This is a further elaboration of the reply I posted to Ann's comment on my long post, "Where We Are Now." It is natural to focus one's attention on the Tea Partiers, and to decry their looniness. But it would be a very serious mistake to imagine that the fundamental shape of American foreign and domestic affairs has been importantly shaped by them and their many predecessors. If one wishes to locate the roots of our policy of permanent war, look to the Foreign Affairs Council, to the sober, respectable, moderate, thoughtful men and women of American public life, to William Fulbright and Mike Mansfield, to Joe Biden and Madeleine Albright, to Hillary Clinton and Zbigniew Brzezinski, yes even to Henry Kissinger. Look to every Senator who has ever chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or Senate Armed Services Committee, to every Secretary of Defense since the post was created. I cannot think of a single major public figure since World War II who has questioned the foundations of American foreign policy [with the possible exception of Henry Wallace, but I am not sure about him --- I was only fourteen at the time.]
For a while, to be sure, American military policy was driven by the objective technological facts of the delivery of nuclear warheads. But that technology settled down forty years ago. [If anyone is actually interested in this, I would be happy to post a long explanation. At one point in my life, I was an expert on the subject, and wrote a book about it that I never succeeded in getting published.]
The crazies in American politics are dangerous, but they are not the explanation for the shape of post-World War II American foreign and military policy. Nor, needless to say, are they and their ilk the cause of economic inequality in America, any more than fever blisters are the cause of an infection.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
BRAGGING
I have won 130 games of FreeCell in a row, and counting, without using the undo feature. Not bad for an old guy! And you thought I just meditated on the eternal verities.
Monday, February 8, 2010
WHERE WE ARE NOW
It is difficult, in the midst of the flood of information and commentary on public affairs, to maintain any distance from the immediate moment. As a philosopher, I am supposed, professionally, to view things sub specie aeternitatis, or at least within a time frame more extended than that of a Mayfly, but I do not have a Merlin who can change me into a mountain, as he did to Wart [the little Arthur] in The Sword in the Stone, so that the future king could see things from their perspective.
Nevertheless, in this post, I propose to step back from the moment and ask, of this country and its people, Where are we? And, perhaps more to the point, Why are we? I am now seventy-six years old, and though that does not give me the perspective of a mountain, or even of a redwood tree, it does allow me to achieve some distance from the affairs of the moment.
The first thing to recognize is that the United States has been continuously at war for close on to sixty-eight years, and there is in this country neither the will nor the interest in bringing this condition of war to an end. It might be objected that though, to be sure, there have been periods during that seven decades when we were at war, there have, after all, been as well periods of peace. But I think that is a faulty construal of the situation in which we find ourselves. Since the seventh of December, 1941 [a day, as Franklin Roosevelt said, that shall live in infamy], this nation has been on a war footing. Indeed, it has been at war. I take as my authority here the great English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who, in the thirteenth chapter of the First Part of his masterpiece, Leviathan, wrote these words:
"For WAR consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time, is to be considered in the nature of war; as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE."
Why have we been at war continuously for seven decades? The conventional answer is that we have been confronted first by the threat posed by the Soviet Union, and then, when that passed, by the threat [conveniently] posed by militant Islam. But neither of those claims is true. The Soviet Union was a territorially continuous empire whose rulers exhibited no interest in engaging militarily beyond the contiguous area they ruled at the end of the Second World War. Unlike the United States, which has repeatedly sent troops beyond its borders since 1945, and indeed has permanent garrisons of its troops in nations around the world, the Soviet Union ventured only once beyond its contiguous sphere of influence, and that, after all, was into a country -- Afghanistan -- that has common borders with three of what were then Soviet Socialist Republics -- viz., Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.
