Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

http://www.politique-actu.com/dossier/different-story-what-shaped-america-gordon-wood/1399328/

(link doesn't work but found article)
v interesting, thx
just the kind of thing i was thinking of re complicated & contingent divergings & coalescings
tangentially related, reminded of this interesting episode in american history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

http://queenmobs.com/2015/11/looking-for-optimism-finding-pessimism-on-salons-recent-interview-of-slavoj-zizek-and-his-turn-to-harsh-realism/

The world is hell. My vision, basically, in religious terms — though I’m atheist, of course — is some kind of Protestant view of the fallen world. It’s all one big horror. I despise Leftists who think, you know, violence is just an effect of social alienation, blah, blah, blah; once we will get communism, people will live in harmony. No, human nature is absolutely evil and maybe with a better organization of society we could control it a little bit.

a very gloomy, dystopian view of the future of europe from niall ferguson:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/paris-attacks-fall-of-rome-should-be-a-warning-to-the-west/story-e6frg6zo-1227609985667

melodramatic nonsense?

violence is just an effect of social alienation, blah, blah, blah

i love how u can see this and just KNOW who it's coming from

xp he's been writing the same article for a while http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/10/empire200610

Misanthropy's one of those luxuries the ruling class get to enjoy

http://sethfrantzman.com/2015/11/17/excusing-terror-paris-beirut-and-shingal/

The excuses and explanations are a deceptive explanation. When you ask deeper questions, such as how it is possible that “poverty” leads people to massacre poor students in Garissa, or kids in Peshawar, the awful nature of the excuses are revealed. The men who killed kids in Pakistan, or bomb Shia mosques or Ahmadi minorities, they are not “alienated”, they are killing the alienated minorities and harming the weakest members of society.

I think that piece is wrong in assuming ISIS attacks in Beirut don't relate to Lebanon foreign politics, poverty, demography etc but am NO expert. But p sure that the rise of ISIS is closely linked to Iraqi infrastructure, demography, etc etc. But maybe I'm missing some point, just skimmed the article (not because I'm not interested but because at work so limited time).

I agree that "excusing" does not seem a great idea in itself, but "understanding" maybe crucial to addressing the issue (to whatever extent it's possible to address it)

this part seems a bit radical, but again I'm no expert:

Terrorists aren’t “alienated”, they are empowered, and they are the wealthier ones who want to take the life of others. Their sense of entitlement and privilege causes them to want to commit wonton murder. It was the same with the Red Brigades and Beider-Meinhof and going all the way back to the 19th century Anarchists.

there has been some research to suggest that terrorists are better educated, wealthier:
https://newrepublic.com/article/91841/does-poverty-cause-terrorism

Enough evidence is accumulating that it is fruitful to begin to conjecture why participation in terrorism and political violence is apparently unrelated--or positively related--to individuals' income and education. The standard economic model of crime suggests that those with the lowest value of time should engage in criminal activity. But we would hypothesize that in most cases terrorism is less like property crime and more like a violent form of political engagement. More-educated people from privileged backgrounds are more likely to participate in politics, probably in part because political involvement requires some minimum level of interest, expertise, commitment to issues, and effort, all of which are more likely if people are educated enough and prosperous enough to concern themselves with more than economic subsistence. These factors could outweigh the effect of opportunity cost on individuals' decisions to become involved in terrorism.

I should probably have included the next paragraph as well:

The demand side for terrorists must be considered as well as the supply side. Terrorist organizations may prefer highly educated individuals over less-educated ones, even for suicide bomb attacks. In addition, educated middle-class or upper-class individuals are better suited to carry out acts of international terrorism than are impoverished illiterates, because the terrorists must fit into a foreign environment to be successful. This consideration suggests that terrorists who threaten economically developed countries will disproportionately be drawn from the ranks of the relatively well off and highly educated.

Good points, never thought abt that

Hm, it seems mostly just speculation to me? Most western countries have enough impoverished foreigners for anyone to fit in... I also think for the first point, we might be confusing religion and politics again. Yeah, the middle class will be most political, but the poorer classes will be more likely to go with religious fanaticism (I think).

For me it's not really about the immigrants in France being 'poor', and therefore choosing terror, but they're clearly marginalized. And this is not just about marginalization leading to terror, of even more importance seems to me to be that they are so marginalized, so shuffled off to the side and left alone, that the security agency's have lost control of them.

