‘The limit of freedom for Mill was the point were an individual’s actions risked harming other people. This is his so-called Harm Principle, and he applies it throughout the book.’
This blog is still trying to work towards a definition:
‘Like many scholars of modernism, I’m often asked two questions: What is modernism? And why is modernist studies, it seems, all the rage right now? I don’t have a good, succinct answer to either question — and I’ve no doubt frustrated plenty of friends because of that — but the reasons why I don’t are pretty telling.’
From the comments:
‘The most useful definition of modernist fiction I’ve encountered comes from Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction. He says modernist fiction tends to “foreground epistemological questions” such as “How can I interpret the world I’m part of? What is there to be known?Who knows it? What are the limits of that knowledge?” In contrast, postmodernist fiction tends to “foreground ontological questions” such as “What is a world? What kinds of worlds are there and how are they constituted? What happens when…boundaries between worlds are violated?’
‘There is no morality in art. There is morality in religion; there are philosophical objectives embedded in politics. The two are intertwined in a society and reflected in its art. When you sever art from its cultural moorings and make “newness” the overriding criterion by which the merits of a work are judged, then anything is possible. This results in crap. Not always’
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, the Bauhaus, the imagists, the futurists etc. Some of those influences have morphed into post-modernism or where such currents have flowed and keep flowing.
Lileks’ take:
‘The primary urge of the revolutionary and the modernist and the adolescent: impatience.’
So, do we aim for maturity? Reverence? Good old Longfellow?
Food for thought. Science, technology, mathematics are doing quite fine, and moving ahead, but what about the humanities?
Does rock/popular music corrupt the souls of youth in preventing them from evening-out the passions; from pursuing higher things that a quality humanities education can offer?
Might such a lack allow political ideology to offer young people something to do, something to be, and something of which to be a part?
A questioning of premises, with varied disagreement, including that from an Emersonian.
Apparently, not all ‘individual humans’ as defined by Western intellectual traditions and Western secular humanists/idealists see themselves as Westerners do.
In spite of the last American administration, not everyone wants to be a member of a global Anglo-capitalist trading and legal order, forced to create some kind of functioning Western-style democracy, backed by American military power and guided no doubt, by some Christian belief from afar. Nor do many people perhaps even want a Westphalian state (which means having to keep-up appearances at NATO gatherings and maintain some basic founding documents/Constitution and a minimal standing army).
In spite of the current American administration, not everyone wants to join into a state of perpetual progressive protest and activism, living under ever-growing social-democratic bureaucratic States promising their own visions of the ideal society, justifying some violence and righteous revolutionary activity in the process, exerting their will through international institutions, looking for human rights and new classes of victims.
Not everyone prefers such ideals, say, over immediate relief, money, advantage, and leverage in their relations with American interests.
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There are many other models which are NOT a part of the traditions and institutions to which I am responsible, from the old Persian empire to the modern Islamic/Islamist hybrid State (or as many would prefer, a functioning, secure Islamic order like the good ol’ days).
From the ancient Han Chinese core/Mandarin system to the big-chief tribal setup found in various regions of what we’re calling the modern world.
On that note: When ISIS holds territory, ISIS is able to amplify its reach and scope. Some ISIS folks apparently want virgins and/or slaves, guns, blood and power. Others have a slightly bigger picture in mind, settling for a brutal enforcement regime in Raqqa…for now.
I have some concern for these lower risk, higher consequence events happening where I live, and I tend to favor cold-eyed realist leaders who will focus on such threats enough to balance my/your/our freedoms with a lighter hand.
In fact, some consideration of the above is one the main reasons on which I consider my vote, even for the two unpleasant choices currently facing me and you (candidates who both seem to consistently put themselves, and their images of themselves, above most other considerations…most of the time).
‘Deal opponents say their focus now is to expose Iran’s bad behavior and risks for business, and to minimize Iran’s economic gains so the regime can’t use new trade and investment to spend more money on terrorist activities, ballistic missiles, wars in Syria and Yemen and repression at home. Once a new U.S. administration is inaugurated, getting a better and broader deal is still possible, they insist: if Iran wants access to the U.S. financial system, for example, it should agree to end financing for terror groups like Hezbollah, Dubowitz says.’