The permanent war footing of the United States since World War II has wrought enormous, devastating, and irreversible changes in the politics, economics, and culture of this country. The most immediately obvious effect of the endless war is a dramatic shift in the power exercised by the three branches of government. The Constitution was written so as to severely rein in the powers of the executive. Although the President was designated as Commander in Chief, the power to declare war was reserved for the Congress, and that, together with their control of the purse strings and the power to impeach, try, convict, and remove officers of the other two branches guaranteed, the founders thought, the ascendancy of Congress in the American political system. This balance was upset during the Civil War, but then immediately reestablished itself one the war was ended. In our world today, the Presidency looms large, with unlimited power to make war, total control of the information needed to judge the wisdom of military action, and -- with the current compliant Supreme Court majority -- liberty to ignore the few restraints on presidential power that have survived three quarters of a century of war. Let us understand that this is in no way a point of contention between Democrats and Republicans. The permanent war was launched under Harry Truman, continued [though with hesitation and concern] by Dwight Eisenhower, expanded by Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and reaffirmed by every subsequent president, up to and including Barack Obama. War has long since become its own justification in America.
The economic dislocations occasioned by permanent war have distorted American society in two ways: First, unimaginable quantities of resources, over seventy years, have been diverted from socially productive uses to what is essentially waste, thereby dramatically lowering the standard of living of most Americans and all but destroying the public infrastructure of America; and Second, the processes of allocation and expenditure of these vast sums has made every state in the Union, and therefore every politician in America, dependent on the continuation of the war economy. It is not even possible, save by the sort of fantasy thinking that economists call economic modeling, to form a coherent idea of what America might look like now, had it not embarked seventy years ago on a policy of permanent war.
As for the culture of America, it is thoroughly steeped in and interpenetrated by martial imagery. America has become the Sparta of the modern world.
The second thing that stands out as we strive for perspective on the condition of America is that this country no longer has a strong, effective labor movement capable of constraining and combating the pernicious effects of unrestrained capitalism. [I am not talking about a revolutionary movement, aimed at replacing capitalism with another form of economic organization. I reserve such dreams for the night time hours.] It had such a movement at one time, of course, even though labor unions have never managed to organize the preponderance of American workers. The pyramidal distribution of wages and salaries in the United States has remained fundamentally unchanged for a century, save for a widening of the gap between the rich and everyone else in the past twenty years. But despite the frenzied and absurd right wing talk about "Obama the socialist," there is no serious energy anywhere in America for an overturning of the present structure of economic inequality.
In summary, America is a nation on an unnecessary and unjustifiable permanent war footing, with an economy characterized by large and growing inequality. It is, to state it clearly and openly, not a country I can happily call my own. My time horizon is necessarily somewhat foreshortened, since even under the best of circumstances I have only another two decades or less to live. But it is impossible for me to imagine that these two fundamental facts about America -- permanent war and deep inequality -- will change in any significant way in the lifetimes of my children, or even of their children.
What is to be done? [If I may echo Lenin.]
Despair is not a plan. It is a sentiment. Revolution is not an option. It is a fantasy. What remains is incremental action to ameliorate evils, reduce suffering, and protect the vulnerable, all the while recognizing that even many successes will not alter the framework within which we are condemned to live our lives. There is some comfort for me, but precious little, in the knowledge that I have been questioning the justifications offered for the war footing and for the economic inequality at least since the late 1950's. Were I fortunate enough to believe in God, I could comfort myself with thoughts of a heavenly reward. As it is, the most I can do is utter a loud and self-justificatory "I told you so!"
Nevertheless, in this post, I propose to step back from the moment and ask, of this country and its people, Where are we? And, perhaps more to the point, Why are we? I am now seventy-six years old, and though that does not give me the perspective of a mountain, or even of a redwood tree, it does allow me to achieve some distance from the affairs of the moment.
The first thing to recognize is that the United States has been continuously at war for close on to sixty-eight years, and there is in this country neither the will nor the interest in bringing this condition of war to an end. It might be objected that though, to be sure, there have been periods during that seven decades when we were at war, there have, after all, been as well periods of peace. But I think that is a faulty construal of the situation in which we find ourselves. Since the seventh of December, 1941 [a day, as Franklin Roosevelt said, that shall live in infamy], this nation has been on a war footing. Indeed, it has been at war. I take as my authority here the great English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who, in the thirteenth chapter of the First Part of his masterpiece, Leviathan, wrote these words:
"For WAR consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time, is to be considered in the nature of war; as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE."
