Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

q:

is 'confusion' / 'wavering' / possibly 'hovering' between something like abstractions and reality, empty metaphysical ideas and concrete life, etc etc, a pretty standard marxian complaint / point of critique?

do you mean this in the "thesis 11" sense or a Marxist complaint about competing theories not drawing that distinction clearly enough?

whew that's over my head holmes, i just mean as something marxians would generally be fond of targeting ppl / thinkers / societies with

ah, well it's an interesting question! I can't answer very well since my reading in that stuff isn't all that wide--at least in regard to those specific terms you mention.

i seem to recall the latter two terms showing up a lot in the älteste systemprogramm generation / athenaeum folx, but i think the bit about confusion might be more proper to marx? for all i know that could mean an ancestry in hegel.

you know, my guess would be that your intuition re: hegel is right. prob something in the phenomenology.

Anderson's The Imperative of Integration looks extremely good. Anyone read it?

I've been reading the Invisible Committee/Tiqqun lately with some ambivalence (and extreme skepticism about their rhetorical strategies in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl), but I was impressed with Alberto Toscano's lengthy response to their latest book, To Our Friends: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/burning-dwelling-thinking

(I was thinking of posting this to HOOS's organizing thread, but IC/T isn't exactly intersectional in their approach.)

I just noticed Mordy's question from last year:

how come we could destroy the german government and not create a huge pocket of instability + violence?

In the case of WW2 it was not only the German government which had been destroyed, but the entire infrastructure of Germany. Their military defeat was rigorous and complete. The German people were refugees within their own country, unable to feed themselves, clothe themselves or house themselves, or transport people or products without assistance from their conquerors. Cooperation was essential to survival.

Further, the allied armies of occupation were on a massive scale, numbering in the millions and able to dominate the entire country. Under the circumstances, the allies had an extremely effective monopoly on force. And don't overlook the fact that those occupation forces stayed on for decades afterward.

The last factor I'd cite in the post-WW2 era was that both Germany and Japan had a well-established culture of obedience and deference to authority which could be used to advantage during their transitions to new governmental structures.

say what you will about moldbug, he's a bright, provocative guy w/ many interests historically, geopolitically, etc, which is a preamble to saying that i was reading this series this afternoon and found it very interesting (w/ the ilx-necessary caveat that i don't agree w/ much of what he says but i still feel richer for having examined it):
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives.html

There is one difference, though. To be a Catholic, you have to have faith, because no one has ever seen the Holy Ghost. To be a progressive, you have to have trust, because you believe that your worldview accurately reflects the real world - as experienced not just by your own small eyes, but by humanity as a whole.

i can imagine there are Catholics for whom the truths behind their beliefs are less important than their belief that Catholicism = morality. prove that God does not exist and they would still adhere to Catholicism because they believe it is the best way to be in the world.

i can extend the same idea to "progressives" - some of them may well believe not that their political opinions are true but that they are moral.

i'm not convinced by any arguments that morality is a product of rationality.

and inasmuch as political beliefs are moral beliefs, the attempt to rationalize them is at best disingenuous imo

interesting bc i feel like you could make the opposite argument easily (that moral beliefs are political beliefs) obv both terms are "fraught"

oh sure i think you could, i don't know if that's the opposite argument, i'm saying that i think politics and morality are very much intertwined

and neither are really grounded in the kind of scientific truth system that Moldbug claims to believe can be applied to history

for sure here are some problems w/ it: his pseudo-structuralist reading of history, the kind of inauguration into the 'truth' tone he strikes - like i think he observes certain things that maybe trouble contemporary political identities in productive ways, but i don't find his conclusions satisfying

i'm still picking thru and that was the first thing that struck me, tho i agree re: political identities - he's not creating Straw Catholics or Straw Progressives as such, but he's taking one kind of believer as representative of everybody who shares the label

i guess this struck me because of a cross-thought from the Guardian thread - for a lot of years now i've abandoned any effort to argue that my political beliefs are "correct" in a way that wd tally with scientism/positivism/whatever the best term here wd be - and i don't find positivist analyses of history/sociology/power relationships v. convincing either

