Items Posted by Jim Kalb
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Jul 16 21:36:59 EDT 1994
Article: 14928 of alt.activism.d
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d,alt.politics.datahighway,alt.society.resistance,comp.org.eff.talk,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Artistic merit?? (was: senate vote on NEA)
Date: 16 Jul 1994 12:50:16 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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Xref: panix alt.activism.d:14928 alt.politics.datahighway:4183 alt.society.resistance:1800 comp.org.eff.talk:35449 talk.politics.misc:183598
gsa1001@hermes.cam.ac.uk (Geoffrey Scott) writes:
>We need the government to protect the citizen-body, support
>institutions that will promote education, communications and
>creativeity, so that self-government can work. Otherwise we will
>continue to be held under the sway of _Big Money_.
_Big Money_ may be a problem, but an active Federal government is not
the solution.
Government has money that dwarfs _Big Money_, and also the power
directly to force people to do things. Government also idealizes the
rule of law, which means the process whereby society is ordered through
explicit rules applied uniformly and rationally. In addition,
government has come to idealize social justice, which is the demand that
the rule of law be extended to more and more of the practical
circumstances of day-to-day life. It seems doubtful that an
organization with enormous (from some perspectives unlimited) wealth and
power that views its mission as subjecting an ever-increasing share of
the practical circumstances of our lives to a rational, consistent and
uniform set of rules is going to promote creativity and self-government.
>I want to stress that we need a Government that will support the
>indivduals effort to have a voice in his or her life and in his or her
>community. The support of culture is one area where this can be
>realized.
What sort of support of culture do you have in mind? I don't see how
taxing the public at large and giving functionaries in Washington D.C.
the power to dole the cash out to those they favor supports the efforts
of the individual to have a voice in his life and community.
>First, I don't believe there is a realm of "high" culture apart from
>"mass" culture.
It makes no sense to have an NEA unless distinctions can be drawn
between culture that is worthy of support and culture that is not worthy
of support. How would you draw that distinction?
> Third, I don't think a vibrant political community will come into
>existance when the citizen-body is held apart from Government, from the
>polity. We are all a part of our political community.
Sure. My point, though, was that the institutions of government are not
the sole vehicle for the life of the community. There must be much more
to the community than the government. And that is the case, it seems to
me. Government does not play a leading role in journalism, by
subsidizing the major newspapers and influencing what they print for
example. Our religious life is mostly carried on outside government
institutions. Only a very small part of our total cultural activity has
anything to do with the NEA, especially since you don't distinguish mass
and other culture. So why is it that the abolition of the NEA would
demonstrate that we don't care about culture?
>It is a perpetual struggle. Such is life.
Life is a struggle, but some ways of carrying it on make more sense than
others.
>In the long run, the tendrils of the polity cling everywhere. We must
>care for the tendrils. They can't be hacked off. I just don't think
>anarchy works on a large scale.
One can care for things more directly than by establishing a government
agency to look after them. Also, order can arise without the government
establishing it. Otherwise, how could governments come to exist? Are
they always created by other governments?
>The people are the Government. The people are not EXXON, or GM, or GE,
>or Beatrice, or Hearst, or TCI, or Murdoch...etc.. These latter
>organizations and individuals have no interest in community.
Like the other organizations you mention, the Government depends for its
power on the support and participation of a lot of people it doesn't
control very directly. Also like the others, it and those who run it
have interests that differ from those of the people on whose support it
depends. So it makes no sense to mistake any of these big organizations
for "the people", although each of them has some incentive to do things
that are in the public interest and even more incentive to appear to do
so.
All big formal bureaucratic organizations have an interest in advancing
the large-scale formal bureaucratic way of doing things. It follows
that each is intrinsically anti-community. I don't see why the
Government should be different in that respect from the others.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Jul 18 05:42:39 EDT 1994
Article: 10715 of alt.postmodern
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: genius
Date: 17 Jul 1994 07:22:38 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In article Andrew_Perry@Brown.edu (Andy Perry) writes:
>Marjorie Garber says that
>Shakespeare's works are like the Bible: no one really knows exactly who
>wrote either, and the anonymity somehow contributes to the canonically
>central status of the work in question.
