if people had found what it said to be of vital
importance and were willing to pay for it. Today, a few people could
put together an electronic magazine and distribute it via usenet to a
potential audience of millions for next to no cost. (My point, of
course, is that one needs a more subtle account than the one you gave to
explain how the powers that be manage to prevent one's own obviously
true ideas from dominating public discussion.)
> To take these "failures" at face value without accounting
>for the influences of colonialism, neo-colonialism and the
>"Cold War" is blatant sycophantism to the ruling elite.
Just so I understand you better, would you please give an example of
artful sycophantism? Also, what proportion of the people who discuss
these issues, on usenet or elsewhere, do you consider blatant
sycophants?
>Democracy, political or economic has never been an option
>for any country within range of the US Marine Corps.
The U.S. or allied military presence didn't seem adversely to affect the
general diffusion of political freedom or economic prosperity in West
Germany compared with East Germany, in South Korea compared to North
Korea, or in Hong Kong or Taiwan compared with the mainland. (Have you
ever read any North Korean literature? We used to get it delivered to
our house on account of the previous occupants. You might find it
inspirational. It was certainly intended to be so.)
>Obviously on some objective level the present system is a failure.
No doubt. The question, then, is whether you have anything useful to
say on how things could be improved. Your comments so far don't lead me
to be optimistic on that point, but who knows?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Thu May 13 06:09:41 EDT 1993
Article: 13061 of talk.politics.theory
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Property rights, equal opportunity
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1spvq0INN497@news.u.washington.edu>
Date: Thu, 13 May 1993 01:03:53 GMT
Lines: 35
davidb@nero.ce.washington.edu (David W. Barts) writes:
>My on position is that it is impossible to sustain a class-based society
>*unless* you place arbitrary limits on people [ . . . ] Perhaps the
>closest we could come to complete equality of opportunity would be if we
>had the government confiscate newborn babies from their parents and
>ensure that everyone was reared in a standardized situation.
Are you consistent here? You seem to say (1) sustaining the class
system requires active arbitrariness, and (2) we could come close to
eliminating the class system only through an unprecedented exercise of
despotic governmental power.
>Alternatively (and much better IMO), is to adopt a less rigid and
>mathematical definition of equality. Such as something along the
>definition of equality that Proudhon's gave in _What_Is_Property?_ (to
>paraphrase, it's been a while since I read the book): that condition in
>which one human being respects the uniqueness, personality, and humanity
>of another human being.
It's not clear to me why such a condition is not at least as consistent
with (for example) a feudal monarchy as an egalitarian democracy. After
all, in a feudal monarchy people have definite connections with each
other, and it seems to me that if people have definite connections with
each other they are more likely to have a concrete grasp of each other's
reality and therefore a realization of each other's uniqueness,
personality and humanity. On the other hand, in an egalitarian
democracy, in which the ties between people are much looser, people
might be more likely either to forget about each other or to treat each
other as means for their ends.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Thu May 13 06:09:42 EDT 1993
Article: 13062 of talk.politics.theory
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: "The problem of the underclass" (was: "reasonable" opportunity)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Thu, 13 May 1993 01:08:49 GMT
Lines: 24
gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>However, even if we had the power to impose new cultures on the
>economically deficient, which we don't, we might not know what culture
>to impose.
I suppose that no culture fits people equally for all situations, any
more than any physical training regimen fits people equally for
everything they might want to do. On the other hand, without
narrowmindedness we can say that some physical regimens are pretty good
(ask your doctor for one) and some are definitely bad (e.g., heavy drug
use, a diet consisting of soda, corn curls and twinkies, and physical
activity limited to watching TV and knife fights). Mr. Turpin's concern
may be limited to ways of life that have clearly gone wrong in the way
my example of a "definitely bad" physical regimen has clearly gone
wrong, rather than the culture of any ethnic group as a whole. (I can't
speak for him, of course.) Is it your view that as so limited the
concern would be with something that doesn't constitute a significant
social problem?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Fri May 14 06:20:56 EDT 1993
Article: 403 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: The Market and the State
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Thu, 13 May 1993 23:56:30 GMT
Lines: 83
Here's some more theorizing along the same general lines as all my
theorizing. Those who wish to read it may do so; as always, comments
are welcome.