Catholics are Catholics because they were raised catholic or are Tony Blair

there is that also obv but in this case they're just standing in for whatever metaphysical belief system you care to consider

tbf standing waiting to receive belief is part of the formation of a Catholics

if some kind of morality is embedded in our nature surely it's pre-rational (even if the two things happen to overlap sometimes)

From Guardian thread (since discussion seems to have moved here):

i wonder if being "right" or speaking "truth" is an important part of politics

Prob "values" (morality, ethics, one's hierarchy of "goods" or "ends") is primordial. Philosophers' efforts to identify "good" and "truth"/"reason" (or derive former from latter) not very successful. (But some of those efforts have had powerful political effects-- some "good,” some “bad.”)

But if politics is about praxis in the world to enact or meet or work toward those ends (insofar as they are practicable), then empirical social reality (and our corresponding knowledge or theorizing of it) v relevant-- anthropological, historical, socioeconomic, etc. And there concepts of "correctness" and "truth" have use and relevance. Fact/ value distinction is imo valid and irreducible; but on the other hand fact/value totally and inextricably intertwined.

Dunno, when it comes to the role of "reason" in politics I find myself wavering between like Rorty and Habermas (not clicking with either). Pragmatist post-Wittgensteinian theory gives you a way to think about politics (or have conversations about politics) but it doesn't help in terms of "what is to be done."

Moldburg does get at something important, that “values” are not just about morality (or truth) but involve cultural and aesthetic factors, like Rorty’s ethnocentrism and Wittgenstein’s “form of life.”

Just read part 1 (will read more). Moldbug's thought-provoking in a good way, but there's a lot to contest (in his premises let alone conclusions). For instance-- though I know the oversimplified dichotomy is intended-- presenting (American) conservatism and progressivism as utterly distinct viruses misses one of the things I find most interesting, their intertangled genealogy & ideology. Going back e.g. to Edmund Burke, or what it means today to be a "liberal" ("classical" or "progressive"; European or American meaning; etc.).

There's a strain of skepticism in conservatism that's imo salutary; as Moldbug says, you doesn't have to be or become a conservative to get something out of reading some (intelligent) voices on the right-- if only to better recognize your own biases and unexamined premises, not falling back on kneejerk political judgments. I've found that to be true in my case.

in some ways i think he's very damning of the right-wing, that they always ultimately sanction yesteryears progressive struggles, that there is no such thing as a revolutionary guerrilla right-wing movement (he discusses franco as a possible exception), that a lot of right wing power is illusory and easily crushed and that judging from history, it has not really put the brakes on its dialectical opposite. i'm more inclined to read these dialectics deconstructively - this is a piece of derrida's that i always liked about the mechanics of nations forgiving themselves: http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-05-24/news/the-global-theater-of-forgiveness/

imagine my surprise when i get to part 5 of this and it turns out i've been living in the theological heart of the cathedral the entire time - twist!

and now he's talking about israel + hamas so obv this was meant to be

Made it through part 3, plan to continue. He's a trip (lol a jacobite!)-- lots to argue with, lots to chew on. Feel I need to read a little further before commenting on his definition of left vs. right and his philosophy of history.

i'm embarrassed to admit i dreamt about this essay a bunch last night

image from harlem that feels relevant to moldbug's major theological claims

https://jewishphilosophyplace.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/012.jpg?w=1280&h=960