Why have we been at war continuously for seven decades? The conventional answer is that we have been confronted first by the threat posed by the Soviet Union, and then, when that passed, by the threat [conveniently] posed by militant Islam. But neither of those claims is true. The Soviet Union was a territorially continuous empire whose rulers exhibited no interest in engaging militarily beyond the contiguous area they ruled at the end of the Second World War. Unlike the United States, which has repeatedly sent troops beyond its borders since 1945, and indeed has permanent garrisons of its troops in nations around the world, the Soviet Union ventured only once beyond its contiguous sphere of influence, and that, after all, was into a country -- Afghanistan -- that has common borders with three of what were then Soviet Socialist Republics -- viz., Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.
The permanent war footing of the United States since World War II has wrought enormous, devastating, and irreversible changes in the politics, economics, and culture of this country. The most immediately obvious effect of the endless war is a dramatic shift in the power exercised by the three branches of government. The Constitution was written so as to severely rein in the powers of the executive. Although the President was designated as Commander in Chief, the power to declare war was reserved for the Congress, and that, together with their control of the purse strings and the power to impeach, try, convict, and remove officers of the other two branches guaranteed, the founders thought, the ascendancy of Congress in the American political system. This balance was upset during the Civil War, but then immediately reestablished itself one the war was ended. In our world today, the Presidency looms large, with unlimited power to make war, total control of the information needed to judge the wisdom of military action, and -- with the current compliant Supreme Court majority -- liberty to ignore the few restraints on presidential power that have survived three quarters of a century of war. Let us understand that this is in no way a point of contention between Democrats and Republicans. The permanent war was launched under Harry Truman, continued [though with hesitation and concern] by Dwight Eisenhower, expanded by Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and reaffirmed by every subsequent president, up to and including Barack Obama. War has long since become its own justification in America.
The economic dislocations occasioned by permanent war have distorted American society in two ways: First, unimaginable quantities of resources, over seventy years, have been diverted from socially productive uses to what is essentially waste, thereby dramatically lowering the standard of living of most Americans and all but destroying the public infrastructure of America; and Second, the processes of allocation and expenditure of these vast sums has made every state in the Union, and therefore every politician in America, dependent on the continuation of the war economy. It is not even possible, save by the sort of fantasy thinking that economists call economic modeling, to form a coherent idea of what America might look like now, had it not embarked seventy years ago on a policy of permanent war.
As for the culture of America, it is thoroughly steeped in and interpenetrated by martial imagery. America has become the Sparta of the modern world.
The second thing that stands out as we strive for perspective on the condition of America is that this country no longer has a strong, effective labor movement capable of constraining and combating the pernicious effects of unrestrained capitalism. [I am not talking about a revolutionary movement, aimed at replacing capitalism with another form of economic organization. I reserve such dreams for the night time hours.] It had such a movement at one time, of course, even though labor unions have never managed to organize the preponderance of American workers. The pyramidal distribution of wages and salaries in the United States has remained fundamentally unchanged for a century, save for a widening of the gap between the rich and everyone else in the past twenty years. But despite the frenzied and absurd right wing talk about "Obama the socialist," there is no serious energy anywhere in America for an overturning of the present structure of economic inequality.
In summary, America is a nation on an unnecessary and unjustifiable permanent war footing, with an economy characterized by large and growing inequality. It is, to state it clearly and openly, not a country I can happily call my own. My time horizon is necessarily somewhat foreshortened, since even under the best of circumstances I have only another two decades or less to live. But it is impossible for me to imagine that these two fundamental facts about America -- permanent war and deep inequality -- will change in any significant way in the lifetimes of my children, or even of their children.
What is to be done? [If I may echo Lenin.]
Despair is not a plan. It is a sentiment. Revolution is not an option. It is a fantasy. What remains is incremental action to ameliorate evils, reduce suffering, and protect the vulnerable, all the while recognizing that even many successes will not alter the framework within which we are condemned to live our lives. There is some comfort for me, but precious little, in the knowledge that I have been questioning the justifications offered for the war footing and for the economic inequality at least since the late 1950's. Were I fortunate enough to believe in God, I could comfort myself with thoughts of a heavenly reward. As it is, the most I can do is utter a loud and self-justificatory "I told you so!"