Social institutions comprise those aspects of human life that men rely
upon even though they are subject to human will. To say that a social
institution is authoritative is to say that men have a right to rely on
it. The fundamental political and social problem of Western societies
today is the decline of the authority of institutions other than the
market and the state. That decline is a problem because there are
values that we can't do without that neither the state nor the market
can foster. Accordingly, a tolerable life is not possible without other
authoritative institutions, such as individual responsibility and the
family. In addition, it is doubtful that either the market or the state
can long survive without such other institutions and the values they
foster.
In an age that values freedom, institutions will be authoritative, and
men will have a right to rely on them, only if they are needed to carry
out some unavoidable social function. It follows that if the market and
the state take on the practical functions of the individual and the
family, and it is assumed that difficulties created by the failure of
smaller-scale institutions are responsibilities of the state or the
market, then individual responsibility and the family will be viewed as
dispensible and will lose their authority. For example, if poverty and
crime are viewed fundamentally as social malfunctions, and it is
accepted that each person has the right to live as he chooses without
depriving himself or his children of their equal right to the benefits
of society, then neither individual responsibility nor the family will
be taken seriously as social institutions.
The growth of the market and the state has been made possible by the
increasing possibility of dealing with things, situations and persons in
accordance with explicit rules applied in accordance with demonstrable
criteria. Improved communications and methods of dealing with
information have made it possible to apply such rules to many more
things, and social practices generally have conformed to this trend.
Standardized products and commodities, which are usually more efficient
to produce, are suited to such rules. Education as a system for grading
and giving credentials is an device to fit people to such rules. The
demand for social justice is a demand that what happens to people fit
such rules. A bureaucracy is a machine made of men that thinks and acts
in accordance with such rules. The problem with such rules is that they
can't make fine distinctions or deal with things that can't be clearly
articulated and demonstrated. Since goodness, beauty and truth (not to
mention faith, hope and charity) depend on fine distinctions and on
things that can't be clearly articulated and demonstrated, where the
market and the state have the final word nothing of final value can
exist.
Since the market is the institutionalization of the principle of consent
and the modern state is the institutionalization of the principle of
equality, the modern ideals of liberty and equality are the ideological
correlates of treating the market and the state as the sole legitimate
primary institutions. Traditionally, the power of the state limited
that of the market and therefore protected rather than weakened
traditional institutions. Until recently, for example, the law
prevented the extension of the market to the relationship between the
sexes by (for example) making divorce difficult and recognizing and
supporting the traditional differences in the roles of the sexes.
However, in a society based ever more consistently and explicitly on the
principles of equality and consent the state will not protect
traditional institutions from the market. Thus, the market now applies
the principle of consent to all human affairs without being limited by
the modern state except to the extent required by equality among
individuals.
It is not clear what is to be done about all this as a practical matter.
The trends I have described have broad and deep support. The
destruction of social institutions has been promoted by rightists in the
name of efficiency, by leftists in the name of justice or
multiculturalism, and by everyone on the grounds of American
individualism. It appears that at present the most that can be done is
to clarify what the problems are, so that the realization that such
problems exist can work its way into the public consciousness where it
may eventually bear fruit.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
From panix!jk Fri May 14 06:21:03 EDT 1993
Article: 13070 of talk.politics.theory
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: "The problem of the underclass" (was: "reasonable" opportunity)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Thu, 13 May 1993 20:03:02 GMT
Lines: 31
In gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>| On the other hand, without
>| narrowmindedness we can say that some physical regimens are pretty good
>| (ask your doctor for one) and some are definitely bad (e.g., heavy drug
>| use, a diet consisting of soda, corn curls and twinkies, and physical
>| activity limited to watching TV and knife fights). ...
>I don't know of any culture or subculture which is as
>uniformly bad as this analogy suggests. Did you have
>anything particular in mind? It seems to me that the
>participants would die off rather rapidly.
I've had neighbors who lived very nearly this badly, and many of them
did die off or at least age rapidly and develop health problems. If you
go to the Bowery or Grand Central Terminal you're likely to see people
who appear to be killing themselves through their way of life. Since
such people hang around together and share a way of life I suppose you
could call that way of life a subculture.
The point of the analogy, by the way, is not that everyone in what is
called the underclass lives as badly as the analogy suggests, but only
that groups of people do exist whose way of life is clearly
self-destructive. I read your post to suggest that such judgments are
necessarily out of place because the consequences of any particular way
of life depends on the setting.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
-- W. B. Yeats
Do let me know if you have comments of any kind.
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