‘When it was announced a year ago, the Iran nuclear deal stoked intense debate among pundits and policymakers about whether it would accomplish its core purpose: keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons. But in recent months, the criticism has shifted. As the sanctions unwind, observers have grown more concerned about whether Iran is getting the economic relief it had expected and how the unwinding might affect the remaining bans on Iran.’
‘Therein lies the central tension of Speak, Memory. Its prose is meticulous, suggesting memory as an exercise in exacting dictation from an omniscient oracle, yet its message points to memory as mutable, prone to the passage of time and the vagaries of imagination’
“Nabokov in America” is rewarding on all counts, as biography, as photo album (there are many pictures of people, Western landscapes and motels) and as appreciative criticism. Not least, Roper even avoids the arch style so often adopted by critics faintly trying to emulate their inimitable subject.’
What’s more American than an exiled member of the Russian aristocracy intimately making his way into the English language and peering out from a thousand Motor Lodges?
A little bit about politics and also the politics amidst fellow writers and critics:
‘…when in doubt, I always follow the simple method of choosing that line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells.’
and:
‘Who’s in, who’s out, and where are the snows of yesteryear. All very amusing. I am a little sorry to be left out. Nobody can decide if I am a middle-aged American writer or an old Russian writer—or an ageless international freak.’
On his professional collection of butterflies:
‘The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.’
Via Youtube: An interviewer, Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss ‘Lolita:’
Let’s not forget the victims of crime, and that in bad neighborhoods, it’s usually just a matter of time before something bad happens to you (even if you know people, I’m guessing):
‘Mac Donald gives voice to the many residents of high-crime neighborhoods who want proactive policing.’
If you’re going to focus on pain and injustice, difficult as it is, it’s probably best to keep a level head, and provide irrefutable evidence of the wrongs, nailing them to a post in public view. Policing can be a risky business which deals with a violent subset of the population most of the time. Knowledge of facts and the law are probably your best allies.
Passionate intensity and endless protest can obviously muddy the waters, erasing the line between violent criminals and regular folks on the street. Ultimately, this weakens whatever trust is there between the police, the neighborhood, and more importantly, all of civil society (the moral concern and inclusion into civil society [freedoms and responsibilities] that can lift people up and keep them striving for something better).
Crime is damaging, demoralizing, and dangerous. Most criminals usually don’t care about the damage they’re doing…
In this blog’s view: It’s not that the social sciences don’t offer knowledge, insight and relief to people, it’s that the knowledge can be mistaken, and their use soon deployed in a system of incentives by policy advocates, politicians and people on the public take…with motivations of their own.
Proper context is key.
There aren’t many good answers to such tough problems, but tough, unsentimental thinking can often help the most; usually much more than proclamations coming from all the ‘right’ media outlets, suburbs and academia…declaring what the latest discoveries are and where people heads and hearts ought to be.
Theodore Dalrymple (pseudonym) worked in Britain as a prison doctor/psychiatrist, and explains his thinking about how to properly treat people as subjects responding to their environments and the incentives presented before them:
This blog sometimes acts as a bit of a dumping ground, a curio-shelf of ideas on the conservation of liberty.
No postmodern, nihilist art lunacy is silly nor ideological enough, and no one painting themselves into ideological corners really ought to be safe, including me and you.
‘Bromwich twice quotes Burke’s deceptively simple political creed, that “the principles of true politicks are those of morality enlarged, and I neither now do nor every will admit of any other.” This biography can be viewed as a careful unpacking of the varying implications of that stance, as Burke both adhered to it, and attained a deeper understanding of its meaning, over the course of his career in public life.’
Here’s a link to Michael Sandel at Harvard’s lecture courses on ‘Justice’. I’ve made it through his presentation of Robert Nozick, Locke, and Kant so far.