Sunday, February 7, 2010
ADVERTISEMENT FOR MYSELF
In 1959, Norman Mailer published a collection of short pieces to which he gave the deliciously ironic title Advertisements for Myself. This morning, I was re-reading my little book, Moneybags Must Be So Lucky, in preparation for the class I shall teach Wednesday evening on Chapter One of Das Kapital. Moneybags is a very short book, a mere 82 pages, consisting of the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Lectures, delivered at the University of Massachusetts in 1984-85, and published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1988.
In 1739-40, David Hume published anonymously the three volumes of A Treatise of Human Nature, far and away the greatest work of philosophy ever written in the English language. Desperately eager for literary success, he was deeply disappointed by its reception, and later said of it that it "fell still-born from the presses," a phrase that will resonate with every author who has ever anxiously awaited reviews.
My little book cannot even be said to have had an unfavorable reception, for it had virtually no reception at all. It was not noticed, save for one rather favorable review by George Scialabba in The Village Voice [!!], and if the royalty reports are to be trusted, has not yet managed, twenty-two years later, to sell one thousand copies.
And yet, and yet. If I am any sort of judge of literary and intellectual merit, it is, page for page, the best thing I have ever written. It is also, I am absolutely confident, the best thing anyone has ever written about the literary, philosophical, and theoretical dimensions of the first several chapters of volume one of Marx's great work.
Even in the select circle of close friends and former students who form the readership of this blog, I cannot assume much awareness of my little failed book, so let me quote several passages that I think are especially well-written. This entire blog post is so embarrassingly and nakedly self-promoting that I shall not even attempt a feeble excuse. Put it down, if you must, to an old man's intimation of mortality.
In 1739-40, David Hume published anonymously the three volumes of A Treatise of Human Nature, far and away the greatest work of philosophy ever written in the English language. Desperately eager for literary success, he was deeply disappointed by its reception, and later said of it that it "fell still-born from the presses," a phrase that will resonate with every author who has ever anxiously awaited reviews.
My little book cannot even be said to have had an unfavorable reception, for it had virtually no reception at all. It was not noticed, save for one rather favorable review by George Scialabba in The Village Voice [!!], and if the royalty reports are to be trusted, has not yet managed, twenty-two years later, to sell one thousand copies.
And yet, and yet. If I am any sort of judge of literary and intellectual merit, it is, page for page, the best thing I have ever written. It is also, I am absolutely confident, the best thing anyone has ever written about the literary, philosophical, and theoretical dimensions of the first several chapters of volume one of Marx's great work.
Even in the select circle of close friends and former students who form the readership of this blog, I cannot assume much awareness of my little failed book, so let me quote several passages that I think are especially well-written. This entire blog post is so embarrassingly and nakedly self-promoting that I shall not even attempt a feeble excuse. Put it down, if you must, to an old man's intimation of mortality.
In the first chapter, I am talking about the relationship between the literary resources of a language and the conception of reality that the language is being used to articulate. I choose as an example the language of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century:
"The metaphysical poets conceived the universe as having been created by God in such a way,and according to such a plan, as to establish an endless series of correspondences or parallels among the most disparate elements of the creation. As the moon shines by the reflected light of the sun, so the subjects of a great monarch shine by his reflected glory, and so too does the lover live in light or shadow as his beloved bestows upon him the radiance of her smile. As the sun rises in the East, heralding the start of an earthly day, so the crucified Christ, God's Son, rose in the East to heaven, heralding thereby the dawn of a new day in the spiritual life of the world; so, eventually, do we hope to rise to heaven to begin the endless day that awaits us beyond the night of the grave."
And here is a second passage, from near the end of the third lecture. I am trying to explicate Marx's difficult and puzzling claim that the concepts of "commodity" and "value," though verruckt [crack-brained, crazy], are nevertheless socially real and therefore objectively valid. Throughout the early chapters of Capital, Marx repeatedly uses religious metaphors and allusions to communicate his conviction that the marketplace is as fully mystified as the altar ever was.
"Economic efficiency demands that both entrepreneurs and merchants abstract entirely from the natural properties of the commodities they produce and sell, attending only to their exchange value. The prudent capitalist cannot allow his economic decisions to be influenced by his normal human responses to the accidents of his wares. The tailor in love with his worsteds is no better than a whiskey priest drunk on sacramental wine. A sensuous affection for fine cloth, lingering on from a precapitalist craft pride, may incline him to a more costly suiting than the market demand justifies. Soon he will find himself driven to the wall by rational tailors whose fingers are numb to the feel of good wool, but whose metaphysical consciousness can discern the exact quantum of value in each yard of goods."
