Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim Barringer told the News that he plans to demonstrate that a class about the history of art does not just mean Western art. Rather, when there are so many other regions, genres and traditions — all “equally deserving of study” — putting European art on a pedestal is “problematic,” he said.’
‘The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.’
Christopher Hitchens (nearly a free speech absolutist, railing against many of his former friends on the Left) discussing the Yale Press, which was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could lead to violence in the Muslim street:
“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”
I hate to take the fatalist approach, here, but even at your most (S)elf (youthful questing, committed artist), every individual has obligations to others (other parts of your (S)elf, family, loved ones, true friends). At any given point in time, some other (S)elf, group, or coalition may have plans for you (from serial killers to love interests).
Like belief, we seem to move in and out.
Christopher Hitchens could be entertaining, especially on grounds I’m guessing he knew instinctively as a former Trotskyite: Ideologies, while highlighting truths, promise a one-stop shop on truth, knowledge, how to be in the world, what to do and what the future will be.
People can kill for less, and when they adhere to such systems, then they can end-up killing more.
**I would call the man below a white identitarian, a man whose vision of the Nation is seen primarily from within the lens of identity (a few truths and mostly gobbledygook). He’s just on the opposing side of the supposedly right-thinking identitarians. Questions of truth, and your highest good become crucial.
William Faulkner is likely underrated these days. I think it’s worth bearing in mind the people in his own town didn’t like him very much:
‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.‘
—
Moving along:
‘A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risque the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve. The two principles of conservation and correction operated strongly at the two critical periods of the Restoration and Revolution, when England found itself without a king. At both those periods the nation had lost the bond of union in their antient edifice; they did not however, dissolve the whole fabric.’
‘Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim Barringer told the News that he plans to demonstrate that a class about the history of art does not just mean Western art. Rather, when there are so many other regions, genres and traditions — all “equally deserving of study” — putting European art on a pedestal is “problematic,” he said.’
Some people are trying to erode common sense until it becomes less common:
‘The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.’
Christopher Hitchens (nearly a free speech absolutist, railing against many of his former friends on the Left) discussing the Yale Press, which was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could lead to violence in the Muslim street:
“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”
‘By going deep into the minds of six apostates Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens, Oppenheimer offers an unusually intimate history of the American left, and the right’s reaction.’
Gray highlights something I certainly find attractive about conservatism:
‘Ever since it emerged in the late 18th century as a distinct tradition of modern thought, conservatism has been defined by a suspicion of grand schemes of world improvement. Whether their thinking was grounded in a religious belief in original sin (as in the cases of Edmund Burke and the American conservative Russell Kirk) or a sceptical view of the power of human reason (as in David Hume and Michael Oakeshott), conservatives distrusted any attempt to remake the world according to the dictates of high-minded ideals and abstract models.’
Neo-conservatism comes in for criticism as having a hand in all of modern American politics.
Gray:
‘George W Bush’s crazed pursuit of regime change and its continuation in some policies of the Obama administration, particularly when acting under the direction of Hillary Clinton, were the result.’
A few humble observations about the second Iraq invasion:
–There was a reassertion of many Americans’ nationalism, pride, and fear, especially after 9/11, and the desire for revenge against that rather awful blow against civilians and innocents at home, in a business setting no less (3,000 lives lost and a lot of terror). Strategically, Iraq could be convincingly argued to be a serious misstep.
–George W. Bush’s inherited guilt at leaving the Iraqi Kurds to their fate under Saddam on his father’s watch seems to have played a part (for which I have no evidence, but I’ve long thought…which is a product of deeper American life and politics).
Let me know if/how wrong I might be.
——–
Perhaps one of Gray’s main takeaways, a la Oppenheimer, is the almost religious-type experience some people have had within Communist ideals, an experience which drastically shaped this past century, and our lives.
He finishes with:
‘Except for Chambers and Horowitz, Oppenheimer’s apostates learned very little from their journey across the political spectrum. Those who banged the drum for war were as ignorant of the countries whose governments they wanted to overthrow as they been had of the workers they had claimed to be fighting for in the past. In both cases they used people of whom they knew nothing to satisfy their own need for significance. Believing they had left behind the mistakes of the radical left, they helped create a new right that repeated the same follies. Along the way, an older and more civilised conservatism was consigned to the memory hole.’
Hitchens could be entertaining, especially on grounds I’m guessing he knew instinctively well as a former Trotskyite: Ideologies, while highlighting truths, promise a one-stop shop on truth, knowledge, how to be in the world, what to do and what the future will be.
People can kill for less, and when they adhere to such systems, then they can end-up killing more:
Cowen mentions something I’ve often thought: Changing institutions to include female representation will have costs and benefits, and change the character of many institutions themselves, and many parts of our civilization (marriage, incentives, parenthood, politics etc). Pretty unremarkable, but a highly charged and consequential topic nonetheless.
Robert Putnam, author of ‘Bowling Alone‘, seems to agree with Charles Murray about what much of what the data highlights: Working-class whites are behaving more like working-class non-whites, and college-educated non-whites are behaving more like college-educated whites.
You don’t have to agree with all of the ideas, but traditional views have their merits:
‘In sum, the Joint Chiefs have taken a clear long-term risk for an unclear near-term political gain, perhaps hoping to diminish budgetary cuts. The question is whether increasing the individual rights of the female soldier decreases the combined combat effectiveness of the killing pack. We won’t know the answer until we fight a hard ground war sometime in the future.’
Something many Boomers probably still take for granted: If you have a sexual, moral and political liberation movement sweep parts of your civilization (generation of ’68), there are gonna be some consequences, good and bad. Some radicals and social revolutionaries (professing to not believe in the legitimacy of any institution) will join and co-opt many parts of the institutions themselves; enjoying the sudden stability, influence and money gained.
The institutions, however, may arguably become less stable, so a previous stability might have been taken for granted by those Boomers.
I usually prize stability, moral decency, slow change, and rule of law (political/economic freedom) more than any one cause.
It’s probably a matter of time until you get a counter-revolution, and what worries me is a less stable system overall.
Subject: ‘Is England Still Influencing America?’ on Hitchens’ book ‘Blood, Class, & Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies‘ when Hitchens’ was pushing the idea that ’empire’ was the primary transmission, apparently due to his ideological commitments at the time. America must have seemed a classless paradise with institutions well-functioning and ripe to achieve justice and equality for the whole world…for some folks in the Generation of ’68.
‘This conclusion is rarely discussed on a systematic level, although humanists have proposed individual responses to it. Some, for starters, play the “no true humanist” card: there may be bullshit in some humanistic disciplines or by some humanists, but real work in the humanities is just as rigorous and legitimate as work in the sciences. Classicist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum, for example, has accused literary scholar Stanley Fish of radical relativism and gender theorist Judith Butler of deliberate obfuscation; philosopher John Searle has combed through Jacques Derrida’s work to reveal that, for all its ambition and difficulty, it is ultimately “unintelligible.” If Fish and Butler and Derrida have somehow failed in their charge as humanists, then the humanities as a whole don’t have to be responsible for justifying their work.’
I suspect the search for deeper metaphysical and epistemological grounds in the humanities will always be afoot, be they ‘postmodern’ or otherwise. Simply reading texts is probably not enough for quicker minds, which often seek deeper truth and knowledge claims to anchor thought and so often, reinforce behavioral norms. The ‘why’ questions will nag and often coalesce into higher and competing spires, especially upon university grounds.
On this site, see:
A more religious defense (Roger Scruton) of why you should read great works and the religion-sized-hole-filled by-Marxism-approach (Terry Eagleton) mirroring many downstream debates occuring within the British political economy.
A particularly British affair (hopefully the centuries of stratification support a deeper Marxism on that side of the pond):
What have I gotten wrong, here?: Jordan Peterson deploys Jungian metaphysics, downstream of Nietzsche, to make knowledge claims which challenge Blackmore’s reasonably pedestrian modern materialism and atheism.
In other words, Peterson’s defense of Jungian archetypes, including those potentially found in the Bible (and perhaps viewed from the depths of Nietzsche’s nihilism), might connect with biology more profoundly than Blackmore’s psychological materialism might have been able to address.
Nihilism is an interesting epistemological ground out of which to make knowledge claims of transcendant objects, or at least, out of which to synthesize biological knowledge and knowledge claims which align within the burgeoning field of neuroscience.
The desire each of us seems to have for transcendence, wisdom and stories (especially kids) within the subjectivity of our own lived experiences, the deeper hopes and beliefs which seem ever-present (if not consciously realized) in our waking lives, the relationships with loved ones which inform, and probably ought to inform our moral judgments and moral thinking, might align with Jungian archetypes, Greek myths and the King James Bible, and thus some sort of Nietzschen nihilist denial of objective reality or the structure of the material world explored by the sciences…or…they might not.
Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim Barringer told the News that he plans to demonstrate that a class about the history of art does not just mean Western art. Rather, when there are so many other regions, genres and traditions — all “equally deserving of study” — putting European art on a pedestal is “problematic,” he said.’
Some people are trying to erode common sense until it becomes less common:
‘The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.’
Christopher Hitchens (nearly a free speech absolutist, railing against many of his former friends on the Left) discussing the Yale Press, which was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could lead to violence in the Muslim street:
“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”
A sensitive subject, and much deeper than party, ideology, or political ideal. All may not be well in Europe due to demographics, immigration, rapid technological change challenging a rather poorly designed centralized bureaucracy. The less there is, or is perceived to be, the uglier it tends to get.
On that note, ‘neo-conservatism’ is a label of particular heretical significance on the Left, for neo-conservatives are often believers who’ve left the fold.
Perhaps the deep antipathy for religion, and its courageous equal application to Islam separated Hitchens from many peers (especially after Rushdie). Perhaps a slow acculturation to life in the U.S. helped lead to support for the Iraq invasion:
As for the old ACLU these days? A free-speech mission, becoming a legal business, devolving into an anti-speech racket is something to behold.
