‘Coates fails to notice that his blanket exoneration of the perpetrators actually dehumanizes them. On his view, when the young perpetrators pull the trigger or thrust the knife in they are only vectors of forces, not agents with purposes, desires, plans, or motives. Therefore they are not really men at all, so that, ironically enough, they become for him Invisible Man writ large.‘
Many black writers in America should be recognized as having crossed bridges over chasms in communicating their experiences, experiences which have often made even the best radicalize to some degree in the face of such injustice.
Regardless, I’m guessing we’re all best off if the same high standards are universally applied when it comes to quality of prose, depth of thought, scope of imagination and moral courage. Good writing deserves as much: Genuine, even if grudging or even if unfettered, respect.
Works of art are going to do what they’re going to do, polemics what they do, and I tend to believe that respect for the freedom, responsibility, agency and complexity of the individual ought to be central. Realizing the interior lives of others, especially if they’re just characters in a novel, even when they fail miserably and do horrible things, is what I’ve taken to be a core feature of writing which has moved me. This, much more than ideological solidarity and what may be the shared popular sentiment of the moment.
To my mind, there’s something comic about a man (and I can’t be alone) espousing rather radical political views (theories of victimhood, a lack of individual agency and anti-white racism, postmodern ‘body’ talk etc.) while being feted, possibly with the intent of appeasement and assimilation, by mostly less radical (and often very white) audiences.
That’s got to create some tension.
As to politics and social institutions, sent in by a reader, here’s a talk given by John McWhorter about his views in ‘Losing The Race‘, a man who strikes me as politically amorphous, unsatisfyingly moderate for some, and often very sensible. As has been the case for a while, there [are] a whole range of views out there:
Sadly, I don’t trust mainstream outlets, nor their major driver of traffic, and business partner (Google), to report the facts. Of course, I can’t trust them to report the facts without accepting constraints I simply will not accept in defense of speech and Western Civilization, having been captured by activist/radical discontents (I don’t allow my baseline to be driven by those in the West who conditionally support speech, driving American idealism towards the regime in Tehran).
This means all of us, in defense of our own speech, and criticism of authority (think long and hard about this), will presumably find conditional support from similar outlets here at home. This does not bode well.
“I was completely shocked. I was probably 60 feet away from the incident. I saw the attacker jump onto the stage and immediately run to Mr. Rushdie and he started pummeling him is the best way to describe it. Hitting him very rapidly. I could not tell he had a knife,” Davies, a Brooklyn-based urban planner, told The Post.
Rushdie has potentially suffered serious injuries (eye, liver etc.)
‘Rushdie has spent decades looking over his shoulder after Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a call for his death after the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. The suspect, Hadi Matar, 24, of New Jersey, is said to be sympathetic to the Iranian regime.‘
‘Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in 2005 the order still stands.
The new bounty is the largest organised effort to assassinate Rushdie since the fatwa was issued.’
As previously posted. Salman Rushdie went into hiding for years for expressing his views in works of fiction (the kind which might well benefit parts of the Muslim world (and Iran) in evaluating just how it deals with the West, and the ‘modern world’:
================
The mullahs with their moral absolutes and thuggish political opportunism aside, there are some in the West who won’t stand-up to such thuggishness.
‘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,”’
Rushdie on such cowardice:
“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 the truth they’ve expressed here.
No doubt, though, new levels of cosmic conscientious-objective-consciousness have been reached.
—————————————–
.As previously posted:
How do you marry liberal idealism with the radical roots? Shotgun-style.
Our institutions, bending to liberal ideals, will also involve a bending towards the radical base, which is not necessarily liberal.
When his captors uncinched the noose around his neck and shoved him into a wooden chair, Alex Rackley might have assumed his ordeal was over. He had already endured a flurry of kicks and punches, the repeated crack of a wooden truncheon, ritual humiliation, and a mock lynching. But it wasn’t over. It was about to get much, much worse.’
