Yon is upset at the conflicting desire to report the war accurately and inform people as a good reporter would do (including photos of the death of children) and the military’s need to control information with a distant Public Affairs office:
‘Most of the PA’s have been professional, but on balance the experience has ben extremely negative. This is the opposite of what I’ve experienced with combat units, wherein the experiences have been overwhelmingly positive.’
“In the Times’s heavy coverage of the killings in Norway (there were five pieces Tuesday), the name of Stieg Larsson has not come up.”
Stieg Larsson was a Norwegian writer, as Acocella elucidates:
“Larsson’s main concern was the abuse of women, immigrants, and Jews, as was expectable at the turn of the century. Eventually he turned his attention primarily to women, as is clear in his trilogy, with its warrior-queen heroine, Lisbeth Salander.”
It’s interesting that Acocella adopts Larsson’s apparently narrow view of the situation, and then further holds up Breivik as the exemplar of the entire Scandinavian Right (despite Larsson’s prescience in predicting the rise of the anti-multicultural, potentially dangerous Right in Norway). Breivik, apparently, is crazy (addition: as the trial is showing, crazy isn’t so clear), and murderous and his acts are completely morally unjustifiable. He did his cause little to no favor in gunning down children of the ‘enemy’ political party. And while he might have found common cause with “fellow travelers,” it’s not clear how much support he had.
As an American, I’d like to point out some differences between the U.S and Norway’s smaller, more managed, less free-market economy which prevents a U.S style and scale of economic integration of immigrants and helps maintain American exceptionalism and dynamism. I’d also point out the cultural homogeneity of Norway, as in its former monarchic, then constitutional monarchic, now democratic constitutionally monarchic political system (still, a King). Also, it has a much larger State structure (where I would submit much religious idealism has been transposed into the current State, if not marginalized by that State by an often intellectually lazy multiculturalism…which helps create these dangerous European mood swings toward an unyielding right). We’ve managed to escape such realities so far.
And, of course, there’s no mention of a position that someone on the reasonable Norweigan right might hold: The government, since 1980, has been encouraging immigration with lending and scholarship schemes. The government in turn, with policies that usually favor one party or another and transmit Norway’s deepest ideals into current politics and short term political gain, is the primary entity that seeks to integrate these new arrivals. That seems like a recipe for some trouble, especially in a Europe where racial identity and nationalism are more closely aligned.
Acocella finishes with:
“Such inclusion—or, from another perspective, infiltration—is what the Scandinavian right wing opposes, and political parties ruled by that refusal are gaining power. According to the Times, the Danish People’s Party, devoted to resisting multiculturalism, now has twenty-five out of one hundred and seventy-nine seats in the country’s parliament”
I’ll leave it to the Europeans to solve their own problems. It seems like all the more reason to me that we address our own problems without such simplification of European politics, and without backing into self-serving progressive solidarity in a time of tragedy.
Addition: Of course the U.S. and Norway have many important cultural exchanges, and like many European nations, they are relying to some extent upon our military for protection (and they reciprocate to a degree). Like the Obama administration, I think European support is essential to fight terrorism, but unlike the Obama administration, I have no such desire to merely adopt what seems to be a quite progressive and universalist Leftist foreign policy platform (focusing narrowly upon human rights) in order to do so.
“For decades, Europe’s governing classes insisted that only racists worried about immigration, only bigots doubted the success of multiculturalism and only fascists cared about national identity. Now that a true far-right radical has perpetrated a terrible atrocity, it will be easy to return to those comforting illusions.”
Cato riffs on a Bill Gates interview at the Wall Street Journal, regarding education.
‘Why? Because, as Bill Gates correctly observes, hardly anyone thinks of education as their business. And how do you get masses of brilliant entrepreneurs to think of education as their business? You make it easy for them to make it their business.’
I think it’s going too far, trying to apply libertarian economics onto education, but Milton Friedman on Education is thought-provoking.
“In Obama’s speech, the main justification for leaving Afghanistan was that al Qaeda is crippled and compromised — and this is sufficient from the U.S. perspective. But for Afghans, defeating al Qaeda has never been as urgent as ending the Taliban insurgency, which, in its tenth year, needs a political solution, not just a military one. Obama acknowledged as much, saying, “As we strengthen the Afghan government and Security Forces, America will join initiatives that reconcile the Afghan people, including the Taliban.” But it is unclear how such a settlement could come about under the truncated timetable of U.S. withdrawal.”