You stand up for the neo-Nazis right to speak and assemble, because you may need those rights, too.
Did you think you’d just drive-on-by?
Many people, volunteering as our betters in the U.S., have been busy institutionalizing a rather anti-establishment ethos. The problem is, many of these people are now the establishment. Many 60’s boomers (hanging in there, baby) are something like idealists. Holding authority, while simultaneously holding many anti-authoritarian views, is a tragi-comedy.
In my experience, beneath idealists are radicals, and radicals generally hold certain moral goods (ideologically nested) above all else as they drive for disruption. Suppressing the speech of the ‘fascist’ is more important than free speech. Doing violence against the ‘fascist’ is celebrated and much preferable to non-violence. Breaking the law is by far more important than than rule of law.
I personally saw the Antifa violence spread (always here, really) as C.H.O.P came and went. After a while, I saw a small, pro-patriot (kinda New Right) response fill in the void. It was a sad bit of street theater (unserious but very real). Whatever was more civil, respectful and dignified is now less so, and this dynamic would seem to be the new, national normal.
In my experience, along with idealists are also many anti-‘capitalist’, bureaucratic, technocratic, types. The knowledge is available to build brilliant new liberal, inclusive, diverse and global societies. Communitiarian, purely democratic, and ‘equal’ societies are moral goods in themselves, at least in the face of injustice. Political science, the DSM, all the right economics based on deeper math, will free more labor than before and potentially create new political orders.
I’m not sure such glittering enterprises are even possible.
‘Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.’
Many people seem to believe that because the modern world is fallen, it’s easier to blame all the normal self-interest, political corruption and rule-following punishment out there as belonging to the religionist, the racist, and the traditionalist.
The ‘-ist’ tends to see only other ‘-ists’ all the way down. The (C)ause tends to be the highest moral good and this leads to all kinds of dangers.
Still an interesting discussion:
Times come and go: I remember visiting my father’s small, Connecticut hometown. Many factories (spooled-thread, fabric, cutting tools) had become derelict. ‘What did they used to make there?’ we’d ask, driving along, visiting his old haunts. The shallower valleys, stony soil and New England village greens were foreign to me. We’d pass by busted, boarded-up windows and out-of-use smokestacks. ‘Did they actually make these things by hand?’
Most of that industry never came back.
Now imagine losing larger: The rise and fall of automobile manufacturing in Detroit, and all the supply chains throughout Ohio; whole towns dwindling down. Much of that industry isn’t coming back either.
This one’s stuck with me over the last few months:
‘They are, in fact, idealists: and idealism is a cast of mind that Conrad questions even more than he questions radicalism. The logical end of radicalism, in his view, is terrorism; but idealism is the mental aberration that allows terrorism to be brought about. Conrad’s originality was to see that a new tyranny could be generated by people who thought that their rebellion against the old tyranny was rational. Thus his writings seem prescient about what was to happen in the Soviet Union. He didn’t predict the Nazi tyranny because he had underestimated the power of the irrational to organise itself into a state. But then, nobody predicted that except its perpetrators; and anyway, mere prediction was not his business. His business was the psychological analysis made possible by an acute historical awareness. Under Western Eyes is valuable not because it came true but because it rang true even at the time, only now we can better hear the deep, sad note.’
As for politics on the other side, it’s a mess of anarcho-libertarians, non-anarchic libertarians, the New Right, the Old Right, the never-Trumpers, religious believers, traditionalists and a lot of pro- and anti-establishment vitriol.
Camille Paglia has her own take, from 40 years spent within, and on the fringes of, American academia. This is quite a curious mix of 60’s radicalism, art theory, history and criticism, some political philosophy, pop culture and various other influences:
A body-positive, quite radical/anti-anaesthetic and associative feminist art historian (with deep Italian Catholic roots)?
‘However, these boundary-dissolving expansions were unfortunately not the route taken by American academe in the 1970s. Instead, new highly politicized departments and programs were created virtually overnight — without the incremental construction of foundation and superstructure that had gone, for example, into the long development of the modern English department. The end result was a further balkanization in university structure, with each area governed as an autonomous fiefdom and with its ideological discourse frozen at the moment of that unit’s creation. Administrators wanted these programs and fast — to demonstrate the institution’s “relevance” and to head off outside criticism or protest that could hamper college applications and the influx of desirable tuition dollars. Basically, administrators threw money at these programs and let them find their own way. When Princeton University, perhaps the most cloistered and overtly sexist of the Ivy League schools, went coeducational after 200 years in 1969, it needed some women faculty to soften the look of the place. So it hastily shopped around for whatever women faculty could be rustled up, located them mostly in English departments at second-tier schools, brought them on board, and basically let them do whatever they wanted, with no particular design. (Hey, they’re women — they can do women’s studies!)’
“Between these two lines of attack, she believes, the university must articulate a conception of itself that defends the standards of reason, while remaining open to new points of view; that preserves the intellectual traditions and canons that define U.S. culture, while consciously broadening the curriculum to expose students to traditions which diverge from their own and which, in their difference, may confront students with an awareness of their own parochialism; that remain respectful and tolerant of many points of view without lapsing into relativism; and in short, that manages to prepare students simultaneously to be citizens of U.S. society, and cosmopolitans, “citizens of the world.”
This has always struck me as a little too broad of a vision to maintain (too heavy on the gender and equality side of things, deep the shards of disruptive radicalism embedded),though I certainly respect the attempt. We should aim to be citizens of the world and in the best Aristotelian sense (such depth and breadth may be in fact necessary). But is it enough within this framework?
“The works of Shakespeare contain important knowledge. But it is not scientific knowledge, nor could it ever be built into a theory. It is knowledge of the human heart”
“…in the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women’s studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they.”
Quite importantly:
“And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms.”
Much like Paglia…
Terry Eagleton, British Marxist and professor in the humanities, debates Scruton below.
Will Marxism & continental philosophy become further guiding lights for the humanities here in America as we find much more so in Britain?
Are we really that thick into the postmodern weeds?:
—————————–
Judgment, as Scruton points out, shouldn’t necessarily be subsumed to political ideology. I would agree, and I generally default in assuming that each one of us is the ultimate arbiter of our own judgment.
But, no man is an island.
Does Scruton’s thinking eventually lead us back to the problems that religion can have with artists and writers?
Is there anybody whom you trust to decide what you should and shouldn’t read?
Parents? Great authors? Public intellectuals? Professors? God? Laws and lawmakers? Religious leaders? A school-board? A democratic majority? People who think like you? A Council of Cultural Marxists?
The Department of Institutionalized Idiocy?
As to the policial/social climate, did the 60’s counter-culture and the conservative counter-counter culture both win, in a sense?
Christopher Hitchens, William F. Buckley and Peter Robinson discuss below, including the sexual revolution:
What did a man who eventually became an openly practicing Roman Catholic witness during the 60’s protests on campus?
Bork argues that during the 1960’s, likely starting with the SDS, a form of liberalism took shape that promotes radical egalitarianism (social justice, equality of outcomes) and radical individualism (excessive freedom from the moral and legal doctrines which require an individual’s duty and which form the fabric of civil society). This is the New Left.
Bork is quite explicit about the violence and threats of violence he witnessed, the barbarism on display, and the confused, tense years that unfolded (culminating in the Kent State debacle). He was one of two conservative law professors at Yale during the late 1960’s and he argues that events have rarely been represented accurately as he saw them. It is a personal account.
‘It isn’t a coincidence that many of the most resentful people are also successful in their careers. They may well have struggled against some unfairness or other and triumphed in the struggle, but still aren’t satisfied, and won’t be satisfied to their dying day.
It isn’t enough that they had sufficient opportunity themselves to make good: they want to reform the world, at the same time—and not altogether incidentally, perhaps—accruing great power to themselves as the panjandrums of social justice.‘
As posted: Theodore Dalrymple at First Things reviews Christopher and Peter Hitchens’ memoirs: ‘The Brothers Grim:”
‘Perhaps the division between the two brothers is essentially this: One believes that man can live by his own individual reason alone; the other believes that something else is necessary and inevitable. Without being religious myself, I side with the latter.’
Spring And All
I
By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees with dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines-
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches-
They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind-
Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf One by one objects are defined- It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of entrance-Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken
Nothing is so beautiful as spring— When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling. What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
It is no accident that CRT adepts think of themselves as “woke.” For it is not rational argumentation that compels them but a kind of conversion experience, and Kendi, DiAngelo, et al. are essentially Gnostic preachers rather than philosophers or social scientists. Their reliance on inflammatory rhetoric, preemptive dismissal of all criticism as racist, and insistence on putting the most sinister imaginable interpretation on every aspect of social life, create a “dream world” of exactly the kind Voegelin describes. As Greg Lukianoff has noted, “wokeness” inculcates distorting and paranoid habits of thought of precisely the sort that Cognitive Behavioral therapists warn their patients to avoid.
It can be a bit shocking, but, upon reflection, unsurprising, how many would-be liberal outlets continue towards the radicalism of the latest moral cause. Claiming the moral ground of post-60’s institutional authority (anti-Trumpism and Trump’s character as accelerant), also commits many people to become enmeshed in destructive ideological territory.
Or at least negotiating with radicals.
For folks who think like me, This American Life was insufferable already, but Dear God.
It turns out the ground of ‘it’s narratives all the way down’ is inherently unstable.
I’m guessing that because Christopher Hitchens claimed knowledge and action of authentically Left thinking, and was rather charming and ballsy, could he express independent thoughts while in a den of mild paranoia.
The point: People who view themselves in a kind of for-us or against-us struggle, with themselves as heroic and good, and their enemies as evil, leads to true-belief:
The days of old-school, dickish, prickish newsman like Mike Wallace and Charlie Rose (and let’s face it, Union Men like Joe Biden and grab-assers like Trump), are probably gone. Or, better said, they’re still there, but must not be stated as such against the new orthodoxies. Human nature hasn’t changed all that much, after all.