Addition: The military will not take back control of the government:
‘Not all of the rebel soldiers have surrendered yet, but the government seems firmly in control. The Kemalist era in Turkish history lasted for almost 100 years, but finally came to an end in the last 18 hours. The Turkish military, it appears, has lost the role of ‘guardian of the nation’ which it assumed in the interest of making Turkey a modern European country. Atatürk’s Turkey marginalized the pious Anatolian peasants; now their grandchildren and great grandchildren are building a new Turkey.’
Erdogan’s coalition and political stability look to be in some trouble, recently, as a bomb kills nearly a hundred at a pro-Kurdish peace rally:
‘Turkey fears and loathes Kurdish independence anywhere in the world more than it fears and loathes anything else. Kurdish independence in Syria, from Ankara’s point of view, could at a minimum escalate a three-decades-long conflict and at worst threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity’
‘The answer to the primary question about political Islam’s compatibility with modernity is that political Islam’s purpose is to not only be incompatible with modernity but also to oppose it, demolish it, and replace it in every regard.’
(Addition): Few surprises when it comes to the local French-Tunisian attacker Mohamed Louhaiej Bouhlel, who has some criminal history (fitting more the profile of disgruntled, 2nd-generation, more rootless, criminally drifting sort that tends to radicalize peripherally, sometimes with or without groups of others…attracted by the ISIS cause and reach….or maybe even DIY).
As I see it, this implies more of a failure of French society to adequately recognize many natural tendencies of human nature, the colonial legacy, as well as the economic and social/institutional limits as found in any strongly ethno-identified Western Republic such as France.
It’s often people with nothing else/left to do or be, or those more well-educated sorts who don’t have the kingdom they were promised who tend to do things like this…or become attracted by the reach of ISIS as it currently stands.
-As mentioned elsewhere on the web, George Packer’s piece ‘The Other France‘ about what’s going on in the banlieues around Paris can be instructive…
-After the Bataclan attacks, a piece about Molenbeek, Brussels, from which many attackers came.
At least 77 dead (84) dead as a truck plow(ed) into a crowd of people on Bastille Day:
It’s almost as if the West is in a War, soft and hard, with people from another civilization who take that civilizations’ ideas and turn them into weapons.
As previously posted, start getting up to speed anytime…
Even the NY Times notes that Western fighters heeding the jihadi call into Syria pose a risk upon return.
All that righteousness and fighting experience with nowhere to go.
‘Iran is still making extensive attempts to acquire materials to further its nuclear program, even after signing a deal promising its curtailment, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has warned, according to i24news.
The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) said in an annual report it has detected extensive Iranian attempts to acquire illicit materials in Germany, “especially goods that can be used in the field of nuclear technology.”
From a reader-Henry Kissinger as of October 16th of 2015:
But the current crisis is taking place in a world of nontraditional nuclear and cyber technology. As competing regional powers strive for comparable threshold capacity, the nonproliferation regime in the Middle East may crumble. If nuclear weapons become established, a catastrophic outcome is nearly inevitable. A strategy of pre-emption is inherent in the nuclear technology. The U.S. must be determined to prevent such an outcome and apply the principle of nonproliferation to all nuclear aspirants in the region.
‘By the time Baldwin published “Another country” and the essay collection “Nobody Knows My Name,” both in 1962, he had become America’s leading black literary star. Both books were commercially successful, but reviews were mixed. In 1962, “The New Yorker” published Baldwin’s essay “The Fire Next Time,” which detailed his evangelical upbringing and his views on Christianity as a form of slavery forced on and then embraced by blacks. When Baldwin became the official voice of black America, however, he immediately compromised his voice as a writer, sacrificing his gifts in order to gain acceptance from the Black Power movement. In the 1970s, Baldwin was adrift not only politically but aesthetically. Nevertheless, up until his death, in 1987, at the age of 63, Baldwin continued to harbor the hope that he would be embraced as an important literary figure by his own race.’
