Media sources these days find it hard to manage the logic of identity groups all getting their day in the sun AND getting splendidly along. The ‘old-ruleset-is-full-of-closed-minded-natives‘ vs the ‘new-ruleset-is-full-of tolerant-idealists-managing-happy-people‘ code is still running.
Please just give me the facts. You don’t need to mediate my common sense and decide what I ought to think.
You probably kinda already suspected a lot of people aren’t independent, nor abstract thinkers (a lot of us, much of the time). You probably know there are a lot of pretty faces and slick operators in the world (smart and ambitious people, not so much wise and decent people). Look at some of your own behavior, honestly, for confirmation of this.
In the meantime, I don’t consider it a good to not tell basic truths when it comes who/what/when/where/why. I suppose we’ll see how much new technology and the market corrects for the ideological underpinnings creating such incentives:
This blog has not gone often wrong in planning for eventual activist erosion beneath the liberal platform (such is human nature). See most academies, orgs, many Federal Bureaucracies, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR etc. Co-ops tend to get co-opted. This process is about as reliable as expecting loud, true-believing and crazy/brilliant voices to pipe-up in the back of the church.
Please choose one: Human-nature skepticism, some knowledge of history, the humanities, Heraclitus, the tragic view of life, (E)ntropy, God etc. can all help explain why we’re always up against some element of the natural world or the worse parts of human nature.
Now that I think about it, I haven’t had to make too many serious course corrections in anticipating the depth and potency of the postmodern problems, nor the totalitarian/authoritarian impulses and true belief so often beneath the surface.
If you’re still with me, allow me to a point to a deeper map: Beyond political party and loyalty and the modern maps, lies an ancient one. Within this map is the idea that freedom eventually becomes the highest good in a democracy. Such freedom and rule by the demos is extended to all areas of life (old flattering the young, the differences between men and women erased, the former slaves freed etc.). This makes the demos ever more sensitive to any authority, so much so that popular sentiment becomes antithetical to even reasonable authority. Out of this situation arises a man who is this worst master of his passions. Now, I don’t need you to suddenly align this map with your current political lights (it’s Trump! it’s Biden!). Please be quiet, already.
Just take a look for yourself, think for a while, and move on.
Things fall apart. I suppose we’ll see how much. I’d rather look pitiable and foolish than depressingly accurate.
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As posted:
The idea of bronze men (appetitive, trading), silver men (guardians), and gold men (philosopher-kings) rings authoritarian to the modern ear. Plato’s Ideal City has a rigid, birth caste system.
Yet, he founded the first university, more or less, and grounded learning away from Homer and towards a different set of truth and knowledge claims. Many of these claims became intertwined within Christian doctrine later on.
Reading Thrasymachus more as a nihilist, too, has its uses (as a counter-balance to Marx, to the radical utopians and to the postmodern power-all-the-way-down theorists).
This blog remains skeptical of the idea that ‘political theory’ and the modernization of new and emergent fields of thought will meet the claims of many political theorists and modernizers.
If you want to acquire or re-acquire a deep map of understanding, and one of the founding doctrines of Western thought, here’s the material presented pretty clearly and knowledgably.
Really, it’s conversational, like a good podcast ought to be:
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A Podcast From Britain: E30 | Dreaming The Future | Natalie Bennett, Phillip Blond, Roger Scruton
Quote found here——Kraut, Richard. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
“The Peloponennisian War created the sorts of tension in Athens that would appear to support Thucydides’ analysis. Obligations to the community required greater sacrifice and presented a clearer conflict with the self-seeking “Homeric” pursuit of one’s status, power and pleasure. In political terms, people had to decide whether or not to plot against the democracy to bring off an Olgarchic coup. In moral terms they had to decide whether or not to ignore the demands of the community, summed up in the requirements of “justice,” in favor of their own honor, status, power, and in general their perceived interest. Plato was familiar with people who preferred self-interest over other-regarding obligation; his own relatives, Critias and Charmides, made these choices when they joined the Thirty Tyrants.
Arguments from natural philosophy did not restrain people like Critias and Charmides. Democritus argues unconvincingly that the requirements of justice and the demands of nature, as understood by Atomism, can be expected to coincide. Protogoras rejects the view that moral beliefs are true and well grounded only if they correspond to some reality independent of believers; admittedly they are matters of convention, but so are all other beliefs about the world. This line or argument removes any ground for preferring nature over convention, but at the same time seems to remove any rational ground for preferring one convention over another.”