‘Yes. There’s an extraordinary point here. Walter Rauschenbusch [an American theologian and a key figure in the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries] lists six species of social sin.‘
James Lindsay also mentions Rauschenbusch and Rorty:
One path through the postmodern landscape lies in cultivating some appreciation for math and the sciences, direct observation and statistical analysis within the social sciences, and plumbing the depths of a good humanities education (you know, the stuff universities pretty much ought to be teaching).
Receiving or pursuing such an education doesn’t necessarily require religious belief, nor does it necessarily dislodge religious belief.
Aside from the craziness of love, dedication to family, the pressures of work and career, the inevitably of sickness and death, such cultivation can prevent against the sublimity of nihilist and existentialist despair, the Romance of collective primitivism, and the dangers of ideological possession (quick to judge, quick to be judged, forever resentful).
Many readers of this blog don’t necessarily share my views on the importance of limited government and economic growth, tolerance for religious belief and skepticism regarding political idealism (joining an ‘-Ism’ is only the beginning, as hopes soon follow into politics and visions of the good, the true and the beautiful).
You have your reasons.
In the meantime, here are some links gathered over the years from the New Atheists and many independent-minded thinkers of the Left pushing against many excesses of the American and Global Left.
It’s pretty clear to me that many mainstream publications and political debates occur downstream of many intellectual debates.
-James Lindsay offers a cogent account of his experiences in the Atheism movement, and the emergence of Atheism Plus. He attempts to use moral psychology (he mentions Jonathan Haidt) to explain many religious-seeming elements of the woke, social justice crowd.
-Larry Arnhart, of Darwinian Conservatism, continued his careful reading of Jonathan Haidt’s work, to which Haidt responded.
-Daniel Dennett from 1998: Postmodernism and Truth
‘So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’
There sure are a lot of people ignoring the obvious fascism of the anti-fascists inviting the fascists into their collectivist, ideological embrace, giving meaning to a lot of rather pathetic, lonely people.
The individuals focusing on the idea of racial categories, collectivist solutions to individual problems, equity-first and tribal/group-first ideological and political frameworks have the right to peaceably assemble, of course, but there must be law and order and there must be enough individual citizens answering bad speech with more speech.
I am hoping (perhaps unwisely) for a correction in many media quarters, parts of the academy and the high-liberal turrets where’s there’s been great clamor towards activist logic and increasing emotional commitment to the same old political idealism which gives cover for the violent and radical elements on the Left.
This invites genuine fascism which I sternly and open denounce (not patriotism, not a nation of citizens and laws, not the conservation of liberal order). Violence is not the answer.
To be fair, I think Wood offers a decent piece of journalism (interviews, phone calls, research etc.); a well-written, longer-form work I find to be in shorter-supply these days.
In it, he highlights Spencer’s Nietzschean-influenced intellectual aspirations and populist ambitions to become a mouthpiece for alt-right advocacy (serious enough to get attention, unserious enough to be poseurish and pathetically fascistic..which means Spencer may not represent more than a vocal minority, even on the alt-right……feel free to send some data my way).
To be critical: What I think Wood misses, and what many anti-Trumpers and liberal ‘gentry’ miss (Trump is an opportunist if there ever was one), is that Richard Spencer (an opportunist if there ever was one) isn’t enjoying his moment in the sun alone. The kind of black bloc, antifa radicalism which Spencer publicly addresses is clearly ok using violence on the way to radical and revolutionary freedom.
Addition: I should clarify that I don’t think Trump is a fascist, but merely an opportunist; a rather socially liberal, NYC real-estate developer.
This leads to the most persuasive arguments I’ve heard criticizing modern liberalism: It’s all too easy to ignore the true-believers, radicals, poseurs and nutbars (they’re our bastards) beneath one’s own platform, especially if they share some version of one’s own cherished beliefs and ideals.
Left and Left-liberal idealism prospers and is even institutionalized at places like Berkeley (no shortage of anti-racist, neo-Marxist, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist sentiment at Berkeley), which helps fuel radicals which help fuel the Richard Spencers.
Fascists and anti-fascists sure can come to resemble one another, trading tired power theories, hitting each other over the head, and trying to squeeze some meaning from similar principles while showboating through the nihilistic void.
Frankly, they deserve each other, and they deserve to be marginalized by the rest of us.
***I don’t think one need be a Nietzschean nor Nietzsche-inspired, nor a Nietzsche-reacting sort of Straussian (from H.L. Mencken to Leo Strauss to Camille Paglia to John Gray) to seriously question the modern liberal and secular human project, and help offer perspective.
But, it probably helps in understanding the fascist tendencies of Spencer and his enemies/allies..
Addition: I should make it clear that Nietzsche didn’t have much truck with fascists, and that he diagnosed, from the depths of his own nihilism, a lot of the crises that would come to face Europe…as for folks like Spencer, they seem to get enough nihilism to carry around while looking for meaning/purpose/identity/belonging elsewhere (in fascist movements)
Hitchens could be entertaining, especially on grounds I’m guessing he knew instinctively well as a former Trotskyite: Ideologies, while highlighting truths, promise a one-stop shop on truth, knowledge, how to be in the world, what to do and what the future will be.
People can kill for less, and when they adhere to such systems, then they can end-up killing more.
This is something of what neo-neo conservatism might look like, and a Man Of The Left recognizing what an ideologue and a favorite target looks like.
NOTE: You’ll have to click through and sign-in to Youtube because the ‘Youtube Community’ is now deciding what is and isn’t acceptable discourse within a new set of emerging rules, partially driven by ideologues in the comment section.
Surely you trust the new rules and rule-enforcers?
Via a reader. Platonic idealism has advantages in restoring both idealism and realism into political debate, but also drawbacks. It can be a bulwark against moral relativism, which is a modern soup in which Left and Right fascism can be found simmering.
If you have an ideology, a loosely connected set of doctrines and ideas, built upon revolutionary ‘praxis’ and radical liberation, you also have a place to put your moral sentiments and judgments about reality and the world.
Where your thoughts go, so tend to go your habits, character and beliefs. You are cleared to act in the world.
Human beings, likely at the structural level, require profound concepts to make sense of reality and the world, as well as our own sensory apparatus, emotions and desires.
Messianic, Manichean and Millenarian doctrines of revolutionary praxis and liberation (moral, sexual, political), generally propose tearing down everything which exists, usually towards the aim of liberation, without necessarily replacing our current institutions with anything.
This is fine if you don’t mind generally dysfunctional institutions, more easily exerting unaccountable power (fulfilling the prophecy).
Some people in the modern world are following ideas which haven’t addressed the hard problems of maintaining moral legitimacy in positions of authority, nor reasonable mastery of one’s (S)elf and the passions, creating adult human beings.
Peter Hitchens used to be a Bolshevik, and his late brother Christopher Hitchens a Trotskyist (I’m speculating that some gruesome family tragedy might be at play).
Such youthful radicalism has tilted him back towards religious conservatism in Britain:
Failure to recognize these deep human problems, at the personal and political levels, and the consquences of the ideas in play, are, what I see as a failure of many custodians of our current institutions.
The Human Nature and Nature problems are still in play, such as they always have been.
James Lindsay helps to clarify some intellectual strands of the radical, revolutionary, and more pedestrian postmodern types, and how such thinkers and ideas are exerting pressure upon all of us.
Why do antifa members believe they have the right to justified violence, and how has the space for them in civil society been created and supported at the highest levels?:
Nature can be just as harsh and unforgiving as ever, death is still waiting (making life all the sweeter), and human nature can still be as capable of great evil or passing indifference and cruelty.
Given the darknesses of the human heart, the existence of great evils, and the tremendous problem of creating contraints and proper incentives for authority, I see a lot of liberal idealism as not having accounted for the wages of social change.
Wanting to control what other people think, feel, say and write, even if dressed up in the clothing of righteousness, is still wanting to control what other people think, feel, say and write.
Broad humanistic ideals have much truth to them, often scaling and framing clear thinking and good behavior, but such ideals will also form the structure for authority, rule-making and rule-following.
I continue to skeptically observe many claims of universal secular humanism; especially the claims of people using universal secular humanism for their own ends (the more enduring real-world test being which kind of people and institutions are, in-fact, being produced under such ideals).
I see the speech issue as an important barometer for such ideals.
‘The ability to be brutal in print and decent in person was a quality I very much admired in Christopher. It went to the heart of his values as a writer and a human being. It belonged to an old-fashioned code, and for all his radicalism, he was old-fashioned.’
That, I feel sure, is at the core of this controversy: resentment. If the publishing industry is “broken” because it throws big money at mediocre books, and those books get a lot of pop culture hype, then the publishing industry has always been broken, and so have the movies. This happens all the time. It is a total cliche that bad blockbuster movies and bad bestselling novels pay the bills so that smaller, better books with a more limited readership can exist. Life is unfair. What can we do?
We’ve got some bad code running at many important institutions.
—
The political Left seems to be fracturing too, around new, radical chic old-school Marxism, and a more short-term failing identity politics. I’m guessing it will be less cool to be seen as an out-of-touch high liberal idealist (‘neo-liberal,’ meritocratic, stodgy, traditional) in the eyes of radicals and wherever the new cool will be.
‘A true devotee of freedom of speech says, ‘Let everyone speak, because it is important that all sides are heard and that the public has the right to use their moral muscles and decide who they trust and who they don’t’. The new, partial campaigners for friends’ speech effectively say, ‘Let my friend speak. She is interesting. She will tell the public what they need to hear.’ These are profoundly different positions, the former built on liberty and humanism, the latter motored by a desire to protect oneself, and oneself alone, from censorship. The former is free speech; the latter ‘me speech’.
It’d be nice if many secularists and political liberals said something like the following: ‘If we continue to secularize society, we will entrench many postmoderns, activists, radicals, people steeped in resentment, and narrow socialist ideologues, but the gains in liberty will be worth it.