And just to suggest no definitive answers to such problems, but rather which kinds of questions might be worth asking:
“People in Harlem know they are there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else…[In a new housing project they] naturally…began smashing windows, defacing walls {and] urinating in the elevators…“
======================
But what if in the crusade of black folks to appeal to white folks’ better natures, one fell prey to the vanity of this idea?:
‘The central premise of liberal intellectuals for decades…[was] that the racial problem was essentially…inside the minds of white people…“
Well, Baldwin was pretty successful at reaching inside the minds of many, to his credit, using his natural gifts to make a moral plea for such ends.
Sowell asks why certain cultures have pursued ideas and abstractions to tremendous advantage, developing habits of success in the sciences, politics, law, trade and technology in the process?
America, certainly, has been one such success story, despite and partly because of its original sin…and such successes have happened before in England instead of Ireland, the Greeks and Romans instead of Northern Europe, as Sowell notes.
Why not join ’em, copying what works, or at least trying hard to beat them at their own game once given the chance? This seems to be a logical consequence of Sowell’s reasoning. This, as opposed becoming locked in resentment, justified in anger, dependent upon the ‘oppressor’, often following an ideology in search of a cause; victim-hood in search of facts and evidence.
Schools and programs can do a lot, expanding experience and making people larger than they otherwise would be, but they are often an inefficient way to do it, really offering less than can a stable home in a growing economy, and running into problems of unions, twisted incentives, bureaucracies, corruption and waste.
I suspect that under an activist moon, many liberals must feel the tidal pull of solidarity against the ‘oppressor;’ left seeking their own moral lights in a rather dense fog.
There must be someone to blame!
This can also be very funny; creating incentives for well-educated, often very square people to overlook, quite conveniently at times, their own habits of success, wealth-building and hard-work.
This can also be very sad, making successful folks follow incentives that will eventually undercut their own habits of success, wealth-building and hard-work through awful political incentives, potentially dragging us all into poorer, darker, place with little room to reflect.
Preach what you practice. Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
Any thoughts and comments are welcome.
***From a reader, parks are better than the kind of neighborhood ‘The Message’ comes from:
Duly noted:
‘People pissin’ on the stairs you know they just don’t care’:
And from this ‘Shout & Murmurs’ piece in the New Yorker:
‘Eventually, I believe, everything evens out. Long ago, an asteroid hit our planet and killed our dinosaurs. But, in the future, maybe we’ll go to another planet and kill their dinosaurs.’
“It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.”
‘That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Addition: Perhaps you can still govern men by assuming their wickedness as well as having their consent, for a little while anyways.
Another Addition:
“My conclusion, then, is contrary to the common opinion which claims that the people, when in power, are variable, unstable, and ungrateful; and I affirm that these faults are no more common to them then to individual princes.”
Megan McArdle at Bloomberg from not long ago, on Brexit. Comments are worth a read on issues many Americans may share, or, at least, where many folks are finding shared populist rejection of many aspects of a global, liberal order. Many people place sovereignty, reasonable self-interest, borders, freedoms and duties under national laws and the ‘we’ coming from these freedoms and duties above other considerations.
From a reader, Peter Hitchens tracks 40 years of history, often snaking across party lines, and makes a case for Britain to stay-out:
‘Indeed elite tribalism is actively encouraged by the technologies of globalization, the ease of travel and communication. Distance and separation force encounter and immersion, which is why the age of empire made cosmopolitans as well as chauvinists — sometimes out of the same people. (There is more genuine cosmopolitanism in Rudyard Kipling and T. E. Lawrence and Richard Francis Burton than in a hundred Davos sessions.)’
Well, it’s probably important to remember that any one person, or group, of shared interests and ideals is reasonably content, if enough members of the group are getting their interests met and/or their ideals reflected back upon them. It’s tribal and it isn’t.
This rebuttal from the comments, alone, may justify having written the piece:
‘No no Ross, you’re wrong. Cosmopolitan sorts walk the talk my friend. We (gasp) befriend kind people of lesser means, we find value in intelligence and openness wherever it lies. We emphasize and appreciate what connects us all and we seek to find connections wherever we go. We hope to contribute to a world that values all individuals and tolerates all sorts. And it is not a rant. It is a belief system that if we all shared would make the world a better place.’