get why this is fun and it links to some interesting primary sources but it is also just the first half of the republic (you wouldn't elect a ship captain! not in a proper navy! you would use standardized tests!) with some attached nixonian muttering about new england. (in its analysis of a century stealthily dominated first by ivy-league communist flunkies of that-man and then by the weather underground it doesn't have a word to say about the ~50 years skull and bones spent setting up juntas everywhere; "i wonder why." it also reduces reagan to this single phrase, in a list of minor exceptions to the rule of right-wing failure and irrelevance: "he got his military buildup." haha.) its ideas about the camouflage (or seen another way, diffusion) of a specific strain of protestantism are probably more otm than not, but it's wrong to act like the present ruling ideology has not also been diffused into plenty by a different and harsher strain, one no less eager to call theology science. he keeps talking admiringly about how "shockingly to the right" of today everything from the past is, by which he mostly seems to mean that people were more interested in metrical justifications for racism, because in other ways the mainstream american intellectual climate of the early-to-mid-20c was well to the left of that of the early 21c. (his grandparents, he says half a dozen times, were cpusa activists; he's a monarchist blogger whose go-to example of a good dictatorial candidate is fringe pariah steve jobs. but all the other american families have been dragged left, i guess.) at the same time he talks as if the allied-soviet pact and its accompanying popular-front uncle-joe propaganda were evidence of washington's abiding love for stalinism rather than something that appeared when hitler invaded russia and disappeared when he was defeated--as if FDR's infernal reign was actually lefter than it was.

surprised he gets through the whole thing without talking much about augustus, who i would have thought was the ideal model for the lasting purgation of republican sclerosis, but i guess people don't think much of him cuz he accomplished the whole thing with ridiculous orwellian lies, which don't ring like a bell when struck with your dick. irl tho if america ever did somehow reconstitute itself as an absolute dictatorship it would be in exactly this way, so if i were a "restorationist" in search of a responsible technocrat to ruthlessly redesign the state i'd probably hope for another one of him (maybe with better sperm) before i'd hope for frederick or the king of lichtenstein. (cognitive dissonance is always unattractive but in practice i don't think the alleged perpetuation of the republic actually much interfered with roman reverence for the imperator, or with the Moral Strength needed for all that great stuff like building tall things and stomping people.) there shoulda been more gibbon here in general, honestly, espesh considering the big twist was that xtians did it. he should have cut out the parts about how future monarchical authority over the military will be assured by putting electronic code-locks on all small arms, and put in some gibbon.

american blacks are not a protected samurai-style upper class.

the pobedonostev quotes i admit impressed me; pobedonostsev is some deep reaction. i like his book too. longtime unrealized project: pen-and-paper rpg campaign set in a version of 19c russia wherein slavic mythological creatures co-exist with late-imperial politics; big bad is koschei the deathless in the form of pobedonoststev.

(sorry, should not conflate the uncle-joe wartime-allies phase with the pre-molotov/ribbentrop popular-front phase. still tho: in general this essay did not take the cold war seriously enough.)

still slowly making my way through this and would like to say something about it tomorrow, but don't know where to start. enjoyed dlh's response.

i love this fuckin guy

After four loping and windy installments, I thought this week I'd vary the formula. Instead of an open letter to open-minded progressives at large, this is an open letter to just one: Charles Stross, the science-fiction writer.

So there is no Nazi Wikipedia, but there could be. There is no Confederate Wikipedia, but there could be. And there is no Jacobite Wikipedia, but there could be.

A1 posts dlh, bless you, and let me have a copy of that rpg

dlh, i wonder if you have thoughts re dugin who seems much smarter than moldbug to me and also more relevant to yr theoretical russian RPG project

wrote like four medium-sized posts here over the past 4 days but all of them were p much bluffing, we need sharivari. posting this one so i can go back to posting transcriptions of dylan intonations without shame

i think the at bottom orthodox idea that russia has preserved the roman flame for eventual return to the corrupted catholicapitalist west is still v deep there; i think pobedonoststev's notion of a properly authoritarian orthodox east locked in 1812-style combat with an atomized bourgeois west was shared on the 19c left (cf the idea that the russian peasant village contained a Primitive Communism smothered--but preserved!--beneath petrine westernizations, the precapitalist mediterranean's gift to russia, soon to be russia's gift to the world) and by the soviets. lenin was the furthest thing from a russian nationalist, but the beef-swollen cartoon plutocrats in bolshevik propaganda are not slavs. and the necessity of revolution in germany and italy meant that it was extremely important to lenin that the new ussr come out of the civil war with a western border at least as far as warsaw; he was shaken when it didn't. (comrade socialism-in-one-country got his back on that tho, eventually, ironically.) so uh anyway my vague impression of dugin is that he is prob pretty realistic about russia's enduring political+emotional appetite for the empire it lost, found, and lost again, especially if you link it, and i mean how could you not, to a sense of moral combat against the rotted+floundering west. this just happens over and over again. i don't even mean to say it's some special russian thing because who doesn't like empire and teaching your neighbors a thing or two; and these days the russian ultra-right is ideologically strong for the same reasons the islamic ultra-right is. (and they feed each other, and they both feed ours.) moldbug's brand of IT-guy reaction (so allergic to vox populi) is nowhere near as pragmatically attuned as dugin's to the actual mass excitements and hatreds that remain the garmonbozia of the actually-successful right moldbug doesn't believe exists; but he does go in for plenty of my-god-these-animals rational-boy racism, so it's not like he's totally spurning traditional american power sources.