That party at Lenny’s is still pretty awkward, at least the way Tom Wolfe tells it:
‘. . and now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers. That huge Panther there, the one Felicia is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just 41 hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver that someone had, in a parked car in Queens at Northern Boulevard and 104th Street or some such unbelievable place, and taken to jail on a most unusual charge called “criminal facilitation.” And now he is out on bail and walking into Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s 13-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue. Harassment & Hassles, Guns & Pigs, Jail & Bail—they’re real, these Black Panthers. The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny’s duplex like a rogue hormone.’
‘Advocating voluntary restraint of speech (on grounds of common civility, community harmony or fear of violence) ultimately establishes a climate of silence in which any criticism of Islam can be dismissed as provocation – as racism qua Islamophobia, a label that is used to discredit critics.‘
Malik takes issue with some of the British left’s handling of the Salman Rushdie (wikipedia) affair:
“It has now become widely accepted that we live in a multicultural world, and that in such a world it is important not to cause offence to other peoples and cultures.”
‘Though these two brothers may have acted like regular American youth to unsuspecting neighbors, participating in sports, attending public schools, and hailing from neighborhoods in the Boston community, at some point they were taken in by the ideology of political Islam, which, like an intoxicating drug, lured them down the path of separatist Islamism and its common endpoint of militant jihadism against both non-Islamist Muslims and non-Muslim societies’
Theodore Dalrymple at The City Journal compares money, the individual, and the social in Depression-era Soviet and American art:
‘I was struck by the parallels between the furious debates among artists in the early years of the revolution and those that raged during the Depression about the “correct” way to paint and the role of art in society—the assumption being that an indubitably correct answer was there to be found, as if there could not be many mansions in art, as if appreciation of one style automatically precluded admiration for another. The debates were highly ideological: in the Russian case, about what activity truly served the revolution and the proletariat (itself an abstraction, very different from workers’ actual lives); and in the American case, about what activity was truly American.’
To be flippant, as previously posted on this site: A little piece I like to call ‘Stalin’s Fingers’ in Seattle. Comic and graphic art may be taking up some of the muscularity of socialist realism and public-works solidarity.
You might have noticed those tiles already look a little drab and dated, even though construction only finished a few years ago.
More here on the piece (apologies to all comic/graphic artists ahead of time, for not portraying your craft with as much fidelity as it probably deserves).
Our muraliste is a comic/graphic artist tapped to make signs and symbols for all the Community:
‘In a wide-ranging and candid interview with New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio casually noted that the “way our legal system is structured to favor private property” provokes his “anger, which is visceral.”
De Blasio likely places certain ideals (‘community,’ equality, and cooled revolutionary spirit) above private property, free enterprise, and individual liberty, even as he’s collecting the wealth from the successes of NYC finance, trade, property taxes, and tourism.
‘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’
I can’t get much more unpopular myself: If you’re looking to art for moral instruction, or for canned lines to solidify group membership, political affiliation and/or ideological identification, you’re probably doing dirt on the arts and life.
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.
As to human nature, and taking a longer, deeper view of human nature in the face of many current liberatory movements (sexual, spiritual, political), spearheading what appears to be a deeper Statist, ‘human-rights’ and Civil-Rights based political and economic order.
One clear problem is this: If our rights come from not from God, nor Natural Law, nor Natural Right, then often they are inferred to come from (M)an or sufficiently abstract conceptions of (M)an or (M)ankind. In practice, this often becomes the (Right) Men or (Right-Thinking) Men/Women/People (me/us) against (T)hem.
This, in turn, does not exactly lead to Peace, Equality, and ever more Freedom.
One way to understand many of our current institutions and traditions is that they are living representations, to some extent, of who/what we already are. It remains prudent not to confuse liberation for freedom, nor mistake the claims of equality absolutists as desirable for all.
“…and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important that equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.”
‘If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.’
Sometimes ya gotta tell Donahue straight to his face:
Colonists practicing freedom, becoming slowly habituated to running their own lives and affairs, taming an often hostile wilderness, ruled by a distant and increasingly controlling crown, require certain conceptual definitions of freedom.
Activists practicing liberation, colonizing existing newsrooms and administrative hierarchies, tending to totalize all personal and public relationships into an oppressor/opppressed worldview, require other conceptual definitions of freedom.
‘The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism.’
and:
‘But it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end.’
—
As previously posted:
Jason Hill’s open letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates here.
