A Pact
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman –
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.
Maybe Pound did come back in a way…
See Also: Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens-Anecdote of The Jar
Full article here (subscription required)
It’s a complicated tale of economic growth, leftism, the government likely having violated the principle of treating people as ends and not means to achieve that economic growth…acting brutally.
And as Nussbaum frames it: it’s a tale of the anti-liberal communist/marxist left and the more liberal left. The latter in this case has demonstrated real moral courage.
“HERE WE ARRIVE at an issue that lies at the heart of all the leftist political movements of the twentieth century: is solidarity itself a major political value or is the basic value that of justice to each and every person, treating each and every one as an end?“
She takes Noam Chomsky to task for his continuing hubris:
“Not so admirable, by contrast, have been the statements of some leftists to the effect that one should not criticize one’s friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness…
…A particularly fatuous document of this kind was a letter authored by Noam Chomsky”
Chomsky’s nothing if not fatuous when it comes to politics.
In assessing the specific situation of West Bengal, we must distinguish between the government’s industrial strategy, which I, like Amartya Sen, believe to be generally correct and the means the government chose to implement it, which are appalling…”
In Nussbaum’s assessment, the government’s brutality may come out of Marxism itself:
“What led to this breakdown in governance? The seeds of catastrophe lie, no doubt, in the never-sufficiently-de-Stalinized background of this Party, always suspicious of democracy, always used to treating people as agents of class struggle”
Nussbaum concludes:
If the government returns to its arrogant ways, however, it will continue to need and deserve the criticism of fellow egalitarians, who must not allow solidarity to trump justice.”
Anyone who will put the principle of treating people as ends and not means is welcome.
So, where did Marx get his ideas, anyways? Peter Singer discusses Hegel and Marx.
On This Site:
–Martha Nussbaum On Eliot Spitzer At The Atlanta Journal-Constitution -We can all be guilty of hubris.
The Politics Of Noam Chomsky-The Dangers Of Kantian Transcendental Idealism? -How his moral thinking and lingusitic contributions connect with his political philosophy is not clear to me. .
“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation…”
An interesting article. Paglia thinks aloud:
…Is feminism intrinsically a movement of the left, or can there be a feminism based on conservative or religious principles?
Susan B. Anthony (wikipedia) was Christian, mind you, and extremely chaste:
“…feminist history has insufficiently acknowledged the degree to which the founders of the woman suffrage movement—that is, the drive to win votes for women—were formed or influenced by religion.”
Agreed…especially when so many feminists have embraced Marxism, pseudo-Marxism and continental philosophy as driving ideas.
..feminist theory has failed to acknowledge how much the emergence of modern feminism owes to capitalism and the industrial revolution”
In reading Paglia, one can see how difficult it is for thoughtful, independent-minded people (men or women) to confront collective anger, ideology, unclear reasoning and groupthink…though I’m not sure her own reasoning is sound.
Speaking for myself, it’s difficult to be sympathetic to a movement that attempts to exclude me by definition and through its actions can threaten many of my freedoms.
Addition: An interesting article from Britain (where socialism is a more powerful force) against feminism’s shortcomings: anti-men bias, the belief that the personal is polical, the consequent state intervention…