that's a major flaw i think in moldbug - he wants the authoritarianism but without the populist support (and fervent emotions) required to bring it about. In his perfect world I think a majority of society would intellectually come to the conclusion that authoritarian governance is better than democracy and would petition/protest for a shift but that's a totally insane thing to work towards.

i mean, a major pragmatic flaw in his program. there are much more severe moral flaws imo.

it doesnt seem that insane tbh! i mean its morally insane but--its basically what capital works toward right?

i just meant insane to expect to foment political change by appealing to the mass's intellect

yeah sure. but appeal to our love of stability and uninterrupted food supply!

maybe if the current system decays to the point where we're dealing w/ real instability + food shortages

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/19/blame-theory/

^thoughtprovoking; i’m sympathetic to much of it. (also liked another post from same blog you linked before, re whether some political phenomena are akin to religion. going to (ab)use that analogy myself here.)

some rambling halfdrunk tltr (seriously way tltr) thoughts:

agree (albeit in much more qualified & problematized way) that people— in this case academics— are “fundamentally good,” i.e. distressed by others’ suffering. SA argues that significant motive for western academic geopolitical “self-blame” (beyond theoretical or empirical merits of such etiology) is to resolve cognitive-ethical dissonance— to reconcile urgency to help others with our notions of “duty.”

bracketing (for sake of current arg) theoretical/ empirical merits of such etiology, i’d say 1) there’s something to this but also 2) more primordial motive is to make sense of suffering (others’ suffering as much as our own), find/ give meaning or reason to it. in other cultures or contexts, that might involve very different etiologies, teleologies, or ways to find/ give meaning. this intersects terrain covered on other recent ilx threads (e.g. problem of evil, theodicy, free will vs determinism, etc). there is something essentially “therapeutic” about such sense-making of suffering (even “scientific” explanation), whether it’s greek tragedy’s catharsis or marxist critique.

as nietzsche puts it in OGM (concerned precisely with genealogy of guilt etc.):

What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering: but neither for the Christian, who has interpreted a whole mysterious machinery of salvation into suffering, nor for the naïve man of more ancient times, who understood all suffering in relation to the spectator of it or the causer of it, was there any such thing as senseless suffering. So as to abolish hidden, undetected, unwitnessed suffering from the world and honestly to deny it, one was in the past virtually compelled to invent gods and genii of all the heights and depths, in short something that roams even in secret, hidden places, sees even in the dark, and will not easily let an interesting painful spectacle pass unnoticed. For it was with the aid of such inventions that life then knew how to work the trick which it has always known how to work, that of justifying itself, of justifying its “evil.” Nowadays it might require other auxiliary inventions.