Sadly, the video does not include the discussion of both Kant and Chomsky, nor the Chomskian linguistic revolution. Click through for parts 2 and 3.
Kant’s novel answer to the problem of how scientific knowledge is possible (Newton’s Principia), relies partly on David Hume’s assertion that no universal knowledge can be achieved by induction alone, as the video does a good job of explaining.
Here’s a quote from a previous post on this site:
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
Kant realized that Science itself, and its claims to objective universal laws that are good for all time, past present, and future, and for all space (the tiniest particles to apples to the moon to all celestial bodies) were under threat from Hume’s induction problem, and he set out to find a solution. Here’s a good summary from If-Then Knots (which also goes into the Kant/Chomsky connection):
‘Those propositions that we knew independent of any particular fact about the world (a priori) but which also contained new information about the world (synthetic) were synthetic a priori.
How do we know such propositions? On Kant’s account, synthetic a priori statements are derived from the conditions that make experience possible. For example, we know propositions in geometry because they are derived from the conditions that make possible the experience of spatially extended objects. From his account of mathematics as grounded in synthetic a priori statements about space and time, Kant felt that he could put Newtonian mechanics on objective and certain foundations.’
and:
‘…Kant used the transcendental method to derive synthetic a priori propositions, which he argues form the foundation of scientific (ie, objective and certain) judgement. Simple enough, right?’
One consequence of Kant’s view is that knowledge of objective reality is due to some extent on our own onboard apparatus. Reality, or the reality which is knowable, has already conformed to our minds, rather than the other way around. Kant thought his own project may best be used as a negative limit for possible knowledge, including the threat scientific knowledge faces from Hume’s problem of induction. Kant’s views of time and space are complex: (and his thinking has some questionable connections to subsequent developments in mathematics).
Chomsky’s Universal Grammar is totally consistent with Kant’s epistemology (although, obviously, Kant never used it as an example, having been dead for 153 years when Chomsky first published his theory):
The Universal Grammar is a priori.
Unlike his predecessors in the field of linguistics, Chomsky does not join the empiricists in claiming that learning a language is just a matter of imitation. There has to be something in our mind, something innate, that makes the knowledge of any human language possible. In fact, Chomsky has postulated the existence of a language organ in our brain that would come equipped with knowledge of the Universal Grammar. Non-human animals, lacking that language organ, can never become fluent in any human languages.
Reality conforms to the mind
In the context we are discussing, by “reality” we mean “language”. In the empiricist’s view, the mind is just a passive receptacle of information—if you spoke to a child in any sort of language (English or Arabic, but also a computer language or an alien language) from the moment they are born, then the child would become fully proficient in it. In contrast, in Chomsky’s theory, a human child could never acquire a computer language or an alien language as their first language, since those languages do not conform to the Universal Grammar (FOOTNOTE: An alien language would doubtless conform to some sort of Universal Grammar, but it would be the Alien Universal Grammar, as opposed to the Human Universal Grammar.) So the Universal Grammar makes our knowledge of language possible, but also limits the kinds of languages we can know, just like our a priori of space makes our perception of physical objects possible, but also limits the kinds of objects we can perceive—to, for instance, three-dimensional objects.
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So, Chomsky, may something of a Kantian in his revolutionary work on linguistics.
Yet, I was asked if there is any connection between Kantian transcendental idealism and Chomsky’s political philosophy, and I remain doubtful I could provide proof of such a connection.
It has remained confounding to me that Chomsky has clung to a philosophical idealism that serves, at best, as a platform to critique all human organizations relentlessly (especially the U.S. government, and “corporate tyrannies,” military and civil hierarchies but also fascist tyrannies and other oppressive regimes).