‘Coates fails to notice that his blanket exoneration of the perpetrators actually dehumanizes them. On his view, when the young perpetrators pull the trigger or thrust the knife in they are only vectors of forces, not agents with purposes, desires, plans, or motives. Therefore they are not really men at all, so that, ironically enough, they become for him Invisible Man writ large.’
Many black writers in America should be recognized as having crossed bridges over chasms in communicating their experiences, experiences which have often made even the best radicalize to some degree in the face of such injustice.
Regardless, I’m guessing we’re all best off if the same high standards are universally applied when it comes to quality of prose, depth of thought, scope of imagination and moral courage. Good writing deserves as much: Genuine, even if grudging or even if unfettered, respect.
Works of art are going to do what they’re going to do, polemics what they do, and I tend to believe that respect for the freedom, responsibility, agency and complexity of the individual ought to be central. Realizing the interior lives of others, especially if they’re just characters in a novel, even when they fail miserably and do horrible things, is what I’ve taken to be a core feature of writing which has moved me. This, much more than ideological solidarity and what may be the shared popular sentiment of the moment.
To my mind, there’s something comic about a man (and I can’t be alone) espousing rather radical political views (theories of victim-hood, a lack of individual agency and anti-white racism, postmodern ‘body’ talk etc.) while being feted, possibly with the intent of appeasement and assimilation, by mostly less radical (and often very white) audiences.
That’s got to create some tension.
As to politics and social institutions, sent in by a reader, here’s a talk given by John McWhorter about his views in ‘Losing The Race‘, a man who strikes me as politically amorphous, unsatisfyingly moderate for some, and often very sensible. As has been the case for a while, there [are] a whole range of views out there:
James Baldwin’s works are there to be read and thought about, his words and ideas echoing in your mind; your words formed in response.
Take or leave those words and ideas. You can write a paper, and forget them. They may deeply move and stir your moral imagination, or not.
Such is freedom.
A lack of freedom is demonstrated by uttering James Baldwin’s words as incantations seeking solidarity; chanted mindlessly by a mob of moral/ideological purists, shouting down anyone who might disagree.
Most of these low-rent, post-Enlightenment ideological re-enactors are happy to become stars; each of their own scripted passion-plays and soapy little dramas; tacitly cradled by the academics and administrators off-camera.
In this blog’s opinion, John Derbyshire has extended his own experiences into broader truth claims about race and empirical reality. He uses statistics and evidence to bolster his arguments. There are, frankly, quite a few people who agree with him. What he says may simply be true, or contain truths, partial truths and misconceptions. Some central claims may not be true.
Should one disagree, it must be demonstrated to him, and to others, why he might be wrong. Derbyshire’s intellectually honest enough to present his arguments clearly and cogently, as presumably he believes what he’s saying is true.
Become part of a much nobler process, dear reader. Most decent people already know better than to claim all the truth, moral goodness and virtue for themselves.
For those who didn’t make it through, and those who did, and those who have worked every day to make it better…
Here’s a video of the memorial at night, from some number of years ago. You can look into those holes, the water flowing down and away. You can also be with everyone else for a moment, looking at the beauty around you; the bustling city.
Addition: At the NY Observer, a firsthand account from the 77th floor of the 2nd tower.
A little more on that Roger Scruton dustup with the deputy editor of the New Statesman. When you’re righteous, you don’t necessarily have to be right, nor civil:
On Roger Scruton and his defenders:
– There is no context in which it is ok to refer to a “Soros empire” (an anti-semitic trope).
– Or to refer to Chinese people as replicas of each other (a racist trope).
– Or to refer to Islamophobia as a “propaganda word” + Muslim “tribes”.
I take the claims of ‘Ismologists’ with a grain of salt; especially when there’s professional incentive to have one’s Nazi/non-Nazi list at the ready with those who politically disagree. The identity game is so tired yet still so damaging, the intellectual bar so low yet still so influential, that I think I’ve stopped noticing the constant whine of my bullshit detector.
Update: Scruton responds here. There is a lot of social and professional incentive for Eaton to act in such a way.
Our politics and civil debate is engulfed in similar ideas, and like the Brits, Canadians and Aussies, our politics will still be necessary to maintain civil society.