At the time Shakespeare's works and the Bible achieved cultural
centrality, did people have much doubt as to their authorship? It
almost seems as if the reverse might be true -- their cultural
centrality means that people have come to question everything about
them, including authorship.
As an aside, in Newman's _Grammar of Assent_ there's an extremely
amusing discussion of the authorship of Shakespeare that raises the
possibility that his works never existed as such, and what we have is
only a huge concatenation of interpolations, emendations and so on by
various actors, printers, editors and so on. I think that when he
wrote that (mid-19th c.) the authorship of Shakespeare was not
considered problematic. Maybe he sensed something in the air ...
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From alt.postmodern Mon Jul 18 07:31:22 1994
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: genius
Date: 17 Jul 1994 06:44:13 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In Andrew_Perry@Brown.edu (Andy Perry) writes:
>> And wasn't Shakespear the "comic book" of his day?
>Yes, which makes him rather an interesting example. It would seem obvious
>that "Shakespeare's genius" has been created by succeeding generations, but
>lots of folks don't seem to see it that way.
Ben Jonson, among others. His "To the Memory of my Beloved, the
Author, Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us", in which he
presents Shakespeare as the supreme English poet and dramatist, the
supreme comic dramatist of all time, and the equal of the great Greek
and Roman tragedians, certainly seems to be meant more seriously than
the nice things people say when someone dies usually are.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jul 19 06:17:51 EDT 1994
Article: 10720 of alt.postmodern
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: genius
Date: 18 Jul 1994 07:37:05 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>One might want to ask why we need to rate and grade Shakespeare,
>Mozart, and so on in this way, and need or want to impute an objective,
>intrinsic quality to their works absent or deficient in lesser art.
We want our beliefs about the world to reflect the way the world seems
to us. Many people experience aesthetic qualities in the works of
Shakespeare or Mozart that seem to them qualities of the works
themselves. The qualities seem to exist only because the specific works
are just as they are, to be perceptible to more than one person, and to
be reasonably stable over time. They also seem to be the qualities that
make the works worth paying attention to and sometimes demand
comparisons of better and worse. So I think people who experience
things in such a way would quite naturally act as you describe, unless
by "rate and grade" you mean something quite formal and comprehensive.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jul 19 06:17:55 EDT 1994
Article: 1933 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: A comment upon recent art and literature
Date: 18 Jul 1994 07:34:43 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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pas@phantom.com (Wild.Boy) writes:
>This is also part and parcel of the rise of the museum, where the
>artist's name must be attached to the painting (since, clearly, the
>original owner no longer is in possession of the item). Attribution
>becomes a key part of 'appreciation'; painting becomes more literized.
An interesting point. The rise of the museum means that the importance
of the work as an item in catalogs and lists increases. Therefore the
focus shifts to the part of the work that exists that way, its name and
that of the artist. Extreme individualism (concentration on the
identity of the artist and his definition of the work as expressed in
its title) turns out to be identical to the triumph of abstraction and
soulless bureaucracy. I wonder if there's a lesson there someplace?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jul 19 08:10:43 EDT 1994
Article: 10731 of alt.postmodern
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: genius
Date: 19 Jul 1994 07:30:03 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>does Mozart have some special quality that rock'n'roll does not? Or,
>perhaps, do both partake of this quality, _to_kalon_ perhaps, in
>differing measurable quantities? The Adorno-Nilges theory seems to be
>that they do -- that once we hear Mozart, we no longer wish to hear
>rock.