I've started to notice right-wing nativists using the language of "indigenous studies." My question is: If switching the X in "We are the indigenous people of X" turns it from a liberation statement to a racist statement, maybe the entire paradigm is of little value outside political expediency?

I haven't really reviewed the studies on whether suicide bombers mostly come from the poor or middle class or whatever, but I do think it's worth considering whether the "disaffected" people who might join terrorist groups could be disaffected on account of something other than pure material conditions.

ISIS, for example, provides a very tidy answer to the question "what is my life for?" as well as the promise of adventure and the potential for a glorious death.

Sorry those two posts were a little more disjointed from each other than I thought when I wrote them.

i think generally the left is less sympathetic to existential disaffection than material alienation

mordy, i think you're right re: identity politics and political expediency. not sure i've ever found that particular faustian bargain worth making but the alternative is a total deconstruction of "race" that just doesn't seem to get any purchase outside of academics and high brow philosophy.

see also derrida on the "assinity" of "the animal" as a category that in effect erases the near infinite differences among living beings.

Mordy, maybe that's true of the American left, but elsewhere one finds other preoccupations (e.g. Sartre)

the academic left? i mean sartre was not very popular among activists when i was in school - moreso among lit ppl

been wanting to read this forever:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Vxte4wdtL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I don't know about activists in the USA, I'm just observing that there's a left elsewhere and that existential concerns remain important there, even when the participants are largely atheist (though cf. e.g. Lévinas and Ricoeur)

i think material deprivation in the US has become the primary focus though obv these other concerns aren't inconsequential. from my perspective the problem w. existential alienation is that there is no fundamental justice to be readdressed - the wealthy and the poor alike can fret over their eternal soul, their alienation from society and family, their sense of meaninglessness + worthlessness. in fact it seems to me that the most unsympathetic crimes in contemporary society (like hate crimes) are also products of existential alienation. but what is the action to be taken? what injustices can be readdressed? it's much simpler to focus on areas of observable inequality. imho.

the problem of drawing the line between the shitty things we have to live with and the shitty things we don't (because we made them shitty) is a problem because we have to draw that line from within culture, social construction, etc and thus it's always a contingent boundary. which is not the same thing as saying that the boundary doesn't exist.

pikkety weighs in, suggests (somewhat unsurprisingly) terrorism is related to inequality, I'm not sure if argument is thought through https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/30/why-inequality-is-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-the-islamic-state/

probably important to distinguish between terrorist movements, civil wars, insurgencies in the MENA-region and terrorist attacks like the one in Paris - maybe the latter are less likely to be directly linked to poverty/economic inequality

I've found that I like texts that undermine large parts of contemporary Western society, philosophy + consensus. I'm reading "After Virtue" which is very provocative and I enjoyed the Unger I read (in light of the link posted in the rolling philosophy thread). Earlier we discussed the Moldbug manifesto as well, though obviously he's a particularly flawed critic (if not a still entertaining one). What are some other authors/texts that posit that our current intellectual/ethical infrastructure is broken/illusory/nonsense that might be entertaining to read?

Well, don't know about ethics, but Karen Barad extrapolates from quantum mechanics into a broad attack on Cartesian thought in Meeting the Universe Halfway. I liked that one.

mb peter sloterdijk, tho also a douchebag, if not quite as much a douchebag as moldbug

Yeah, Critique of Cynical Reason is amazing!

thx guys, they're both going on the pile

Macintyre is fabulous, read more of him; in particular the Gifford lectures, published as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.

do you know Charles Taylor? start with The Ethics of Authenticity, then go to Sources of the Self.

I kinda live for this stuff.

my 2 big interests at the moment: biblical religion and temple era sacrifices, and how all contemporary ethics + thought are giant failures. now where can i go to sprinkle this sheep blood?

you might also be interested in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age also, wherein the focal question is: how did we move from a world in which atheism was unthinkable, to a world in which it seems to be a living option?

