Let me thank both Tom Hickey and Jerry Fresia for the very
useful responses to my open-ended question about the way forward. I shall try
to respond to both of them, perhaps later today. Right now, however, I should
like to spend a few moments talking about the contrast between my actual life
and the large-scale philosophical and political questions about which I so
often bloviate on this blog.
What have I actually been doing in the nearly 4 months since
the virus compelled the retirement community in which I live to go on virtual
lockdown? My wife and I live in a comfortable third floor apartment with our little
cat. Our meals are delivered to our door by the dining services here at
Carolina Meadows, along with a variety of things that I can order from them online.
I also get deliveries to my door from Amazon.com and via Instacart from the
local supermarket. I leave my apartment on a typical day twice: first, in the
early morning, to take my one hour walk, carrying my mask with me so that I can
put it on when I pass another early walker; and then later on in the early
afternoon when I go masked downstairs to the lobby to pick up my mail. By my count,
I have left Carolina Meadows ten times in the past four months: Four times to
take Susie to a doctor when she broke her wrist in a fall during a brief walk
outside; once when I went to the dentist; three times when I called in takeout
orders at local restaurants, paid over the phone by credit card, and had them
put the order in the trunk of my car when I got to the restaurant; once when I
went to get some gas at a local gas station, sanitizing my credit card after
inserting it into the slot and holding the pump handle with a sanitizing wipe;
and once – a daring outing, this – when Susie and I drove to the parking lot of
a local restaurant wearing masks, stood 6 feet away from her son and
daughter-in-law, also masked, and chatted for half an hour. And that is it.
To be sure, during these four months I have taught five
meetings of my UNC Marx course by zoom, made several guest appearances, also by
zoom, in a course on the Critique of Pure Reason taught in Laramie, Wyoming,
and sought daily, in the immortal words of Emily Dickinson, “to tell my name the
livelong day to an admiring bog.”
Inasmuch as my overriding concern is to make absolutely
certain that neither Susie nor I contract the virus, I suspect that this will
be my life for at least another nine months. That is not an inconsiderable
portion of all the days I have left on this earth so I must make of them what I
can. The contrast between the constrained circumference of my actual life and
the limitless scope of my speculations is, of course, a commonplace for people
who make their living as philosophers, but this virus has brought it home to me
with especial force.
3 comments:
this is only slight off-topic:
an important petition--please sign
Hang in there, Professor Wolff. You and your wife will make it through the rest of the pandemic. Keep taking all the necessary precautions, and take it one day at a time. You may want to check your mail once or twice weekly, instead of daily, to minimize risk. I encourage you to finish reading Piketty’s ‘Capital and Ideology,’ since you read his ‘Capital in the 21st Century’ and wrote many extensive posts about it. I’ve fully read the former and there is an abundance of topics to discuss:
* The Brahmin Left (i.e. the educational elite) vs the Merchant Right (i.e. the wealthy business class). Over the past 50 years, the left-wing parties in the US and Europe have largely abandoned the poor and working class.
* A universal capital endowment (e.g.€120,000 for everyone when turning 25)
* A very steeply progressive income tax, estate tax, and wealth tax
* Basic minimum income, which is means-tested, unlike universal basic income
* A wealth tax on the largest university endowments, which would be redistributed to poorer universities
* A federation of European nations (separate from the EU) that can implement federal tax policy so that you do not have a race to the bottom in terms of corporate tax rates (which is happening in the EU)
* Co-determination policies: allocating 30-50% of company board seats to labor representatives. The Germanic and Nordic countries have done this for a long time, and it has worked well.
* Changing a nation’s constitution to explicitly define common property as having a social dimension, i.e. property is not 100% private, sacrosanct, or inviolable, contrary to Locke, libertarianism, and neo-liberalism (what Piketty calls neo-proprietarianism). Germany did this in the 1950s, and the US, UK, and France should do this as well, in order to provide a constitutional basis for a steeply progressive wealth tax, estate tax, etc.
To save time when reading ‘Capital and Ideology,’ you could just read the introduction, Parts 3 and 4, and the conclusion.
In the last bullet-point listed above, "common property" should be "property in general." The constitutional change would define property in general (real estate, equipment, financial assets, etc.) as having a social dimension: it is not 100% private, sacrosanct, or inviolable. In contrast, common property or communal property, by definition, has a social or communal dimension.
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