My own (boring!) answer is that both statements are true, that is, that
the two sorts of music are the same in some ways and different in
others. Both participate in _to_kalon_, or have expressive form, or
whatever it is, and so quite likely if you consider one of Mozart's
works and a rock song it will be possible to rank one as better than the
other from that point of view. On the other hand, the styles are very
different, and to some extent we like things because of stylistic
preferences that are a matter of nonaesthetic interests, subjective
taste, or mood. Also, in many cases aesthetic ranking is difficult or
impossible for works in different styles, just as it is for works in
different media. Which TV shows are better than which rock songs?
Sometimes it might be clear that some (very good) TV show is better than
some (truly bad) rock song but often it would be unclear what to do with
the question.
>It seems to me that our hypothesis of an intrinsic, measurable quality
>is in trouble as soon as anyone decides they want to listen to, say,
>Sonic Youth instead of the Jupiter symphony, having heard both, a
>decision I've certainly made on a number of occasions.
"Measurable" suggests the judgment can be reduced to numerical form so
that all works of whatever sort can be given definite comparative
aesthetic rankings. I would be surprised if anyone had claimed that.
Also, I would also be surprised if anyone claimed that everyone who
hears a piece of music forms a correct judgment as to its aesthetic
value. Beyond that, mood, interest, and particular taste play a role in
choosing what you want to listen to. It's possible for someone to feel
like listening to X while judging Y to be really better. There are
people who on occasion read mail order catalogs with no immediate
practical reason for doing so, even though they judge other illustrated
writings to be better. Not everyone who makes comparative aesthetic
judgments has only one piece of music that he listens to, the one he
judges to be the best of all.
>In fact, I don't think the drive to weigh works of art in this way
>would have occurred outside of a liberal bourgeois capitalist culture.
Presumably outside such a culture there would be nothing people would
classify as "mass market schlock". One might attribute that either to a
drive to classify or to the characteristics of some things that get
produced in a l.b.c. society. Lady Murasaki describes competitive
artistic performances at the Heian court and thought the arts of the
court were better than the arts of the common people, so a drive to
weigh and classify works of art can exist in other sorts of culture as
well.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jul 19 08:10:49 EDT 1994
Article: 27584 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Moral Absolutism
Date: 19 Jul 1994 08:10:08 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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chloe@qpc.com (Chloe Carter) writes:
>A moment's thought will show that a physical law is nothing more than
>an attempt to use the experience of past regularities to formulate
>predictions for the future.
It seems to follow that physical law can not help us investigate the Big
Bang or why the dinosaurs became extinct.
>A law that cannot make predictions regarding observable phenomena is no
>law at all.
It seems to follow either that the theory of evolution is not a
scientific theory or that scientific theories can consist of things
other than physical law.
>Lastly, with regard to human beings, physical laws will operate
>independently of the beliefs of the people involved.
This statement doesn't sit well with your first statement, that a
physical law is "nothing more than an attempt" by human beings to do
something or other. You seem to think that the beliefs people have are
one sort of thing that is irrelevant to physical law, while the attempts
people make are something completely different, that define what
physical law is.
>To begin with, unlike physical laws, moral laws
>are not, for the most part, based on observation.
Nor is logic or mathematics.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Jul 20 22:29:01 EDT 1994
Article: 1946 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: sugarcoating
Date: 20 Jul 1994 21:15:49 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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DEANE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU (DAVID MATTHEW DEANE) writes:
>The more factors of existence one considers in one's thinking, the more
>sophisticated one's approach can become; conversely, the fewer factors
>one considers, the more open to fallacy. Economic thinking, in that it
>only gives credence to economic factors, is an example of such shallow
>thinking.