Mr Scruton was pretty much excommunicated from British academic life and civil society for his views. It’s actually possible to have a civil debate, you know, but just don’t expect it from most people, much of the time, especially identitarians (political enemies are morally evil…because politics seems to function as a religion):
In the Q & A afterwards, Scruton receives about as pointed a post-lecture questioning on his metaphysics as I’ve seen.
In the final moments, Robert George also posits that Scruton’s four presented categories actually rather resemble Aristotle’s Order of Nature and three of them Aristotle’s Practical Reason.
Interesting presentation by an interesting thinker, indeed.
‘Religion has been a major force in world history, and today is no exception. The popular intellectual who probably has made the biggest splash this year, Jordan Peterson, describes himself as a Christian. Right-wing intellectuals, overall, aren’t nearly as religious as is the broader right-wing electorate. Still, I find they are much better suited to understand the role of religion in life than are left-wing intellectuals.’
This usually reveals more about me: What I often see here in Seattle is the sad spectacle of the professed rejection of religion for either the negotiation or acceptance of the ‘-Isms; the often belief-deep level ‘Ismology.’ The overall culture is still a bit uncivilized, immature (young) and counter to anything ‘they’ might believe.
Some people are religious, sure, but the culture is very Left and activist liberal-Left. The environment, anti-‘capitalism,’ feminism, gender, race are all safe zones for righteous belief, activist action and the pursuit of moral and political purity (causes worthy of living, fighting and often pretending to die for). A more equal, fair, and socially just society is ever-emerging from within that winter fog hanging over the Sound.
I see such thinking as often as a squandering of a tremendous amount of freedom and opportunity in favor of frequent collectivist utopianism and the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of many failed and revolutionary doctrines. A lot of money sure is wasted.
Of course, people are people and worthy of being treated as such, and there is plenty of truth, knowledge and beauty here. All the truths and all the knowledge, I surely don’t have. If you’re looking just for doctrinal and/or ideological purity on this blog, hopefully you won’t find too much.
As previously and consistently posted-Thanks to a reader. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
‘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.’
I’d add this: Bureaucratic elements exist within companies, of course, but, sooner or later, such elements are subject to market forces (if there ain’t too much collusion with lawmakers).
Decisions made within companies often receive more direct feedback (monthly and quarterly reports), customer feedback (client management is key) and competitive threats (Company B across town risked some money/time and invested in data analytics which now sets the industry standard) etc.
The disruptive forces within bureaucracies often tend to be internal (opposing blocs at odds with the bureaucratic elements), or enough free people who won’t subject themselves to the bureaucracy and/or or whose self-interest works against those in current control of the bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, many bureaucracies end with a political defeat and/or the entire collapse of the political economy.
-Bureaucrats and idealists, as well-meaning and hard-working as some may be, often find themselves unable to escape the inertia of the systems they’ve helped to create, incentivized to spend other people’s money on other people.
One problem here lies in getting how people actually behave wrong, or overlooking the self-interested nature of so much human motivation and action, while still recognizing one’s moral obligations to other people and the intractability of so much human suffering and so many human problems.
Naturally, I think pretty highly of myself, and aim to operate under the ideas that none of us is selfless, none of us has special possession of universal truths (some are wiser than others), and none can design systems from the top down that work for everyone.
This world being what it is, I have resigned myself to the idea of there being some bureaucracy, but constant vigilance and vigorous freedom is required to even sustain some of it.
“The purpose of bureaucracy is to devise a standard operating procedure which can cope effectively with most problems. A bureaucracy is efficient if the matters which it handles routinely are, in fact, the most frequent and if its procedures are relevant to their solution. If those criteria are met, the energies of the top leadership are freed to deal creatively with the unexpected occurrence or with the need for innovation. Bureaucracy becomes an obstacle when what it defines as routine does not address the most significant range of issues or when its prescribed mode of action proves irrelevant to the problem.”
and:
“Moreover, the reputation, indeed the political survival, of most leaders depends on their ability to realize their goals, however these may have been arrived at. Whether these goals are desireable is relatively less crucial.”
Kissinger, Henry. American Foreign Policy: Three Essays. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc. 1969.
