I have decided to try blogging without comments. During the 13 years that I have been blogging, there have been a total of 38,572 comments, if Google is to be believed. That is a lot of comments. I have enjoyed a great many of them, but in recent months I have grown weary of the comments section being dominated by a few people who seem in many cases only tangentially interested in what I am saying.
There are a dozen or so people who seem to have gotten to
know one another rather well through the intermediation of the comments section
on this blog, and I do not wish to deprive them of the pleasure of
continuing to communicate with one another, so I will hold open the comments
section for another few days and they can, if they wish, use the comments
section to exchange email addresses with one another. Then, in a few days, I
will turn off the comments entirely.
I will still be available, of course. My email address is
listed right at the top of the first page of the blog and anyone who wishes to
communicate directly with me is welcome to do so, as in fact many of you have
done over the years.
I do understand the reason for your move, Professor Wolff.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I will miss the comments section of your blog. Granted, many of the threads do seem to veer off the original post that prompts them [though not the most recent one on Charles Mills].
I regret this loss of the comments section as a kind of forum for often controversial views.
I too regret the loss of the comments section.
ReplyDeleteIf I may offer a bit of unsolicited and probably unwanted advice, I believe that it's an error for a man of your age, already in retirement, to cut himself off from the feedback
of the comments section, even though much of it may seem trivial or irrelevant to you.
My email: vivepablo@gmail.com
The comments on the recent Charles Mills post were about... the Charles Mills post. Odd that Prof Wolff should have decided to turn off comments right after a comment thread that, far from straying into "tangential" territory, was directly about his original post.
ReplyDeleteI will miss the comments section too. I think most of them movement of the comments from the subject matter of the original post is simply a function of the natural progression of peoples' thoughts and ideas--one thing suggests another. I have found them to be enjoyable and stimulating.
ReplyDeleteSome of your recent posts have been very personal, dealing with things like your health, your wife's health, the loss friends. I didn't know how really to respond to them, but I felt them personally. At 84 I'm younger than you, but I'm no spring chicken and have my own health problems as does my wife. I was particularly touched a few days ago by your mentioning the loss of so many people who played an important role in your life. My wife and I have done the same--just reciting the loss of friends and relatives. I didn't know how to say anything helpful or constructive to you in commenting on those posts without turning the subject from you to me.
LFC has a point. The brief post noting the Amazon union vote was followed by a bunch of comments on unions. Ditto the Mills post. Perhaps a reconsideration is due along with an admonition about straying too far afield?
ReplyDeleteI welcome your decision, Prof. Wolff. I’ll note that another site i regularly visit, Crooked Timber,” is contemplating the same sort of action, though it is considering allowing individual posters to open their reflections to some comment.
ReplyDeleteWhy welcome it? For far too long, or so it seems to me, the Comments on your blog have indeed diminished into exchanges among the same few whose egos get so involved that they end up bickering among themselves about irrelevancies. Were that all that followed from that sort of “conversation,” I wouldn’t worry too much about it. But there must be many others out there—e.g., those ‘strangers’ who took up your recent invitation to suggest topics for you to discuss—who find that sort of “conversation,” marked as it often is by sarcasm, expressions of injured pride, and the like, a real turn off.
Finally, contrary to s. wallerstein (with whose political comments I’m usually very comfortable), I, being approximately of an age with you, can’t believe that if you no longer avail yourself of the opinions of the usual coterie of commentators you will be at much risk of isolating yourself. I’m sure you have other resources. And you’ll be eliminating, I’d guess, a continuing sourse of intellectual frustration.
Best wishes.rm
Someone once said something to the effect of "anonymous and instant communication makes everyone as asshole."
ReplyDeleteI'm probably responsible for 4 or 5 of those nearly 40k comments, so it's no loss for me. I rarely even looked at the comments section as of late, particularly if I saw a there were a few dozen comments on a post, I knew it had likely blown up into a pointless argument, as are almost all arguments on the internet these days (maybe ever?).
It's an unfortunate set of circumstances we find ourselves in. I used to frequent a fly fishing forum and loved talking shop with people around the country, young folks, old timers, pros, guides, gear manufacturers, the occasional weekend warriors, and the diehards who fished nearly every day. But, alas, the Trump years caused it become a cesspool of vitriolic comments. About the most entertaining thing was listening to the old curmudgeons who were stalwart conservatives try to contort their positions to fit both their political ideology, the Trump administration's behavior and comments, and their love of nature, clean unobstructed waterways, government enforcement of catch and release, public access to streams and rivers, and general conservation of the wilds.
I may reach out to you from time to time Professor Wolff via email, as I've recently decided to go back to school at 41 and pursue a degree in philosophy (or sociology, or history, or literature, or anthropology, or who knows!). Would love to get your thoughts on the current state of higher education.
Prof Wolff, in case you missed it, Ama Green has a question in the comments on 3 April about nuclear technology.
ReplyDeleteBefore the hatchet comes down, I would like to thank Achim Kriechel for drawing my attention to Robert Sapolsky's lectures in neurobiology on Youtube.