Economic thinking can be done more or less subtly, and refined and
extended in various ways without violating its integrity. I think of it
as simply an orderly way of discussing what happens when people try to
realize their preferences either directly, through their own efforts, or
through the cooperation of others who are also trying to realize their
preferences. Obviously it abstracts initially from issues of objective
value, but such issues resurface as the analysis proceeds. The Kalb-
Stamper-Deane murder discussion gives an example. To carry the line of
thought a bit further, it seems to me that someone who believed that
what people really want is the beatific vision and that the function of
morality is to bring them closer to that goal would be able quite
honestly, if he had the technical competence, to generate the moral code
he accepts from an economic analysis of human life. Economics tells
how people get what they want, and if you think people really want X
then you will consider that economic analysis correct that explains how
people can get X.
>You mention Charles Murray, but I at least would consider him a
>paleolibertarian or a paleoconservative; groups I excluded from the
>above characterizations.
Murray started life as a liberal who believed in social programs, he is
a sociologist by profession, and he publishes in _The Public Interest_
and _Commentary_ and so associates with known neos. He's a paleo only
to the extent that non-paleo analyses lead to paleo positions, or so
say I. People who believe that paleo positions are correct are not
surprised that intelligent non-paleo analyses should lead to them.
>The very fact that Mr. Murray approaches the question from an
>economic/utilitarian perspective does not mean that he does not
>consider other factors; my problem with this approach is that it seems
>to have to sneak these factors "in the back door".
It seems to me he is successful in showing that such factors arise
through natural and plausible extensions and refinements of economic
thinking. The idea is that if you pursue economic thinking it turns
into something that doesn't match the usual image of that kind of
thinking. By becoming more truly himself, economic man is dialectically
_aufgehoben_ and a higher stage of humanity, paleoconservative man,
appears.
>Those CRs using economic neoliberal reasoning feel that their methods
>are neutral and can be used by "our side" as well as "theirs". The
>other CRs feel that the neoliberal reasoning in question is what got us
>into trouble in the first place, and will do so again.
The rejection of economic reasoning can also cause trouble. I don't
think there is any form of reasoning that is not misleading. When it
comes to forms of reasoning, I'm inclined to let 1000 flowers bloom.
>Some CRs would say that using neoliberal reasoning will enevitably lead
>to reabsorption of the "rebellious" movement back into the fold of the
>liberal establishment - not as a matter of theory, but of actual
>practice. Regardless of the intentions of the intellectual in question.
There has also been recent comment in the foaming-at-the-mouth right-
wing press, I think by Joe Sobran in _RRR_ and Sam Francis himself in
_Chronicles_, about the cleverness of FDR and American liberals
generally in appropriating the American constitutional vocabulary and
using it for their own ends. So far there are no signs that the
rebellious liberals will return to the fold of the Old Republic.
It seems to me a legitimate task for right-wingers to show that all
roads lead, if not necessarily all the way to Rome, at least away from
Washington D.C. and Brussels. To believe that can be done honestly is
simply to believe one's own position.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Jul 20 22:34:27 EDT 1994
Article: 1947 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: lazy fair
Date: 20 Jul 1994 22:34:07 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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DEANE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU (DAVID MATTHEW DEANE) writes:
> 1) the writer points out that he is opposed to the use of economic
>intervetion by the govt. for the purposes of promoting _equality_. The
>question of using the govt. for other purposes is left open.
As quoted, Maurras, in his preface to _Mes Idees Politiques_ (1937),
says:
However [the state] can undertake the management of the public
interest only in so far as it makes use, with lucidity and with
zeal, of all the infinitely varied mechanisms of social life, as
they exist, as they interact, as they serve. The state must
resolutely refrain from any claim to attempt the impossible task of
revising or changing them: 'social justice' is a bad pretext: it
is merely the pet name for equality. The political state must avoid
any attack upon the infrastructure of the social state which it
cannot and will never penetrate but in its foolish attempts against
it it may cause grave wounds to its citizens and to itself. The
imaginary changes made, in the name of equality, against a wholly
irresponsible nature of things have the consistent effect of
removing from sight the real wrongs perpetrated by criminals
responsible for their acts ...
The rejection of government interference in economic life seems to me
much broader than you suggest.