Nobody, I think, has ever written like this about Marx. And no one else has ever deciphered, as I do in the final chapter, the famously mysterious discussion of the Relative Form and the Equivalent Form of Value, all while explicating it by means of an old Jewish joke.
By way of contrast, my best known book, In Defense of Anarchism, has sold more than 200,000 copies in English, and exists now in fifteen languages, including Croatian, Korean, and Malaysian.
Sigh. I am reduced, as Norman Mailer would have it, to taking out advertisements for myself.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
STRUGGLING TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD IN WHICH I LIVE
Markos Moulitsas, founder and proprietor of THE DAILY KOS website, recently commissioned a poll of 2000+ self-identified Republicans in an attempt to find out what they believe. 36% think Obama was not born in the United States and 22% aren't sure. 63% think Obama is a socialist and 21% are not sure. 21% believe ACORN stole the 2008 election and 55% are not sure. And so forth.
There is a quite natural tendency to conclude that there are scores of millions of truly insane people in America [and that is just on the right!] Now, I do not take a back seat to anyone in my despair at the mindset of my fellow Americans, but as I mulled over the results of this poll, I found myself thinking both about the earlier poll showing that most Americans have no idea that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to block a filibuster, and about an old article on public opinion polling by David Riesman, an important sociologist of an earlier time. [I actually knew Riesman when I was at Harvard, but that is four or five other stories.]
So bear with me, as I try very hard to interpret all of this in a way that does not lead to the conclusion that America is a looney bin.
Riesman first. Very early on in the development of public opinion polling, Riesman pointed out that there is an important element of face and social standing lying behind the results of polls. What interested him was the fact that public opinion could swing so dramatically from one side of a question to the other in no more than a few weeks. His explanation was this: When a pollster comes to the door and asks for the homeowner's opinion about Red China or the Middle East or Health Care Reform, there is a good chance that the respondent won't know anything at all about the subject and will have no opinion, at least as we ordinarily understand having an opinion. But the poll taker is likely to present himself or herself as a middle class professional [we are talking 1950's here], and the person who has come to the door will be embarrassed simply to say, "I have no idea." He or she will know perfectly well that having opinions about things like that is a sign of social status. Rich people, upper class people, have opinions. So the respondent will cough up an answer, possibly choosing one of the offered possibilities on the basis of something vaguely recalled from television or the newspaper headlines. Two weeks later, when another poll is conducted, if in the interim something has caught everyone's attention that inclines in the other direction, the poll will seem to show a big sudden shift of opinion. But in fact, all it shows is that neither the respondents to the first poll nor the respondents to the second poll actually have any sort of opinion at all.
This idea is supported, I think, by that poll about filibusters in the Senate. If three quarters of the people polled don't know that it takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster, then I think we can conclude that that 75% really know next to nothing about what is going on in the public world.
Now look at the poll commissioned by Moulitsas. There are a great many self-identified Republicans who are very, very unhappy about America. They hate the fact that Obama is president, they hate the fact that people are talking openly about same sex marriage, they hate the fact that people are losing their jobs and their houses. And someone calls them on the phone [I don't think people knock on doors any more] and asks them a series of questions,. They may be ignorant, but these folks are not stupid. They understand perfectly well that a "no" to the question, "Was Obama born in the United States?" is an anti-Obama answer. They know that "socialist" is a swear word, and one that one is permitted to use in public. So, not being offered the opportunity to say, "Yes, Obama is an a**hole," they do the next best thing and say "Yes, Obama is a socialist and he was not born in this country." The informational content of that answer is nil, but the emotive content is rich and full.
I venture to guess that if Moulitsas had commissioned a poll that asked, "Do you think Obama kills little white babies and drinks their blood," some significant non-trivial percentage would have said "yes," and a much larger percentage would have answered "I don't know." It goes without saying that there would have been a big yes vote for "Is Obama in league with the Devil?" but that might just indicate a particular theological orientation.