ReplyDeleteI assume that I am one of the commenters whose comments Prof. Wolff regards as unfairly dominating the comment section with comments that are only tangentially related to his post. While I would take issue with such a characterization, it is not my decision to make and irrelevant at this point.
ReplyDeleteGiven the approaching death knell of the comment sections, I do want to address the claim by LFC and others suggesting that my opinion expressed in the prior post regarding Prof. Mills’ views is based on ignorance and a failure to actually read his tome, “The Racial Contract.” This is untrue. And what I am about to write will undoubtedly displease Prof. Wolff even more. So be it. I have in fact read a copy of the work which I borrowed from the library last year, and read more than half of it, until I got to the following passage on pp. 101-103 (more than 50% of the 133 p. book) at which point I stopped reading it and have no intention to resume reading it (I made a copy of the passage in question, just for an occasion such as this):
“For these and many other horrors too numerous to list [the previously referred to ‘pattern of unpunished rape, torture, and massacre in the twentieth-century colonial/neocolonial and in part racial wars’], the ideal Kantian (social contract) norm of the infinite value of all human life thus has to be rewritten to reflect the actual (Racial Contract) norm of the far greater value of white life, and the corresponding crystallization of feelings of vastly differential outrage over white and nonwhite death, white and nonwhite suffering. If looking back (or sometimes just looking across), one writes to ask “But how could they?” the answer is that it is easy once a certain social ontology has been created. Bewilderment and puzzlement show that one is taking for granted the morality of the literal social contract as a norm, once one begins from the Racial Contract, the mystery evaporates. The Racial Contract thus makes White moral psychology transparent; one is not continually being “surprised” when one examines the historical record, because this is the psychology the contract prescribes. (The theory of the Racial Contract is not cynical, because cynicism really implies theoretical breakdown, a despairing throwing up of the hands and a renunciation of the project of understanding the world and human evil for a mystified yearning for a prelapsian man. The “Racial Contract” is simply realist – willing to look at the facts without flinching, to explain that if you start with this, then you will end up with that.)
(Continued)
“Similarly, the Racial Contract makes the Jewish Holocaust – misleadingly designated as the Holocaust – comprehensible, distancing itself theoretically both from positions that would render it cognitively opaque, inexplicably sui generis, and from positions that would downplay the racial dimension and assimilate it to the undifferentiated terrorism of German fascism. From the clouded perspective of the Third World, the question in Arno Mayer’s title Why Did the Heavens Not Darken betrays a climatic Eurocentrism, which fails to recognize that the blue skies were only smiling on Europe. The influential view he cites (not his own) is typical: “Prima facie the catastrophe which befell the Jews during the Second World War was unique in its own time and unprecedented in history. There are strong reasons to believe that the victimization of the Jews was so enormous and atrocious as to be completely outside the bounds of all other human experience. If that is the case, what the Jews were subjected to will forever defy historical reconstruction and interpretation, let alone comprehension.”30 But this represents an astonishing wite amnesia about the actual historical record. Likewise, the despairing question of how there can by poetry after Auschwitz evokes the puzzled nonwhite reply of how there could have been poetry before Auschwitz, and after the killing fields in America, Africa, Asia. The standpoint of Native America, black Africa, colonial Asia, has always been aware that European civilization rests on European barbarism, so that the Jewish Holocaust, the “Judeocide” (Mayer), is by no means a bolt from the blue, an unfathomable anomaly in the development of the West, but unique only in that it represents use of the Racial Contract against Europeans. I say this in no way to diminish its horror, of course, but rather to deny its singularity, to establish its conceptual identity with other policies carried out by Europe in non-Europe for hundreds of years, but using methods less efficient than those made possible by advanced mid-twentieth-century industrial society.
ReplyDelete“30 Mayer, Why Did the Heavens! Pp. 15-16. Mayer [Professor emeritus of European history and diplomatic history at Princeton] is reporting rather than endorsing this view, since his own account seeks to locate the “Judeocide” in the context of Hitler’s anticommunism and the extreme violence in Europe during and after the Great War. His explanation is a purely internalist one, jumping three centuries from the Thirty Years War (1618-48) to the aftermath of the Great War, with no attention paid to the racial violence inflicted by Europe on non-Europe in the interim. But in our own century, just before World War I, there were the examples of the Belgian-made holocaust in the Congo and the Germans’ own genocide of the Hereros after the 1904 uprising.”
(Continued)
We are not Pollyanna teen-agers here, believing idealistically that some racial, ethnic or religious groups are incapable of having bigots. There are Jewish bigots, Chinese bigots, American and European bigots – and yes, there are even Black bigots. I am 74 years of age, and I have seen my share of racism and anti-Semitism, and I can recognize a bigot and an anti-Semite by their words. Prof. Mills was a Black racist and anti-Semite, who tried to disguise his racism and anti-Semitism in scholarly language intended to impress the academic world that he was offering a unique revision of the concept of the Social Contract. But it is not in the same category as the political philosophies of Locke, Hobbes or Rousseau – and that is not because they were White and he was Black. It is the job of academics to point out the truth, and not to avoid doing so because it may appear indiscreet or impolitic. Prof. Mills does not deserve the praise and accolades you have accorded him, Prof. Wolff. And his work most certainly does not deserve to be the centerpiece of a lecture you are preparing to present to a class of graduate law students. I urge you to rethink your assessment of Prof. Mills and reconsider offering his work as “extraordinary” and “brilliant.” It is not.