SA expresses surprise that western academic explanation would take form of western self-blame (“naively we would expect people to cast themselves and those like them in as positive a light as possible”), but actually this isn’t surprising: for (post)judeochristian culture— even after “death of god”— guilt & the confession/ expiation of guilt, original sin etc., are deeply embedded paradigms for experiencing & making sense of (otherwise senseless) suffering.

cf e.g. anthropogenic climate change. on the one hand, there’s the scientific theory, scientific consensus, empirical corroboration, delimitation of explanation (and political advocacy based on current science). on the other hand, you find many in the west immediately adducing climate change to account for any natural catastrophe, even those which responsible scientists don’t find reason to ascribe to climate change.

on the one hand, there’s the science. on the other hand, there’s the urge to resort to quasi-religious sense-making/ blame-ascribing when confronted with great suffering in ANY case of natural catastrophe— whether or not it’s scientifically legitimate to claim, in the particular case, that the catastrophe is “anthropogenic” (our fault) or just “natural” “act of god” (or “act of planet,” planet of perpetual continuous catastrophe, from before human existence to after human extinction).

it’s more therapeutic to find reason to blame “ourselves” (original sin of the west, capitalism, etc)— to find reason— whether this is supported by science or not in the particular case, than face utter senselessness of horrendous suffering.

but also note how this therapeutic quasi-christian machinery of guilt enables relief or evasion from responsibility, too. guilt can be dealt with through confession or casuistry. cf eco-evangelist eco-warrior hollywood actors flitting to and fro on private planes.

also note how trickily guilt/blame can slide from self to other. for an academic to blame the “capitalist west” is as abstract & detached a form of self-blame as original sin or christ’s crucifixion is for the christian: it’s my sin in the sense that i inherit it, am complicit in it. yet (intuitively) i’m not personally responsible; i’m caught up in the postlapsarian (or capitalist) “system.”

so it’s all too easy to slide from self-guilt to other-blaming (or scapegoating): e.g. to blame the jews (or jewish bankers, etc).

so there’s a dark side to the western academic self-blame thing (on analogy of christian guilt machinery): e.g. facile shift to scapegoating, and relief/ evasion from personal responsibility. latter intersects with SA’s point about deontology. one thing about deontology is that it stops at the water’s edge, so to speak: i must act in accordance with my moral duty; i fulfill my duty by doing the “right” thing; but the unintended consequences of such an act don’t really fall in deontology’s purview. what counts, what’s in my power, is acting in accordance with a proper moral intention. if the arrow of my action doesn’t hit its mark (and instead, unfortunately, accidentally, hits something else)— that’s not so much deontology’s concern.

here’s where SA’s appeal to utilitarianism (or more widely, consequentialism) hits the mark for me. the western academic (on analogy of christian) makes sense of suffering through machinery of guilt, and relieves her guilt through confession/ critique. no doubt there’s something really genuinely good about urge thereby to help suffering others. but too often what takes precedence is the therapeutic deontological self-absolving: doing/ writing “the right thing” with “good intentions”— less concern with actual empirical consequences of political theory or action. (there’s some lineage here to the “beautiful soul” which i’m too lazy to trace right now.) this is one reason why it’s salutary for leftwing thinkers to read rightwing critique (and vice versa of course, but rightwing’s blind spots tend to be of different nature)— to have their “good” intentions and “good” self-critical (i.e. critical of west/capitalism) theorizing confronted with discrepant empirical realities and consequences.

on the other hand, utilitarianism unchecked by deontology is abhorrent. this leads to end-justifying-means calculations which (depending on who’s doing the calculating) are all too likely to come down to goal of gaining brute/absolute political power over individuals.

would read a blog post psychologizing those who feel the need for elaborate justifications of their disinclination for (what they perceive as) left wing "theory." talk about moving guilt around!

(just leaving aside the weird and confused notion of "theory" at work in that blog post)

i like a lot of that - particularly re this "i inherit it, am complicit in it. yet (intuitively) i'm not personally responsible" in the sense that objection both fulfills the moral criteria ("not in my name") while obviating the need to directly confront the areas that the subject personally benefits from injustice such that in its most hypocritical state you see academics who rail against all types of injustices, but won't support adjunct unionization.

the one thing i particularly liked about the op was how generous i think the pov is that yr ideological opponent sincerely believes in their values, and aren't cynically lying about what they feel/think is true. and that more importantly, that ppl's values are often the same (i think this blog talks elsewhere about u ethically agreeing w/ salem witch hunters that witches that curse the land should be put to death - you just disagree that these are witches, or that witches exist, etc. ie - what is bad about these ppl aren't their values, but how those values are expressed).