Polls are frequently a good indicator of feelings, if properly interpreted, but they are often no indicators at all of informed opinion. On the other hand, a poll asking which American Idol candidate the respondents support, or who is going to win the Super Bowl, may very well elicit genuinely informed opinions.
Does this make me feel any better? Well, ignorant is better than crazy [I think].
There is a quite natural tendency to conclude that there are scores of millions of truly insane people in America [and that is just on the right!] Now, I do not take a back seat to anyone in my despair at the mindset of my fellow Americans, but as I mulled over the results of this poll, I found myself thinking both about the earlier poll showing that most Americans have no idea that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to block a filibuster, and about an old article on public opinion polling by David Riesman, an important sociologist of an earlier time. [I actually knew Riesman when I was at Harvard, but that is four or five other stories.]
So bear with me, as I try very hard to interpret all of this in a way that does not lead to the conclusion that America is a looney bin.
Riesman first. Very early on in the development of public opinion polling, Riesman pointed out that there is an important element of face and social standing lying behind the results of polls. What interested him was the fact that public opinion could swing so dramatically from one side of a question to the other in no more than a few weeks. His explanation was this: When a pollster comes to the door and asks for the homeowner's opinion about Red China or the Middle East or Health Care Reform, there is a good chance that the respondent won't know anything at all about the subject and will have no opinion, at least as we ordinarily understand having an opinion. But the poll taker is likely to present himself or herself as a middle class professional [we are talking 1950's here], and the person who has come to the door will be embarrassed simply to say, "I have no idea." He or she will know perfectly well that having opinions about things like that is a sign of social status. Rich people, upper class people, have opinions. So the respondent will cough up an answer, possibly choosing one of the offered possibilities on the basis of something vaguely recalled from television or the newspaper headlines. Two weeks later, when another poll is conducted, if in the interim something has caught everyone's attention that inclines in the other direction, the poll will seem to show a big sudden shift of opinion. But in fact, all it shows is that neither the respondents to the first poll nor the respondents to the second poll actually have any sort of opinion at all.
This idea is supported, I think, by that poll about filibusters in the Senate. If three quarters of the people polled don't know that it takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster, then I think we can conclude that that 75% really know next to nothing about what is going on in the public world.
Now look at the poll commissioned by Moulitsas. There are a great many self-identified Republicans who are very, very unhappy about America. They hate the fact that Obama is president, they hate the fact that people are talking openly about same sex marriage, they hate the fact that people are losing their jobs and their houses. And someone calls them on the phone [I don't think people knock on doors any more] and asks them a series of questions,. They may be ignorant, but these folks are not stupid. They understand perfectly well that a "no" to the question, "Was Obama born in the United States?" is an anti-Obama answer. They know that "socialist" is a swear word, and one that one is permitted to use in public. So, not being offered the opportunity to say, "Yes, Obama is an a**hole," they do the next best thing and say "Yes, Obama is a socialist and he was not born in this country." The informational content of that answer is nil, but the emotive content is rich and full.
I venture to guess that if Moulitsas had commissioned a poll that asked, "Do you think Obama kills little white babies and drinks their blood," some significant non-trivial percentage would have said "yes," and a much larger percentage would have answered "I don't know." It goes without saying that there would have been a big yes vote for "Is Obama in league with the Devil?" but that might just indicate a particular theological orientation.
Polls are frequently a good indicator of feelings, if properly interpreted, but they are often no indicators at all of informed opinion. On the other hand, a poll asking which American Idol candidate the respondents support, or who is going to win the Super Bowl, may very well elicit genuinely informed opinions.
Does this make me feel any better? Well, ignorant is better than crazy [I think].
Thursday, February 4, 2010
HOME AGAIN
I am home after a quick, very busy, exhausting, but quite rewarding visit to Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. I gave two talks, both of which were videotaped and recorded. I have been told that they will be posted on a Marist server, and that I will be given links to them. If that in fact happens, I shall review them, and if they are not totally appalling, I will post the links.