We might even inspire a return to old-timey religion. If this happens, we will freak-out about this turn of events.’
—-
You’d make me feel a whole lot better if you showed some backbone when it comes to speech, as Lionel Shriver does below.
‘I’ll write what I damned well please:’
I’d also add, ‘now if you can’t even read the book nor respond to what I’m actually saying, fuck-off.‘
Such a brave stance to take: Six writers apparently know what is acceptable speech and what isn’t, and thus didn’t think the folks at Charlie Hebdo engaged in acceptable speech.
Recently, British popular thinker Alain De Botton floated the idea of building an ‘atheist temple’ in the heart of London. He recommends combing through religious practices for useful organizing principles in response to the New Atheists. You can read more about it here, which includes a radio interview/podcast.
Did the Unitarian Universalists get there first, with a mishmash of faith and secular humanism?
Towards a theme: Perhaps you’ve also heard of the Rothko chapel, in Houston, Texas:
‘The Rothko Chapel, founded by Houston philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil, was dedicated in 1971 as an intimate sanctuary available to people of every belief. A tranquil meditative environment inspired by the mural canvases of Russian born American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970), the Chapel welcomes over 60,000 visitors each year, people of every faith and from all parts of the world.’
There’s even a suite of music by Morton Feldman, entitled ‘Rothko Chapel’
“‘…a morally concerned style of intellectual atheism openly avowed by only a small minority of individuals (for example, those who are members of the British Humanist Association) but tacitly accepted by a wide spectrum of educated people in all parts of the Western world.”
Theodore Dalrymple at First Things reviews Christopher and Peter Hitchens’ memoirs: ‘The Brothers Grim:”
‘Perhaps the division between the two brothers is essentially this: One believes that man can live by his own individual reason alone; the other believes that something else is necessary and inevitable. Without being religious myself, I side with the latter.’
‘Sadly, this corrupt system has proven to be immune from constitutional attack. Yet that attack should succeed on the simple ground that its mandatory renewal provisions force landlords to surrender possession of their premises for below market rents—a classic taking without just compensation.’
This blog’s opinion: A select few get favored over others, gaining from a deal which can’t be justly kept.
—
I’m neither here nor there regarding Woody Allen’s work, but gathering a mob, exalting victims and exacting revenge in some sort of moral and emotional expiation poses clear dangers for justice, individual liberty and due process, regardless of where the truth lies: ‘Cancel Culture Comes For Woody Allen:’
‘But as the cases of Kobe Bryant and Woody Allen show, the distinguishing problem with modern cancel culture isn’t just mobs per se: It’s the gatekeepers who surrender to the mob’s Manichean judgments…’
Mattress Girl is still probably an object lesson, where we can see similar ideas and impulses emerging from a college bubble and being rewarded by those in high office (where the claims are not necessarily true).
‘I do think that nowadays, art pieces can include whatever the artist desires, and in this performance art piece, it utilizes elements of protest, because that is what’s relevant to my life right now.’
Nature can be just as harsh and unforgiving as ever, death is still waiting (making life all the sweeter), and human nature can still be as capable of great evil or passing indifference and cruelty.
Given the darknesses of the human heart, the existence of great evils, and the tremendous problem of creating contraints and proper incentives for authority, I see a lot of liberal idealism as not having accounted for the wages of social change.
Wanting to control what other people think, feel, say and write, even if dressed up in the clothing of righteousness, is still wanting to control what other people think, feel, say and write.
Broad humanistic ideals have much truth to them, often scaling and framing clear thinking and good behavior, but such ideals will also form the structure for authority, rule-making and rule-following.
I continue to skeptically observe many claims of universal secular humanism; especially the claims of people using universal secular humanism for their own ends (the more enduring real-world test being which kind of people and institutions are, in-fact, being produced under such ideals).
I see the speech issue as an important barometer for such ideals.
‘The ability to be brutal in print and decent in person was a quality I very much admired in Christopher. It went to the heart of his values as a writer and a human being. It belonged to an old-fashioned code, and for all his radicalism, he was old-fashioned.’
That, I feel sure, is at the core of this controversy: resentment. If the publishing industry is “broken” because it throws big money at mediocre books, and those books get a lot of pop culture hype, then the publishing industry has always been broken, and so have the movies. This happens all the time. It is a total cliche that bad blockbuster movies and bad bestselling novels pay the bills so that smaller, better books with a more limited readership can exist. Life is unfair. What can we do?
We’ve got some bad code running at many important institutions (though I think sometimes Dreher might prefer if the Right DID have the power to silence dissenting opinions…like we aren’t all familiar with the desire to have our commitments be ascendant, whichever they may be).
—
The political Left seems to be fracturing too, around new, radical chic old-school Marxism, and a more short-term failing identity politics. I’m guessing it will be less cool to be seen as an out-of-touch high liberal idealist (‘neo-liberal,’ meritocratic, stodgy, traditional) in the eyes of radicals and wherever the new cool will be.
‘A true devotee of freedom of speech says, ‘Let everyone speak, because it is important that all sides are heard and that the public has the right to use their moral muscles and decide who they trust and who they don’t’. The new, partial campaigners for friends’ speech effectively say, ‘Let my friend speak. She is interesting. She will tell the public what they need to hear.’ These are profoundly different positions, the former built on liberty and humanism, the latter motored by a desire to protect oneself, and oneself alone, from censorship. The former is free speech; the latter ‘me speech’.
It’d be nice if many secularists and political liberals said something like the following: ‘If we continue to secularize society, we will entrench many postmoderns, activists, radicals, people steeped in resentment, and narrow socialist ideologues, but the gains in liberty will be worth it.
We might even inspire a return to old-timey religion. If this happens, we will freak-out about this turn of events.’
—-
You’d make me feel a whole lot better if you showed some backbone when it comes to speech, as Lionel Shriver does below.
‘I’ll write what I damned well please:’
I’d also add, ‘now if you can’t even read the book nor respond to what I’m actually saying, fuck-off.‘
Such a brave stance to take: Six writers apparently know what is acceptable speech and what isn’t, and thus didn’t think the folks at Charlie Hebdo engaged in acceptable speech.
Recently, British popular thinker Alain De Botton floated the idea of building an ‘atheist temple’ in the heart of London. He recommends combing through religious practices for useful organizing principles in response to the New Atheists. You can read more about it here, which includes a radio interview/podcast.
Did the Unitarian Universalists get there first, with a mishmash of faith and secular humanism?
Towards a theme: Perhaps you’ve also heard of the Rothko chapel, in Houston, Texas:
‘The Rothko Chapel, founded by Houston philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil, was dedicated in 1971 as an intimate sanctuary available to people of every belief. A tranquil meditative environment inspired by the mural canvases of Russian born American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970), the Chapel welcomes over 60,000 visitors each year, people of every faith and from all parts of the world.’
There’s even a suite of music by Morton Feldman, entitled ‘Rothko Chapel’
“‘…a morally concerned style of intellectual atheism openly avowed by only a small minority of individuals (for example, those who are members of the British Humanist Association) but tacitly accepted by a wide spectrum of educated people in all parts of the Western world.”
It might be useful to tease-out the actual historical legacy of suffering, injustice and grievance from the ideology, victimhood and ’empowerment’ of some people pursuing their interests in endless protest. When political ideology foments and amplifies injustice into ‘free speech for me, but not for thee,’ it’s not hard to see there will be problems with the speech of everyone (or at least problem enough with more established Constitutional protections on speech).
In my estimation, the incentives for activist rabble-rousing (addition: less truth and fact, more mob-sustained anger) will only be diminished when when enough Americans decide they can be decent, moral people while quietly rejecting the softly radical activism, anti-establishmentarianism, and yes, moral exploitation of guilt by their political leaders into policies with which they might disagree.
From my perspective, many media outlets and academic institutions are hip-deep in tacit approval of such radical and semi-radical ideas (it’s always 1968 somewhere), so there’s a lot of core identity, pride, conviction, political power, and money on the line.
In fact, with all the technological and economic forces at work on our lives at the moment, I don’t expect our political debates to be reasonably civil anytime soon, aside from these dynamics.
‘In a 2013, the Office for Civil Rights in Education—a federal agency formally charged with protecting students from unlawful harassment, but which appears to have effectively gone rogue under new, far-left leadership over the last five years—declared that universities needed to investigate and possibly punish students for making comments that other students find “unwelcome,” even if those comments were protected by the First Amendment.’
‘A true devotee of freedom of speech says, ‘Let everyone speak, because it is important that all sides are heard and that the public has the right to use their moral muscles and decide who they trust and who they don’t’. The new, partial campaigners for friends’ speech effectively say, ‘Let my friend speak. She is interesting. She will tell the public what they need to hear.’ These are profoundly different positions, the former built on liberty and humanism, the latter motored by a desire to protect oneself, and oneself alone, from censorship. The former is free speech; the latter ‘me speech’.
Back to Yale with Christopher Hitchens (a former Trotskyite):
Old news I know, but it seems that the Yale Press was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could potentially lead to violence, and that they are responsible for the consequences of such potential violence.
Hitchens:
“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”
Such a brave stance to take: Six writers apparently know what is acceptable speech and what isn’t, and thus don’t think the folks at Charlie Hebdo engaged in acceptable speech.
Have these six happened upon an implacable standard of truth that perhaps might guide them in the eminently mysterious creative process of their own writing? Do they all share the same truth? Would they even know if they did?
Such a standard seems at least enough to guide their decision, then, to hold the folks at Charlie Hebdo to such a standard and protest the PEN award:
‘The decision by PEN American Center to give its annual Freedom of Expression Courage award to the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has prompted six writers to withdraw as literary hosts at the group’s annual gala on May 5, adding a new twist to the continuing debate over the publication’s status as a martyr for free speech.
The novelists Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi have withdrawn from the gala, at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.’