Perhaps, after Kant’s moral philosophy, Chomsky believes that we must derive the laws of morality a priori from reason itself, rather than from experience (and Humean habit), thus lending such laws a presumed universality and objectivity. Chomsky seems to hold a rather strong and positive definition of individual liberty, perhaps sharing a space in the social contract tradition which seeks to maintain the consent of the governed (a tradition which includes Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant all of whom approached the problem in different ways). He remains highly skeptical of authority, claims to authority and argues that individuals are best served by anarchy, or anarcho-syndicalism, or some form of libertarian socialism. The burden of proof, on this view, would be upon governments, institutions and groups of individuals to justify interference into the lives of individuals. According to Chomsky, when people do deal with each other (as they must), they ought to do so voluntarily, entering and leaving obligations of their own will as do the leaders of a community council, or perhaps as occurs at a faculty meeting solving problems as they arise (not exactly practicable for most states, nor for the large scale of nation states).
It would be curious to imagine how such a view would respond to Hobbes’ fool, or any threats an individual might pose to any ruling body over him when it is rational for him to do so (a room full of anarchic libertarian socialists may have trouble finding common ground). It is my belief that neither anarchists, nor community councils, nor faculties would maintain legitimate power for long, and the strong, free individual would soon find himself ruled by those who cared not for his positive, generally rights based, definitions of freedom.
Yet, as to the original question, I can’t seem to find satisfactory proof of a connection. Any thoughts and comments are welcome.
Addition: A reader mentions Kropotkin, and points out that some of Chomsky’s thinking harkens to the heady days of the Russian Revolution (Chomsky’s family emigrated from Russia).
Mead has a series built upon the argument that the ‘blue’ progressive social model (building the Great Society) is defunct because America will have to adjust to new economic and global realities. In the current post, he focuses on the part of the model that create and directs government agencies to try and alleviate inner-city poverty and its problems for black folks.
‘This is one danger for the Black middle class and it’s an urgent and obvious one: the good jobs are going away — and they won’t be quite as good anymore. The second danger is subtler but no less important. In the past, government work served to integrate ethnic minorities and urban populations into society at large. In the current atmosphere of sharpening debate over the role and cost of government, the ties of so much of the Black middle class to government employment may make it harder, not easier, for Blacks to take advantage of the opportunities that the emerging Red Age economy offers.’
Well, I’m not sold that the Red age is upon us, nor on this analysis, but it’s an interesting thought (for where are entrenched government interests going?). In my experience, such programs address real needs of which there are no shortage (health and nutrition services for wanted and unwanted teen pregnancies, food stamps and subsidized school lunches for probably millions of kids, subsidized housing for people to get away from predatory and criminal individuals and neighborhoods where the law often doesn’t reach and won’t ever address most of the problems). Poverty is always with us, and black poverty in American inner cities has its own specific history.
These programs, of course, can create reward structures in which there are winners and losers (creating more inequality as well as abuse and corruption from the top down), recipients who’ve long given up any sense of shame at receiving handouts and generations of people who’ve known little else (another form of abuse and corruption). There is also clearly damage done to the spirit of those who’ve gotten out, and those striving to get out by their own lights as they look around and see often an upside-down system of incentives (though it may be better than the reward structure of say, a gang). There is mismanagement, entrenched bureaucracy, and like most city politics, a big political machine with sometimes ruthlessly self-interested players, many of whom have many shady connections.
I’d like to think I’m well aware of the threat such thinking poses to a balanced budget and a growing economy through lower taxation and and continued political stability… and ultimately to individual liberties and personal responsibility…including the freedom to pursue one’s talents apart from enforced schemes of those who would decide where your moral obligations lie as they pursue their own self-interest in the name of their ideals.
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The progressive response is likely to still be their moral high-ground: But for moral concern of principled actors responding to the horrendous injustice of American institutionalized slavery, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. The path to justice therefore, and to make society more moral and equal lies through the use of activism to gain popular support for a cause, to enshrine one’s ideals through legislation and the use of State power. Of course, many progressives assume this legitimizes the broader political platform and all manner of other causes (and their use of the race card shows what happens when politics is used as a driver of change). These ideas have been making their way through our culture, our courts, and our institutions as Mead points out, for over a half-century. They definitely are shaping our current political landscape, come what may.
“For wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer Justice, it is still violence and injury, however colour’d with the Name, Pretences, or Forms of Law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, War is made upon the Sufferers, who having no appeal on Earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such Cases, an appeal to Heaven.”
Vendler reviewed John Serio’s new “Selected Poems” of Wallace Stevens.