I appreciate the honesty, but the lack of self-awareness is kind-of the point.
Because I think it bears repeating, I find myself very much in line with the following:
‘We may sum this up by saying that the more the style of what used to be called politics becomes theorized, the more political problems come to be reintrepreted as managerial. Working out the least oppressive laws under which different and sometimes conflicting groups may live peaceably together is being replaced by manipulation and management of the attitudes different groups take towards each other, with the hope that this will ultimately bring harmony. In other words, in the new form of society, human beings are becoming the matter which is to be shaped according to the latest moral ideas.’
Minogue, Kenneth. Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. (Pg 111).
“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…”
‘Oakeshott’s strong antipathy was for what he terms “rationalism” in politics. Rationalism is the reign of confident reason expended on a subject that cannot readily be reasoned upon. Politics, “always so deeply veined with both the traditional, the circumstantial and the transitory,” will not obey the kind of technical expertise under whose banner ration-alism travels. For the ration-al-ist, no problem evades solution, and perfection will arrive promptly when, one by one, all problems are solved.
“Political activity,” Oakeshott writes, “is recognized [by rationalist thinkers] as the imposition of a uniform condition of perfection upon human conduct.”
“Rationalism in politics means, in Oakeshott’s challenging phrase, making politics as the crow flies, i.e. ideologically. Hayek, a student of the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and for many years a professor of economics a the University of Chicago, shows that this mode of thought is characteristic of one major stream of Continental (primarily French) social criticism, which he labels “scientism” to distinguish it from the other principal stream, which issues into social science properly understood (recall Jeffrey Hart’s essay. The one tradition insists on science’s ability to order society according to a rational plan; the other counsels the dependence of reason on nonrational circumstances, its inability to survey and command the whole of society, its limited room to maneuver in the interstices of society. Placing Burke, Hume, and Tocqueville squarely in the latter camp, Hayek shows why traditionalism is closer to the free market analysis of libertarianism than is commonly thought.”
and:
“In contrast to both Hayek and Vogelin, Leo Strauss presents a profound critique of rationalism that culminates in the renewed authority of reason to guide moral and political life. Not the reason of Hegel or Rousseau or Hobbes, however, but the practical wisdom, the prudence, of statesmen-especially as explicated and defended by Aristotle.”
Buckley Jr., William F. & Charles R. Kesler. Keeping The Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought-A Revised Edition of American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Print.
‘When Robert J. Samuelson published a Newsweek column last month arguing that high-speed rail is “a perfect example of wasteful spending masquerading as a respectable social cause,” he cited cost figures and potential ridership to demonstrate that even the rosiest scenarios wouldn’t justify the investment. He made a good, rational case — only to have it completely undermined by the evocative photograph the magazine chose to accompany the article.’
In my experience, it’s not much about economics (those rationalizations tend to come later), but more about many people finding solidarity, common-cause, identity and group-identity through a set of shared interests and ideals. My major complaint is that basic human needs met under such ideals become met through politics and often non-delimited theories of political power.
‘California high-speed rail will connect the mega-regions of the state, contribute to economic development and a cleaner environment, create jobs and preserve agricultural and protected lands’
What could go wrong?
———–
Much left and left-liberal idealism finds expression through high-speed rail: If you build it, the ideal society will come.
Unions and union-elected government representatives tend to get contracts, money, power and influence, if they play the game right. Many environmentalists and environmental groups can get contracts, money, power and influence, if they play the game right. Everyone somewhat invested in the ideal of a better, shared, collectivist society (especially those further left into anti-capitalism and diversified into identity groups by ‘race, gender and class’) might get money, power and influence…if they play the game right. The winners aren’t always so ‘sharing.’
As I see it, much political stability and individual liberties are lost as these political and social arrangements become reflective of both actual human nature as it is and the economic scarcity of reality.
The people who promise solutions to poverty and homelessness seem to be engaged in a utopian cost-shifting exercise which favors their interests and overlooks crime, violence and personal responsbility…hardly a way to balance the budget: Repost-Heather MacDonald At The City Journal: ‘The Sidewalks Of San Francisco’…