The reasons? Here are a few:
‘In an email to PEN’s leadership on Friday, Ms. Kushner said she was withdrawing out of discomfort with what she called the magazine’s “cultural intolerance” and promotion of “a kind of forced secular view,”’
Salman Rushdie knows a lot about ‘Islamophobia:’
“If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name,” Mr. Rushdie said. “What I would say to both Peter and Michael and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.”
In their exercise of freedom, let such writers be one day judged by their own truth.
============================
Here’s Hitchens (nearly a free speech absolutist, railing against many of his former friends on the Left) discussing the Yale Press, which was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could lead to violence in the Muslim street:
“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”
There’s some craziness and brutality going on there.
But, what a performer, a part of you might pipe-up. That guy had to be able to switch it on and keep it going. Part preacher, part performer, part force-of-nature. Combine that with a particularly rough childhood, legendary status and lots of money at stake and….well…:
‘They swim in the same pools, they belong to the same clubs. Their wives and everyone goes to the same fucking cocktail parties.’
‘..And they eat these little handout stories. They’re like little pigeons eating the shit sprayed on the sidewalk from the government. They want to be in good with their sources, but they don’t even name the sources!’
Was there a time when more hard-boiled skeptics roamed the newsroom; narrative purists seeking le mot juste and the story behind the story?
-The linked-to Talese piece on Frank Sinatra. Isn’t there always a certain amount of ‘fabrication’ involved? Whatever happened to that wannabe Kinsey motel peeper voyeur piece?
The satire of the liberal intelligentsia is pretty rich, as well as the Southern Gentleman’s WASP ‘rejuvenation.’ You just know Christopher Hitchens had to get-in on that action:
From the Late Show in 1989 with Howard Jacobson:
===============
Are Tom Wolfe and New Journalism seeing things clearly, as they really are?
‘The important thing to understand about journalists is that they are the lowest ranking intellectuals. That is to say: they are members of the intellectual class, but in the status hierarchy of intellectuals, journalists are at the bottom. That is why they have traditionally adopted the status cues of the working class: the drinking and the swearing, the anti-establishment values and the commitment to the non-professionalization of journalism.’
and on professors:
The important thing to understand about academics is that they are the highest rank of intellectuals. That is why they have traditionally adopted the status symbols of the 19th-century British leisured class—the tweeds and the sherry and the learning of obscure languages—while shunning the sorts of things that are necessary for people for whom status is something to be fought for through interaction with the normal members of society (such as reasonably stylish clothing, minimal standards of hygiene, basic manners).
The ideas of original thinkers and those of thinkers in academia often trickle down into popular thought anyways, but the easy quote is often just a way to reinforce one’s own beliefs or ideology, or get a quick fix.
Also:
‘In a philosophical debate, what everyone involved is trying to get at is the truth. In contrast, what is at stake in the political realm is not truth but power, and power (unlike truth) is a “rival good”—one person or group can wield power only at the expense of another. This is why politics is inevitably adversarial. Political power is ultimately about deciding who shall govern, and part of governing is about choosing between competing interests’
***In journalists there can be the shabbiness of the second-hand, the designs of the social-climber, the self-regard of the idealist and the possibly deeper aspirations of an artist. Some are more devoted to finding truth than others.
Walter Russell Mead At the WSJ (behind a paywall) on European politics and Brexit (British exit from the European Union) below:
Storm clouds over Salzburg? The EU just got tough with the UK over Brexit. That might just push Trump into a fight with the EU. VW, BMW, Daimler stockholders beware? My latest @WSJ. https://t.co/IiuWIVUdRf
One angle: Most technology reduces distances, but not necessarily ignorance, and increases communication, but not necessarily understanding.
The EU started out as a trade union, but also, in seeking to protect its members and advance its interests, has been levying serious fines on American tech companies. Controlling flows of information upwards towards mercantilism is an obvious result (Eurocrats and big players make and approve the rules, supposedly in favor of ‘the little guy’ but only so far as the moral lights and sentiments of the Eurocrats and big players can envision, if they spend much time envisioning).
These laws tend to be more restrictive than many American laws, but not nearly so restrictive as nearly all Chinese laws, where, apparently, Google has had to make concessions in order to create a search engine alongside the Chinese government.
‘Yesterday, we showed how speech codes are consistently struck down by courts. Today, we look at two ongoing cases that threaten to curb that trend by expanding the doctrine of mootness while narrowing what qualifies to establish standing.’
It’s worth revisiting a once very committed Trotskyist who came to the U.S. and quite iconoclastically kept searching for the truth, and on speech, spoke pretty eloquently:
‘No great surprise that Argentina cancelled their friendly against Israel’
As for the Argentinian regime, such shenanigans may be representative of its basic corruption, dysfunction, and an alignment against U.S. and Israeli interests. Global politicking.
Geo-political trade-winds can blow, and political leaders can suck.
Court in Venezuela fines opposition newspaper *one billion* bolivars for a story about Chavista nutbag Diosdado Cabello. Paper’s editor then points out that because of insane inflation, that amounts to…a $500 fine https://t.co/EJ1UrZg5hT
‘Bill de Blasio, then 26, went to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine in the middle of a war between left and right. But he returned with something else entirely: a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government.
and:
‘His activism did not stop. In the cramped Lower Manhattan headquarters of the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York, where he volunteered, Mr. de Blasio learned to cause a stir. He and a ragtag team of peace activists, Democrats, Marxists and anarchists attempted to bring attention to a Central American cause that, after the Sandinistas lost power in a 1990 election, was fading from public view. “The Nicaraguan struggle is our struggle,” said a poster designed by the group’
‘It is wonderfully, gloriously, hilariously awful’
As for getting right what an entire intellectual class, given to bouts of useful idiocy, still often gets wrong:
‘He was aware of the terror, the mass executions, the famine, the wanton destruction, the lying propaganda, the tyranny, and the universal spying that Bolshevism instituted from the first.’
You dare not speak such truth amongst adherents!:
I forthwith shall consult with my own dynamic, courageous fatherly leader, for all of life’s problems:
Old news I know, but it seems that the Yale Press was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could potentially lead to violence, and that they are responsible for the consequences of such potential violence:
“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”
One might even argue that politically, it will be harder to get Muslims to the table when knowledge of this kind of publication is used and misused to inflame the the Arab street…if it inflames the Arab street…
Subject: ‘Is England Still Influencing America?’ on Hitchens’ book ‘Blood, Class, & Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies‘ when Hitchens’ was pushing the idea that ’empire’ was the primary transmission, apparently due to his ideological commitments at the time. America must have seemed a classless paradise with institutions well-functioning and ripe to achieve justice and equality for the whole world…for some folks in the Generation of ’68.
*Includes the Firing Line opening theme of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (those damned Germans influencing us) followed by a Michael Kinsley introduction (founding editor of Slate, which has since gone more progressive under recent management).
To be fair, I think Wood offers a decent piece of journalism (interviews, phone calls, research etc.); a well-written, longer-form work I find to be in shorter-supply these days.
In it, he highlights Spencer’s Nietzschean-influenced intellectual aspirations and populist ambitions to become a mouthpiece for alt-right advocacy (serious enough to get attention, unserious enough to be poseurish and pathetically fascistic..which means Spencer may not represent more than a vocal minority, even on the alt-right……feel free to send some data my way).
To be critical: What I think Wood misses, and what many anti-Trumpers and liberal ‘gentry’ miss (Trump is an opportunist if there ever was one), is that Richard Spencer (an opportunist if there ever was one) isn’t enjoying his moment in the sun alone. The kind of black bloc, antifa radicalism which Spencer publicly addresses is clearly ok using violence on the way to radical and revolutionary freedom.
Addition: I should clarify that I don’t think Trump is a fascist, but merely an opportunist; a rather socially liberal, NYC real-estate developer.
This leads to the most persuasive arguments I’ve heard criticizing modern liberalism: It’s all too easy to ignore the true-believers, radicals, poseurs and nutbars (they’re our bastards) beneath one’s own platform, especially if they share some version of one’s own cherished beliefs and ideals.
Left and Left-liberal idealism prospers and is even institutionalized at places like Berkeley (no shortage of anti-racist, neo-Marxist, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist sentiment at Berkeley), which helps fuel radicals which help fuel the Richard Spencers.
Fascists and anti-fascists sure can come to resemble one another, trading tired power theories, hitting each other over the head, and trying to squeeze some meaning from similar principles while showboating through the nihilistic void.
Frankly, they deserve each other, and they deserve to be marginalized by the rest of us.
***I don’t think one need be a Nietzschean nor Nietzsche-inspired, nor a Nietzsche-reacting sort of Straussian (from H.L. Mencken to Leo Strauss to Camille Paglia to John Gray) to seriously question the modern liberal and secular human project, and help offer perspective.
But, it probably helps in understanding the fascist tendencies of Spencer and his enemies/allies..
Addition: I should make it clear that Nietzsche didn’t have much truck with fascists, and that he diagnosed, from the depths of his own nihilism, a lot of the crises that would come to face Europe…as for folks like Spencer, they seem to get enough nihilism to carry around while looking for meaning/purpose/identity/belonging elsewhere (in fascist movements)
Hitchens could be entertaining, especially on grounds I’m guessing he knew instinctively well as a former Trotskyite: Ideologies, while highlighting truths, promise a one-stop shop on truth, knowledge, how to be in the world, what to do and what the future will be.
People can kill for less, and when they adhere to such systems, then they can end-up killing more:
Via a reader. Platonic idealism has advantages in restoring both idealism and realism into political debate, but also drawbacks. It can be a bulwark against moral relativism, which is a modern soup in which Left and Right fascism can be found simmering.
‘By going deep into the minds of six apostates Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens, Oppenheimer offers an unusually intimate history of the American left, and the right’s reaction.’