Rene Girard

seems relevant: http://www.versobooks.com/books/2118-an-american-utopia

https://thecharnelhouse.org/2016/06/05/we-are-not-anti/

translation of « Nous ne sommes pas Anti », a 2005 text by Bernard Lyon of the French group Theorie Communiste - the intro is packed though with links to v fascinating discussions about anti-imperialism, anti-anti-fascism, + related.

from huntington's clash of civilizations:

A universal religion is only slightly more likely to emerge than is a universal language. The late twentieth century has seen a global resurgence of religions around the world (see pp. 95-101). That resurgence has involved the intensification of religious consciousness and the rise of fundamentalist movements. It has thus reinforced the differences among religions. It has not necessarily involved significant shifts in the proportions of the world’s population adhering to different religions. The data available on religious adherents are even more fragmentary and unreliable than the data available on language speakers. Table 3.3 sets out figures derived from one widely used source. These and other data suggest that the relative numerical strength of religions around the world has not changed dramatically in this century. The largest change recorded by this source was the increase in the proportion of people classified p. 65 as “nonreligious” and “atheist” from 0.2 percent in 1900 to 20.9 percent in 1980. Conceivably this could reflect a major shift away from religion, and in 1980 the religious resurgence was just gathering steam. Yet this 20.7 percent increase in nonbelievers is closely matched by a 19.0 percent decrease in those classified as adherents of “Chinese folk-religions” from 23.5 percent in 1900 to 4.5 percent in 1980. These virtually equal increases and decreases suggest that with the advent of communism the bulk of China’s population was simply reclassified from folk-religionist to nonbelieving.

Table 3.3 – Proportion of World Population Adhering to Major Religious Traditions

http://i.imgur.com/pjSI3fn.jpg

The data do show increases in the proportions of the world population adhering to the two major proselytizing religions, Islam and Christianity, over eighty years. Western Christians were estimated at 26.9 percent of the world’s population in 1900 and 30 percent in 1980. Muslims increased more dramatically from 12.4 percent in 1900 to 16.5 percent or by other estimates 18 percent in 1980. During the last decades of the twentieth century both Islam and Christianity significantly expanded their numbers in Africa, and a major shift toward Christianity occurred in South Korea. In rapidly modernizing societies, if the traditional religion is unable to adapt to the requirements of modernization, the potential exists for the spread of Western Christianity and Islam. In these societies the most successful protagonists of Western culture are not neo-classical economists or crusading democrats or multinational corporation executives. They are and most likely will continue to be Christian missionaries. Neither Adam Smith nor Thomas Jefferson will meet the psychological, emotional, moral, and social needs of urban migrants and first-generation secondary school graduates. Jesus Christ may not meet them either, but He is likely to have a better chance.

In the long run, however, Mohammed wins out. Christianity spreads primarily by conversion, Islam by conversion and reproduction. The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 percent in the 1980s, leveled off, is p. 66 now declining, and will probably approximate about 25 percent of the world’s population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high rates of population growth (see chapter 5), the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20 percent of the world’s population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of the world’s population by 2025.

according to wikipedia in 2016:

http://i.imgur.com/cM7imVA.png

so was huntington wrong? and if so, what did he miss about christianity and islam that has allowed christianity, 16 years after the turn of the century, to halt an apparently decline and maintain approx 30%, and islam apparently to have slowed (tho he got the general trend of growth correct). did christianity open new markets? this seems particularly surprising considering the aging of the West. did he fail to account for latin american catholicism? ongoing conflict in the middle east?

was he confused about birth rates mb, assuming the growth would continue? obviously there aren't many significant things which those 2.2 billion christians have in common, and especially in the developing world the adherence to doctrine can be eccentric, hybridised etc. so more crucially I'm not sure what you can say the draw of e.g. Christianity is in any cultural/spiritual sense beyond the social and material benefits that are often the initial draw of missions

fwiw he argues that the revival of religious sentiment in general was a globalwide response to urbanization, industrialization, globalization, aka crisis of meaning in post cold war moment and doesn't really make much of an argument that christianity has value/appeal above or beyond hinduism or islam. tho i think he'd contest the idea that there aren't significant things which those 2.2 billion christians have in common (or at least that the 'many' modifier is essential) bc he seems religious identification as being civilizationally determinative.

I assumed that if he'd made good arguments in support of his basic contentions I would have heard of them by now. I'm struggling to think of many distinctive solid cultural/spiritual/ethical things most christians believe, never mind all. I don't think the narrative of the cold war had as much meaning for most of the areas where religion has been growing and that in fact the drivers behind the growth predate it

idiot US grad students on fb this morning blaming the brexit on neoliberalism. feel like if we lived in venezuela we'd be blaming our troubles on state-planned economies. maybe life is just hard no matter what economic or political system you live under, and though "suck it up buttercup, life could be much worse" isn't really a satisfying panacea to get ppl to vote the right way, it's really the only honest answer?

^this is why we need the humanities. (only half kidding)

what do you blame it on mordy

the boogie what else