The first talk was a great success and a total failure. It was supposed to be a very high level technical discussion of a paper I have written on Kant's ethical, legal, and political theory. I sent the paper ahead to the Philosophy Department, and they discussed it in anticipation of the session. But when I showed up Tuesday evening, I discovered that the audience was utterly different from what I had expected, and that almost none of them even knew about the paper. A large group were students taking an on-line philosophy course and using my textbook, ABOUT PHILOSOPHY. They were there to meet their Instructor for the first time, as well as to meet the author of their textbook. It was wonderful and rather comic to see the Instructor say, "Hello, I am your Instructor, and here is the author of your textbook." In the thirty-five years that the textbook has been in existence, I have never met a group of students using it! So it was wonderful for me. Another group of people simply came to hear me because my talk was announced locally. And then there were the handful of people who really expected a serious discussion about Kant.
How on earthy was I going to speak to this heterogeneous group in such a way as not totally to mystify and alienate most of them? I decided to wing it. The first question got me started. A man sitting near the back of the group [there were maybe thirty or more people in the audience] asked, "Are you an atheist?"
That gave me an opening to deliver a long monologue on the nature of religious faith. A student taking a course on Marx, among other authors, asked me what people meant when they said Marx had stood Hegel on his head. Well, I could handle that one! By the end of the evening, I think everyone had had a pretty good time, even though the philosophers never did get the serious Kant discussion they came for.
The second talk, on Wednesday, was much more straightforward. I gave a formal lecture on "What Good is a Liberal Education?" that draws on ideas in the writings of Freud, Marx, and Marcuse to answer the question. I hope I can post that one. It really might provoke an interesting discussion on this blog.
Many, many thanks to Ann Davis for arranging all of this.
Oh, by the way, it was no colder in Poughkeepsie than it was when I left in Chapel Hill!
The first talk was a great success and a total failure. It was supposed to be a very high level technical discussion of a paper I have written on Kant's ethical, legal, and political theory. I sent the paper ahead to the Philosophy Department, and they discussed it in anticipation of the session. But when I showed up Tuesday evening, I discovered that the audience was utterly different from what I had expected, and that almost none of them even knew about the paper. A large group were students taking an on-line philosophy course and using my textbook, ABOUT PHILOSOPHY. They were there to meet their Instructor for the first time, as well as to meet the author of their textbook. It was wonderful and rather comic to see the Instructor say, "Hello, I am your Instructor, and here is the author of your textbook." In the thirty-five years that the textbook has been in existence, I have never met a group of students using it! So it was wonderful for me. Another group of people simply came to hear me because my talk was announced locally. And then there were the handful of people who really expected a serious discussion about Kant.
How on earthy was I going to speak to this heterogeneous group in such a way as not totally to mystify and alienate most of them? I decided to wing it. The first question got me started. A man sitting near the back of the group [there were maybe thirty or more people in the audience] asked, "Are you an atheist?"
That gave me an opening to deliver a long monologue on the nature of religious faith. A student taking a course on Marx, among other authors, asked me what people meant when they said Marx had stood Hegel on his head. Well, I could handle that one! By the end of the evening, I think everyone had had a pretty good time, even though the philosophers never did get the serious Kant discussion they came for.
The second talk, on Wednesday, was much more straightforward. I gave a formal lecture on "What Good is a Liberal Education?" that draws on ideas in the writings of Freud, Marx, and Marcuse to answer the question. I hope I can post that one. It really might provoke an interesting discussion on this blog.
Many, many thanks to Ann Davis for arranging all of this.
Oh, by the way, it was no colder in Poughkeepsie than it was when I left in Chapel Hill!
Monday, February 1, 2010
OFF TO POUGHKEEPSIE
Tomorrow well before the crack of dawn, I shall head to Marist College in Poughkeepsie to give two talks. The second one, "What Good is a Liberal Education?," has some rather unusual ideas in it, drawing on Marx, Freud, and Marcuse. Indeed, it is in its way a good example of the Frankfort School project of achieving a union of the insights of Marx and Freud. When I get home, I shall post on this blog the part of the talk that deals directly with those ideas. I will be very interested to see both what sort of response it gets at Marist and what reaction it provokes on this blog.
Meanwhile, I wait forlornly for the Congressional Democrats to do SOMETHING about health care reform.
Meanwhile, I wait forlornly for the Congressional Democrats to do SOMETHING about health care reform.
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