Gray highlights something I certainly find attractive about conservatism:
‘Ever since it emerged in the late 18th century as a distinct tradition of modern thought, conservatism has been defined by a suspicion of grand schemes of world improvement. Whether their thinking was grounded in a religious belief in original sin (as in the cases of Edmund Burke and the American conservative Russell Kirk) or a sceptical view of the power of human reason (as in David Hume and Michael Oakeshott), conservatives distrusted any attempt to remake the world according to the dictates of high-minded ideals and abstract models.’
Neo-conservatism comes in for criticism as having a hand in all of modern American politics.
Gray:
‘George W Bush’s crazed pursuit of regime change and its continuation in some policies of the Obama administration, particularly when acting under the direction of Hillary Clinton, were the result.’
A few humble observations about the second Iraq invasion:
–There was a reassertion of many Americans’ nationalism, pride, and fear, especially after 9/11, and the desire for revenge against that rather awful blow against civilians and innocents at home, in a business setting no less (3,000 lives lost and a lot of terror). Strategically, Iraq could be convincingly argued to be a serious misstep.
–George W. Bush’s inherited guilt at leaving the Iraqi Kurds to their fate under Saddam on his father’s watch seems to have played a part (for which I have no evidence, but I’ve long thought…which is a product of deeper American life and politics).
Let me know if/how wrong I might be.
——–
Perhaps one of Gray’s main takeaways, a la Oppenheimer, is the almost religious-type experience some people have had within Communist ideals, an experience which drastically shaped this past century, and our lives.
He finishes with:
‘Except for Chambers and Horowitz, Oppenheimer’s apostates learned very little from their journey across the political spectrum. Those who banged the drum for war were as ignorant of the countries whose governments they wanted to overthrow as they been had of the workers they had claimed to be fighting for in the past. In both cases they used people of whom they knew nothing to satisfy their own need for significance. Believing they had left behind the mistakes of the radical left, they helped create a new right that repeated the same follies. Along the way, an older and more civilised conservatism was consigned to the memory hole.’
Hitchens could be entertaining, especially on grounds I’m guessing he knew instinctively well as a former Trotskyite: Ideologies, while highlighting truths, promise a one-stop shop on truth, knowledge, how to be in the world, what to do and what the future will be.
People can kill for less, and when they adhere to such systems, then they can end-up killing more:
Those people with whom you disagree, do youkill them?
‘A prominent Jordanian writer was shot dead Sunday on the steps of a court where he was facing charges for sharing an anti-Islam cartoon on Facebook.
Nahed Hattar was struck by three bullets before the alleged assassin was arrested at the scene of the shooting in Amman’s central Abdali district, said the official Petra news agency.’
and:
‘Hattar was a political commentator known for his antipathy towards Islamists including Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood and also his support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.’
Old news I know, but it seems that the Yale Press was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could potentially lead to violence, and that they are responsible for the consequences of such potential violence.
Hitchens:
“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”
Today’s activist vanguardian is very often tomorrow’s calcified, authoritarian bureaucrat (if they play the game right and come in from the cold).
‘Preserving that ability to recognize tyranny is at the heart of Silverglate’s second battle—protecting college students from ideological indoctrination and censorship. As co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, he is a fiercely litigious defender of free speech on campus.’
Thanks, Mr. Silverglate.
Meanwhile, at Yale…a nice mix of bureaucratese (radical placation) flirting with all the authoritarian consequences one wishes to imagine.
‘The charge of the Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming is to articulate a set of principles that can guide Yale in decisions about whether to remove a historical name from a building or other prominent structure or space on campus—principles that are enduring rather than specific to particular controversies.’
Then again, the Committee is probably safer for individual members than being surrounded a mob-justice shame-circle in the wilds of the quad.
Erika Christakis, whose husband can be seen below, had no help from the administration…
‘Nicholas says, if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offence are the hallmarks of a free and open society.
But — again, speaking as a child development specialist — I think there might be something missing in our discourse about the exercise of free speech (including how we dress ourselves) on campus, and it is this: What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment?’
Christopher Hitchens on re-printing the cartoons that incited Islamic violence:
‘According to Yale logic, violence could result from the showing of the images—and not only that, but it would be those who displayed the images who were directly responsible for that violence
‘From a technical standpoint, if we are asked by the police department and a subpoena is issued, we’ll give up the information,” Scott Goldsmith, president of media at Intersection, said. “We are not going to challenge the New York City police department if they ask us for information that we are legally required to give to them.’
Update: A7373 here and S 5370 here. Both have passed the NY Senate And Assembly.
‘Well, thanks to two new bills currently gaining traction in Albany’s assembly and senate, New York may become the first state to incentivize adding diversity to a production’s writing staff.
The bills, A47373 and S 5370, would modify the existing production state tax credit, so that certain New York writing income would qualify as an eligible expense. A company would have to employ women or people of color, and a portion of their New York salaries would qualify for the credit, which hasn’t been the case previously. It’s capped at $50,000 per writer, and an overall expenditure of $3.5 million a year.’
So will writers’ rooms have to send-in photos every quarter, or a list of diverse-sounding names to ensure they’re receiving the credit?
Will there be surprise, on-site inspections with a potential room full of white guys fleeing like cockroaches?
‘HUD intends to insert itself into local zoning efforts through the AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) program to push affirmative action in housing policy, directing HUD grant recipients to “affirmatively further the Act’s goals of promoting fair housing and equal opportunity.’
‘The fact that an ostentatiously privileged beneficiary of that freedom should take a public stand against according such freedom to others might be described as ironical. We think “despicable” would be a more accurate designation. Garry Trudeau pretends to be celebrating the underdog. In fact, the dog he celebrates is himself’
–Six writers apparently know what is acceptable speech and what isn’t, and thus don’t think the folks at Charlie Hebdo engaged in acceptable speech (we’ll leave some French things to the French, but not our own speech here at home)
It still needs to be said, loud and often: What keeps so many disparate groups together under the 1st amendment to the Constitution clearly includes speech which offends. Your litmus test for ‘tolerance’ is speech you yourself see as dangerous, harmful, and threatening to you and your own.
Frankly, you want to see bad ideas coming, while also having the courage to live in knowledge of such ideas and the people who would act upon them.
As to people in different civilizations with whom we have business, military and political engagement, people who would kill U.S. citizens where they live for engaging in this freedom when it upsets their own rules and commitments, choices will have to be made.
This blog believes choosing not to ‘offend’ for fear of death is not a winning, reasoned, nor functional long-term strategy. It is cowardly, unrealistic and muddle-headed.
The universal aspirations of the entirely Western ideologies from which it springs are no substitute for the freedoms and responsibilities we already have. In fact, they often undercut them with promises of utopian abstractions.
Such apologists have already betrayed you, me, and themselves, leaving some people, quite literally, to death.
It would be foolish to leave your freedoms and our engagement with the rest of the world in their hands.
‘But as the past couple of decades have demonstrated, there has been a twist to this tale of liberal progress. Censorship, far from disappearing, has changed form. What was once the prerogative of the state has become the prerogative of the individual. What was once grounded on morality, on what the state decreed to be right or wrong, moral or corrupting, is now grounded on emotions, on what the self decrees is hurtful or hateful. Speech no longer corrupts, or causes the will to deviate from the path of virtue; speech now upsets feelings, and causes people emotional harm. It is not the old-fashioned rational self that’s deemed at risk here; it’s the new-fangled emotivist self.’
It seems to me that the choice of ’empathy’ and walking a mile in another man’s shoes is relatively neutral, a choice that ought always to be ours to make.
For all the genuine injustice out there, publicly rewarding victimhood and airing grievances can soon become an exercise in punitive redress. Once folks start exploring themselves with certain ideological tools and ideas, it can be easy to start grafting genuine injustices along with their own failures and slights in life onto someone/something else without much thought at all.
And there, many can stay, in perpetual grievance, seeking constant social change, but often without much thought at all to what exactly that change would look like; the potential costs to all of our freedoms.
Personally, I’m hoping that all the self-help temples out there, the confessional couches a la the commercial populism of Oprah don’t decide to indulge too much in this direction…
As this blog sees it: A vague, shared emotion is no stamped passport to civilized society.
Much more is required of us all.
Christopher Hitchens had some interesting ideas (yes, a man, generally, of the Left no matter how contrarian):
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The late Ken Minogue had some thoughts which might shed a little light on our own natures, lest you get too pumped-up.
‘What most people seem to want, however, is to know exactly where they stand and to be secure in their understanding of their situation.’
From another reader (a record at this blog!): Robert Tracinski at The Federalist also offers reflection upon the year’s events, so reserve your right to be free from culture warriors of all stripes:
‘This is why I’ve written far more about the culture war this year than I ever expected (and the excerpts above are just a sampling). It has become an urgent necessity to push back against the resurgence of totalizing political correctness, to carve out room for the freedom to disagree—and to lay down the outlines of what a third alternative in the culture war looks like.’
Looking back, was this the most important development of the year?
‘Don’t discount this sort of impulse. You may not be able to relate to it at all, but it’s real. War is hell–that’s for damn sure–but it’s also an incredible antitode to alienation and boredom.’
‘Fall or survive, Kobani has assumed an importance few could have anticipated, becoming the rallying cry for Syrian and Turkish Kurds as much as Halabja was for their Iraqi brethren. Moreover, Kobani’s plight has once again drawn the whole international community’s attention to the region’s Kurdish question.’
‘If you have to protest that you’re not something, that only goes to show that really, underneath it all, you are that something: for if you were not, you wouldn’t have to proclaim it. After all, a bear doesn’t have to go round proclaiming it’s a bear, that it partakes of ursitude; it just is a bear and everyone knows it.’
Subject: ‘Is England Still Influencing America?’ on Hitchens’ book ‘Blood, Class, & Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies‘ when Hitchens’ was pushing the idea that ’empire’ was the primary transmission, apparently due to his ideological commitments at the time. America must have seemed a classless paradise with institutions well-functioning and ripe to achieve justice and equality for the whole world…for some folks in the Generation of ’68.