ReplyDeleteAA
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to engage in a debate, just state my own view.
First, a clarification: I really didn't know whether you'd read the book or not. I said *I* hadn't read it. Since you didn't say that you had, I tended to think you hadn't, since you seemed to be "over-reading" the passage in the previous post.
Second, I assume you have some familiarity with some of the historical writing about the Holocaust, and I think it's fair to say that there is still debate among historians about how to place it in history, about its uniqueness or not, singularity or not -- at least, that's my impression. Mills obviously, from what you've quoted, takes a certain position on that issue. One has to have an extremely broad definition of antisemitism to label anyone an antisemite who argues that the Holocaust shares a "conceptual identity" with the way (some) Europeans treated non-Europeans across the centuries. You can reasonably, and strongly, disagree with that view (and clearly Jews were the victims of systematic persecution and massacres for centuries before WW2, as you point out). But there is a difference between being wrong about the singularity of the Holocaust (assuming here for the moment that Mills' position on that is wrong) and being an anti-Semite. That's my view at any rate.
I think it's fairly certain, btw, that Prof Wolff is not going to change his assessment of the Mills book because of what anyone writes in the comments. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if he's stopped reading the comments altogether.
LFC,
ReplyDeleteLet me ask you this question. If a writer expressed the view that the history of lynchings in the South and the brutal murder of Emmett Till, as horrific as these events were, do not compare to the slaughter of Jews which was committed by the Nazis, would you not conclude that the writer was a racist towards African-Americans? I certainly would. So why are you willing to let Prof. Mills off the hook when he claims that the use of the expression “the Holocaust” is unjustified because it was not as unique an event of the slaughter of people due to their race or ethnicity in history and ignores the slaughter of Africans by the colonial powers? Not being Jewish, perhaps you do not have the antenna for discerning such things as I and many other Jews do, and only an overly scrupulous concern about being accused of being indiscreet prevents many from stating what I regard as the obvious. Prof. Mills was an anti-Semite, and an anti-White racist, and I have no compunction is so stating, regardless whether it changes Prof. Wolff’s opinion of Prof. Mills or not.
Professor Wolff,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your posts & allowing everyone to comment as long as they have been able to at your website. In the future, please feel free to bring back your blog's 'comment option' if you believe that such an option, although maybe not to your fullest satisfaction, does add a certain charm or missing meat (& Socratic fat) to your regular blog posts.
First, thank you for your blog. Always a good place on the internet to check in with. Perhaps a period with no comments will set the stage for a renewed season of commentary - maybe with ground rules. If this is to be my last comment forever, allow me to delight in taking a poke at those who wish to remain anonymous and still leave detritus of their musings.
ReplyDeleteWell, you put up with us for a long time. Thank you for that too. And thanks to the others who have broaden this blog into a little family of sorts, with members coming and going, clashing at times and rushing, as might a comrade, to a sibling's defense. jerryfresia@hotmail.com
I seldom comment myself, but generally I like the comment section.
ReplyDeleteI think of it in this way. Your post of the day is what I come for, and read in full, so I 'attend' your blog as for example a lecture hall. The comments section is then a bit like watching groups of people chat along - generally in af friendly fashion - after a lecture by the main speaker. I can then choose to join one or more of the discussions at will. I sometimes do (engage, reading the comments), and sometimes don't. When I do, I learn something, and I do think it is fun to get perspectives from people who sit in another part of the world, with different backgrounds.
Cheers to you all,
trane
First, I'll join the others above in thanking Prof Wolff for his posts.
ReplyDeleteSecond, to AA: as it happens, I am Jewish. Both my parents were, and though I wasn't brought up in a religious atmosphere I did go to Hebrew school and had a bar mitzvah. (Today I feel few or no ties to the organized religion and am unobservant.) I'm not going to continue the discussion of Mills with you. I've said what I have to say and your position is also clear.
P.s. Someone looking at my resume/c.v. might assume I'm Catholic because I spent time as a student (not as an undergrad) at The Catholic Univ. of America. But, obviously (see the comment above), I'm not Catholic. I don't like to get this personal usually, but I felt it necessary in view of what AA said above.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy comments directly related to the original post, whether or not I agree with them. I don't enjoy when comments become conversations/debates/arguments. I am not personally a fan of the comments section as a forum. That is a different internet format.
ReplyDeleteI would prefer that if people wanted to go back and forth they do so via email, so I think I understand Prof. Wolff's frustration.
I enjoy this post
ReplyDelete