“Stevens’s conscience made him confront the chief issues of his era: the waning of religion, the indifferent nature of the physical universe, the theories of Marxism and socialist realism, the effects of the Depression, the uncertainties of philosophical knowledge, and the possibility of a profound American culture, present and future.”
and
“Stevens’s poetry oscillates, throughout his life, between verbal ebullience and New England spareness, between the high rhetoric of England (and of religion) and the “plain sense of things” that he sometimes felt to be more American…”
Still, Fukuyama’s project is quite in the spirit of Hegel, who made clear that the writing of universal history does not require giving an account of everything that has ever happened to mankind. Rather, Hegel explained in the introduction to The Philosophy of History, “The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom; a progress whose development [is] according to the necessity of its nature.” It is this story of progressive enlightenment that the universal historian has to tell…
…In the past, Fukuyama felt that that story was best and most succinctly explained by Alexandre Kojève, the Franco-Russian philosopher whose seminars on Hegel, given in Paris in the 1930s, exerted a huge influence on subsequent political thinkers. (When Fukuyama talks about Hegel, he acknowledged in The End of History, he is really talking about “Hegel-as-interpreted-by-Kojève.”) It was Kojève who proposed that History (that is, the History of the march toward freedom, rather than the lowercase history of whatever happens to happen) ended with the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon—for convenience’s sake, say in 1806, the year of the Battle of Jena and the completion of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit.
This influence led to a strong historicist strain in Fukuyama’s work; a continental line of thought that can often lead to a rather liberal political philosophy. But Fukuyama was on the ground in Afghanistan in 1979, studied with Allan Bloom and Samuel Huntington and was often associated with neoconservatism. So how did he get here, and where is he headed?:
For in a strange way, without explicitly acknowledging it, Fukuyama in his new book abandons the central premise of his earlier work, which was the Hegelian necessity of the progress of freedom. It is true that, as before, Fukuyama sees political history as the story of the evolution and spread of liberalism. The strategy of the book is to examine the development, across a range of societies, of what he considers the three pillars of “modern liberal democracy”: a strong state, the rule of law, and accountable government.
This seems closer to Huntington’s reaction to modernization theory, toward the current neoconservative viewpoint of using our military and economic strength to advance democracy and overthrow dictators (Fukuyama has since pulled away from neoconservatism after Afghanistan and Iraq).
Fukuyama has never accepted the Hobbesian view of the state of nature as a war of all against all, but the grounds of his rejection have changed. In The End of History, he countered Hobbes with Hegel: the Hobbesian notion that society is grounded in man’s fear of violent death, he argued, was less plausible than the Hegelian view that society arises from man’s need to earn recognition from his fellows by dominating them.
And he’s arrived at Darwin?:
In the new book, he again dismisses Hobbes, but this time on Darwinian grounds. Mankind has never consisted of atomized individuals, Fukuyama writes, but even in its most primitive state was organized into small, kin-based bands:
and:
“Political systems evolve in a manner roughly comparable to biological evolution,”
Kirsch doesn’t seem too impressed by this new turn, and disputes this influence with Nietzsche’s response to Darwin: the will to power:
“In The Will to Power, Nietzsche observed that, for human beings, the subjective experience of triumph was more important than actual success in the struggle for survival: “Physiologists should think again before positing the ‘instinct of preservation’ as the cardinal drive in an organic creature. A living thing wants above all to discharge its force.” And the discharge of force can take forms inimical to the preservation of life.”
Which could mean we’re right back to a Kantian/Hegelian philosophical influence as far as Kirsch is concerned (I’m thinking of the Straussian critique of historicism which holds that Nietzsche merely followed such logic into to its conclusions inherent in Hegel and in the subsequent crises of modernity…often visible in attempts to restlessly attach modern liberal democracies to something…away from religion…and as Strauss likely saw it, away from Natural Right…). Correct me if I’m wrong.
Kirsch finishes with:
“As long as Fukuyama could believe in History as a dialectical process, moving inevitably in the direction of freedom and equal recognition, there was at least one compass point that he could rely on. In the Darwinian world of The Origins of Political Order, that directionality has vanished, and we are left with contingency and cynicism as the keys to understanding our own past. That this results in a more conventional book than we have come to expect from Fukuyama is a sign of how difficult the conventional wisdom is to escape.”
If you’ve read the book, please share your thoughts. Any comments are welcome.
chr1