*Includes the Firing Line opening theme of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (those damned Germans influencing us) followed by a Michael Kinsley introduction (founding editor of Slate, which has since gone more progressive under recent management).
‘On empirical grounds it does seem we have another reason for thinking Piketty’s central claim isn’t quite right, at least not for the reasons he sets out, and perhaps not quite right altogether.’
Still unfolding.
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And just some writing perhaps worth revisiting.
Old news I know, but it seems that the Yale Press was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could potentially lead to violence, and that they would be responsible for the consequences of such potential violence:
On empirical grounds it does seem we have another reason for thinking Piketty’s central claim isn’t quite right, at least not for the reasons he sets out, and perhaps not quite right altogether. – See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/#sthash.578zkt6w.dpuf
Christopher Hitchens’ post here suggesting this was an act of institutionalized cowardice and a nod to the thuggish demands of those who need to be stood up against. He did have a first-hand look at Salman Rushdie’s ordeal, and the responses to it from those in the West.
“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”
“As “a slave of the Prophet,” he had the natural right to murder Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, not even for committing “blasphemy” but for criticizing a law that forbade it for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. And this sweeping new extension of the divine right to murder not only was not condemned by the country’s spiritual authorities; it was largely approved by them.”
At least Hitchens has the courage to stand up for his ideals where they conflict with the Muslim world, and try and define them. This fault-line will be at work for some time.
Here’s Briton Melanie Phillips speaking about Muslims in Britain, and also finding excessive fault with multiculturalism (~15:00 min):
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Phillips wrote a book called Londonistan, and perhaps she’s the British equivalent of a neo-conservative, having been ‘mugged by reality’ to some extent, for which she draws special ire from her former fellow travelers. As a columnist who started out for the British Left-Of-Center Guardian, and moved to the Daily Mail, Phillips targets that unholy marriage of Islamism and multiculturalism.
In the case of Britain, civil society has managed to create a space which shelters a number of Muslism immigrants operating outside of British law, sometimes bringing tribal customs and Sharia courts with them. Obviously, this is a problem.
Islamism and Islam, for Phillips, are two different creatures. There are Muslims who subscribe to the faith, and emigrate from their home countries. They come to the West for economic opportunity, political stability and all the other reasons people immigrate to the West. In the case of America, for example, they are particularly free to practice their religion, and perhaps have their religion insulted by South Park or the likes of Terry Jones.
Islamists, on the other hand, are a different matter. They range from the radicalizing Tsarnaevs, to Al Qaeda, to Anwar al-Awlaki and the Muslim Brotherhood. They subscribe to a form of Islamic ideology that sees itself in a global struggle against the encroachment of outside ideas, particularly the freedoms, culture, and influence of the West at the moment. Islamists are reactionary, ideological, and often advocate violence. They have serious issues with modernity, demanding and seeking solidarity and soldiers for the front lines against all enemies. Islamists seek to re-establish the kinds of laws and society that would enforce strict and impossibly ideal and narrow Islamic codes. This form of Islamic idealism has many wings and various sympathizers. It’s the kind of idealism we’re battling both abroad and on our soil, sometimes effectively, sometimes not very effectively at all. Some Islamists have even imported Western fascistic and socialist ideology and fused them with their own Islamism. A toxic brew.
Islamism is a major force throughout the Middle East and Muslim world right now, and at the very least, perhaps we can recognize that the Islamists mean harm to other Muslims as well.
So, how does Phillips think Britain should handle Muslim immigration? By highlighting terms which Britons should be quite clear about: There are laws to follow, forms of government to understand, a language to master and traditions which they might one day be expected to defend. This means locking horns with the multicultural Left.
The West is not merely a stop on the global benefits welfare chain. We’re not necessarily here to offer asylum or student visas to those who don’t particularly care to be here, nor those Islamists who travel from mosque to mosque, calling for jihad. Of course this is closer to the melting-pot approach that was once dominant in the U.S., which has since been on a slow decline due to the rise of multiculturalism here as well. I doubt this is a coincidence.
I’d add that America is obviously more than just a well-educated university faculty, or the talking heads on T.V. There are many other ideals, beliefs and virtues besides those like the new atheism, environmentalism, feminism and multiculturalism etc. Such secular ‘-isms’ tend to have universal aspirations, and many of their followers believe in these ideals with a kind of secular faith, rallying around these ideas and often presuming them to be universally true. As in Europe, universities and the media are natural draws for people who want to pursue such idealism, eventually influencing the culture and politics.
If Britain can show us anything, it’s that allowing the secular ‘-isms’ to be the highest things around, right alongside Muslim immigration and Islamism, is asking for serious trouble.
Now, I don’t think Phillips has everything right (nor obviously do I have everything right, for that matter) but her voice, like that of Christopher Hitchens, and Lars Hedegaard, are interesting voices of dissent tracing paths out of the Marxist, socialist and multiculturalist European Left. They have important truths to tell us.
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Sayyid Qutb isn’t a bad place to start to understand a little more, I’ve been told.
Michael Totten’s various interviews over the years with the Muslim Brotherhood are not inspiring. They’re Islamist lite, perhaps, and not likely the kinds of people we can do much business with.
Also, check out that sophisticated link between the Brotherhood, Muslim world and multiculturalist Europe, Tariq Ramadan. He sure knows how to speak the language:
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***Inevitably, criticism comes from the Left that highlights Phillips’ Jewishness. “She’s a shill for Israel” etc. Well, there you go. Anti-American, anti-semitic victimhood is all the rage in many quarters in Europe these days. Where’s that getting them?
Ever closer to the ideals which they hold aloft, and which move forever out of view.
People think I’m crazy, but NPR is the manifestation and mainstreaming of 60’s idealism. This idealism will always need money, and gravitates towards the public purse. Foundations which served other ideals naturally attract idealists. A Few Thoughts On NPR And Current Liberal Establishment Thinking Under Obama…
Theodore Dalrymple argues that France has the potential to handle Muslim immigration better because of its ideological rigidity, which can better meet the ideological rigidity of its Muslim immigrants…Theodore Dalrymple Still Attacking Multi-Culturalism In Britain
Some people are letting imagined Muslim youths from the other side of the world live rent-free in their heads as they take pen to paper, imagining such youths will be inspired by newspaper headlines, blog-posts, cartoons and T.V. shows from America. This is a propaganda war, they say, and we don’t want to give the jihadis recruiting material.
Naturally, they fear terrorism like all of us do to some extent, plain and simple, and they fear that any loss of innocent life will be at their hands (not at the hands of those who choose to kill). Many self-censor as a result. We’re a global village now, I’ve heard, and in a few huts in the global village huts are some really angry, irrational people, engaged in constant warfare in defense of their religion, willing to kill, die and terrorize for any scraps of glory. You don’t want to make them any angrier, do you?
Add to this an increasing raft of self-censorship in our own culture from the pc police, some aiming to absolve us the sins of slavery, and to unite the pluralistic and multi-ethnic strands of American life under the banners of multiculturalism and diversity, and you can see why some news outlets are reluctant to point out certain facts.
As I see it, there is a very small percentage of Muslims who radicalize, and nearly all other Muslims in America are not radicalizing. But, as immigrants go, Muslims pose unique problems, those few of them leaping off from the mosque into the radical night. Many Muslims, in following their faith, will put themselves at odds with many freedoms and facets of American life, including separation of church and state, and women’s freedoms. Statistically, there may be thousands more young Muslim men out there across the fruited plain, in danger of radicalization. While it’s a low probability occurrence, it only takes one to deal us the high consequences of an attack (as it does for any act of terrorism, from McVeigh to The Weather Underground).
In my view, this is partly where the logic of multiculturalism leads: Some people want you to want to self-censor. They’d rather have you be more worried about how other people are going to react to your thoughts and speech than your actual thoughts and speech, and the freedom you have to think and speak. You may be wrong of course, or have incomplete information, but some folks simply want to shut down debate. While you’re concerned about upsetting the next round of poor, impressionable terrorists on the other side of the globe, the Tsarnaevs might live down the road. This is a glaring inconsistency.
I believe we should aim for honesty in public speech, much like when there’s a robbery in the local paper. I’d like the newspaper to simply report the age, description and race of the suspect for the sake of public safety, especially if he’s still on the loose. That’s important information to know.
I’d like to see outlets simply reporting the religion, the path to radicalization, the associations and beliefs of the Tsarnaevs, which we seem to be getting from some sources.
Here’s Christopher Hitchens (nearly a free speech absolutist, railing against many of his former friends on the Left) discussing the Yale Press, which was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could lead to violence in the Muslim street:
“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”
Addition: But we also will maintain an open, healthy society.
1. Broad definitions of free speech don’t need to belabor the point of religion nor even seek enemy combatant status for the remaining Tsarnaev, as there are many other components to the Marathon bombing. However, I’d prefer to see his religion stated clearly as more information is made available. There are many people I don’t trust in the media to be able to do this as they roll ahead with the multiculturalist message.
2. In some ways, we’ve got to stay ahead of enterprising Al Qaeda online and in the marketplace. They have Inspire magazine. It’s like The Anarchist Cookbook for radical Islamists.
3. Unlike China, Russia, and even France, we have less of a top-down State and authoritarian apparatus which can swiftly crack down on security threats, or one group of immigrants, even if it was so desired, for any reason. Such is the cost of an open, Anglo-American society, apparently.
Another Addition: Eli Lake at The Daily Beast on that NYC to Toronto bombing. Al Qaeda in Iran.
Adam Garfinkle says to think of the event more like the D.C. sniper attacks, more lone-wolf act of domestic terrorism than foreign policy or immigration changing event-The Real Boston Story.
“This impression was not helped by his tendency to answer specifics with generalities. Ramadan’s favorite word seems to be “diversity” and it was trotted out with numbing regularity to serve as many masters as there were sentences that night. It was the answer to every question, which is to say, once again, not an answer.”
Ramadan knows how to play the Western end of the debate. One of his arguments that resonates with me is that human nature itself is flawed. Any religion, secular group, moral philosophy, human rights campaign etc….any person really…ought to be concerned with has been done (and what people are doing) in the name of any set of ideas or principles, which is often violence. This has some weight.
Hitchens, however, remains unmoved and maintains that the metaphysics of Islam will ultimately create and encourage violence through its moral absolutism and its total metaphysical prescription for all aspects of life, including politics and the public square (though Hitchens was clearly anti-religion, a materialist through and through, on a broader basis). Muslims are the ones right now in Europe and the Middle-East, he points out, who are violent and threatening violence and it must be stood up to.
I suspect on Hitchens’ view, one of the products of Europe is the secular multiculturalism to which Ramadan often appeals, but which the adherents of secular multiculturalism are not always fully willing and able to defend (free speech for example) against Muslim threats of violence. This secular tradition has also not been fully integrating Muslims successfully under its banner nor through public policy, the economy, or Europe’s political institutions, often creating fiefdoms and ghettoes.
Many Americans want this to be our approach as well.
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Here’s a further debate from Intelligence Squared with Ayan Hirsi Ali on one side, arguing that Islam is the problem (the same absolutism in Islam that will not tolerate questioning of its tenets, and its many violent passages). A member of the opposing side suggests that Muslim alienation in British life, combined with a European influenced fascist inspired-Islamism is the problem, not Islam itself (yes, it’s colonialist Europe’s fault). He proposes a more human-rights based Islam.
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R.I.P to the victims of 09/11.
Addition: Interesting post here from A Reluctant Ombudsman on The Church Of Atheism. You can be civil, and not bash religion from within your own atheism and stand up against the evils and infringements upon liberty that both religious groups and non-religious groups pose.
“This impression was not helped by his tendency to answer specifics with generalities. Ramadan’s favorite word seems to be “diversity” and it was trotted out with numbing regularity to serve as many masters as there were sentences that night. It was the answer to every question, which is to say, once again, not an answer.”
Ramadan knows how to play the Western end of the debate. What place has been made in Europe for its Muslim immigrants? What place are they making?
‘But the memoir gives solid hints about the elements of his composition: the adventure books for boys that made him a Romantic; first encounters on the Darwinian English schoolyard where he, a small boy deficient in physicality (sports was always near the top of his hate list along with God and Israel) learned that words were the best fists; independent socialist politics that left him with what he once called, apropos of Saul Bellow, a “trotskisant dialectic” even after his days as a self-identified leftist were over; the decision to cultivate a droll Wodehousian side to go along with the moralistic Rosa Luxemburgian one’
I suspect the Marxist materialist/radical days encouraged his particularly anti-religious bent. As a member of the new atheists, he had a real and passionate hatred for the ability of religious doctrines and religions themselves to encourage (and potentially cultivate) many darker parts of human nature, including mysticism, passionate conviction tied only to respect for authority, righteous justification for action (no one may know some of these traits better than a former Marxist…and usually writers know the darker parts of the human heart). He loved going after religious charlatanism. He was also a war correspondent (real courage is always mixed with fear), a fine writer, and excellent in debate.
I remember being drawn to him for his withering critiques of the failures of multi-culturalism in Europe.
R.I.P.
From the Telegraph:
‘He began as a leading iconoclast of the Left and, during the 1970s, was a voluble member of a talented and raffish gang, with Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and James Fenton, which gave the New Statesman magazine its glittery literary edge. But he got tired of British politics and, in 1981, moved to America where, despite occasional disagreements with his erstwhile comrades (as when he took Britain’s side against the Argentine junta in the Falklands conflict), his repeated assaults on such hate figures as Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger continued to guarantee him a welcome in radical circles.
All this changed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, an event he interpreted as a turning point in “a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate”. He became an outspoken opponent of “Islamofascism”, forging a breach with the Left which became a permanent rift after the invasion of Iraq in 2003.’
Addition: Transcript of a very interesting Reason interview here from November, 2001.
‘Again to quote myself from 2001, if Pakistan were a person, he (and it would have to be a he) would have to be completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. That last triptych of vices is intimately connected.’
and:
‘If we ever ceased to swallow our pride, so I am incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores the awful historical fact that, each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United States.’
If Hitchens means his mission is to disassociate people’s submission of will in faith to a transcendent God and the earthly authority of the church, and faith without reason…then the argument clearly has merit. There’s no shortage of ignorance, zeal, willful denial of reason, a violent certitude and moral absolutism with which men can occupy their minds in the throes of belief (though some very good poetry and literature has come of it). It is one of the greatest threats to liberty.
Hitchens has brought such a standard to bear against Islam (as well as Christianity) in his role as a war correspondent, highlighting the West’s engagement with Islam with a vigorous and heated defense of free speech. Perhaps one of the greatest evils for Hitchens is the abuse and exploitation of ignorance by those who claim divine providence; or simply those who bend to the many political, institutional and personal incentives for maintaining such a lack of reason (the Grand Inquisitor scene from the Brothers Karamazov comes to mind, rallying cry for many a secularist).
Here’s a quote from John Locke:
“7. What is meant by enthusiasm. This I take to be properly enthusiasm, which, though founded neither on reason nor divine revelation, but rising from the conceits of a warmed or overweening brain, works yet, where it once gets footing, more powerfully on the persuasions and actions of men than either of those two, or both together: men being most forwardly obedient to the impulses they receive from themselves; and the whole man is sure to act more vigorously where the whole man is carried by a natural motion. For strong conceit, like a new principle, carries all easily with it, when got above common sense, and freed from all restraint of reason and check of reflection, it is heightened into a divine authority, in concurrence with our own temper and inclination.”
Yet, there are some serious questions surrounding a positive doctrine of reason for Hitchens (it was probably shrewd of him to join the new atheists). He’s renounced Marxism, but there is likely a continual influence of the same thinking upon him…around which social, civic and political life was organized upon Enlightenment ideals as well and a certain metaphysics of reason these past few centuries. This thinking, of course, also motivates Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Humanists, Universalists, etc.
In its worst incarnations, there was, and is, no shortage of similar human behavior on display in its wake. It involved the submission of will by force for the common good, overseen by those would enforce that good against the will of individuals, faith having been banished…power and the incentives for rule over others increasingly attached to the baser desires as the system slowly collapsed.
As for our current engagement with Islam, one threat would be merely copying the universalist dilemma that faces Europe regarding Muslim immigration (guided by relativist logic and under the banners of equality and tolerance which can simply not handle the problems immigration creates; the poverty, economic opportunity and its lack, stresses on the labor market, social tensions, etc). On the other hand, less likely,but still plausible: Pitting Christianity against Islam (and vice versa) for all the gains involved for some, the likes of which are much more prevalent in the Muslim world at the moment (think Bin Laden’s violent, thuggish mission) in a new round of religious wars.
Is Hitchens deeper than that? Is the analysis sound?
There are people animated by a vision of Islam that restores it to a place of central importance in the Muslim world (partly in response to the injustices of the autocrats and long-tribal/family rule and harsh punishment they inflict…partly from the relatively weak economies, high levels of poverty, low political freedoms…partly spurred onwards against the interests, involvement and injustices of the West in the Muslim world, sometimes involving military force, sometimes in ways which undermine sovereignty, and also in ways that can dramatically strengthen cultural ties, trade, education and opportunity).
There is a large pool of sentiment and longer trends in the Arab world toward such a revival (Hitchens also might argue like Ayan Hirsi Ali that most Muslims simply cannot conceive of separation of church and state) and there are actual thugs willing to carry it out violently in the form of Al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba etc. These people need to be stood up to as Hitchens points out, and challenged. And if not by American citizens, then by default to our militaries and security agencies, but for Hitchens perhaps not so much by coalitions and diplomacy.
Hitchens has little patience for those in the West who don’t stand up to such thugs. He criticizes those who lose the facts in a fog of cultural relativism, those who out of fear or culturally ‘sensitive’ reasons (see Yale) get those facts wrong and capitulate too readily.
Such folks are often part of the Left he’s renounced, and much like the religious believers he denigrates and the stupidity and ignorance he’s wont to highlight, all of those folks have potentially lost sight of their moral obligations and capability to properly reason in Hitchens view, and deal lowly with our freedoms out of guilt and fear. This, of course, can lead to other problems.
A fair summary at the moment?
Addition: Is he still a socialist? A materialist? On a neoconservative trajectory out of British/European Leftism? Fully understanding of American traditions?
A writer, a polemicist, a war correspondent, quite at home critcizing the abdication of personal responsibility by religious believers and leftists, a former Marxist/Socialist, a secularist, an anti-religionist, a builder of the humanist project upon Enlightenment ideals (especially against fascistic theocracies), and a Briton born of its class structure.
What are some advantages and drawbacks of the humanist project seeking to enshrine ideals assumed to be universal in international legal framework? Better than what we have?
Mentioned: Mother Theresa, Isaiah Berlin, The Generation of ’68, Thomas Paine, The Materialist Conception of History, British Conservatism, the end of the British Empire, The International Left.
Hitchens has some unkind words for Pakistan. Some of his motivation is likely his anti-theism, but he does point out the following:
“Successive U.S. administrations used to keep certifying to Congress that Pakistan was not exploiting U.S. aid (and U.S. indulgence over the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan) to build itself a nuclear weapons capacity.”
We’ve been sending a lot of checks to Pakistan (and Musharraf played us quite well, as I don’t think you can ask a leader to be too far from his people). Pakistan is not an entirely reliable partner in pursuing our aims due to the circumstances on the ground. Yet, we need Pakistani support to prevent haven across the border if the plan in Afghanistan is going to work. So, we’re making more deals and sending more checks.
He also takes a parting shot at anti-war liberals:
“American liberals can’t quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he’s ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.”
Part of my fear has been a sitting liberal President picking up a war and feeling pressure to act aggressively. But let’s not put more of that kind of pressure on him to spite liberalism. He’s been pretty reasonable so far in my opinion.