>The question then becomes: how far is one going to go in allying with
>neoliberalism?
It seems to me that the counterrevolution should reject the state as
something that establishes overall goals for society and designs a
administrative and regulatory scheme through which it thinks it can
bring those goals about. So CRs can ally with neolibs in dismantling
administrative and regulatory machinery.
>When is one going to use the state for CR ends?
It seems to me that in a CR state whatever the state did would reflect
and support CR values. If there is a system of public education that
system would presume the correctness of the religious and ethical
outlook on which the state is based. The definition of crimes would
correspond to the basis of the state. In a Christian CR state certain
antireligious actions such as public blasphemy might occupy the same
place hate crimes do in the current order. A state that treated the
family as fundamental would legally disfavor practices like adultery
and homosexuality that are inconsistent with the sexual constitution of
society. A state with an ethnic basis would have severe restrictions
on immigration and naturalization. None of this has much to do with
elaborate schemes of regulation.
As to economics, it seems that a CR state might have a stable set of
rules that has a great effect on economic life but doesn't need much
administration. A CR state might impose primogeniture or equipartition
of estates, or forbid outdoor commercial advertising, or impose limits
on land uses and transfers, or establish soup kitchens, poorhouses and
free medical clinics that provide set services under set conditions
that are not constantly reevaluated and adjusted. It's the
comprehensiveness and constant variability of the administrative rules
enforced by the modern state that seems to me most objectionable rather
than the substance of any particular rule.
Any other proposals?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Jul 21 07:22:39 EDT 1994
Article: 1952 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CR texts
Date: 21 Jul 1994 07:22:32 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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pas@phantom.com (Wild.Boy) writes:
>Both the Fascists and the Bolshevik left were determined to penetrate
>to the heart of 'the matter' as their myths defined it (which may be
>why the early Comintern _praised_ the actions of Mussolini in 1919).
>The main difference between them lay primarily in their interpretive
>structure, or myth, not in their resolve to realize a historical
>project.
If you grew up in an English-speaking country, the Continental thinkers
do indeed seem provocative, penetrating, and dramatic. Also, myth and
violence have their appeal if you're tired of comfort and mediocrity.
In the end, though, if you yourself understand something as myth it
isn't what you should be pursuing. The reason you understand it as myth
is that it is consistent with only part of your experience, and that
loosely. Otherwise you would understand it as truth. If you try to put
it into effect the discrepencies between it and the world as you find it
will loom larger and larger.
Historical projects aren't good enough. What you want is the world
remade, but a plan that is consciously conceived and chosen, which is
what a project is, will always leave out too much and contain too many
misconceptions to give you a new world. Man is not a creator, certainly
not when he thinks of himself as such.
>the revolution is certainly long dead.
That's true as a living intellectual and spiritual force, but not as a
process. Also, the death of the revolution doesn't necessarily cause
anything else to live. The revolution has proceeded first by killing
the concept of God, then that of the divine in man, then intellectual
and spiritual standards of any sort, and now even ordinary enjoyments.
Presumably at some point something will rise from the ruins and squalor,
but when it does it won't be possible to blame the revolution for it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Jul 21 07:26:21 EDT 1994
Article: 1953 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: lazy fair
Date: 21 Jul 1994 07:26:08 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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DEANE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU (DAVID MATTHEW DEANE) writes:
>Anyway, you will agree that Mr. Murray is a paleo _now_, won't you? His
>research has put him "beyond the pale", which is a sure sign of a paleo!
>If you will pardon the attempted pun.
I wouldn't have said so. He still seems to be treated in the mainstream
as someone who's part of the debate. Maybe that shows that like other
people liberals are affected by geneology and style in determining who
they will treat as human beings. I don't think he has published in any
paleocon periodicals.
>My problem, I guess, is that human motivations are not purely economic;
>hence any approach which focuses on the economic eclusively is
>inherently flawed.
I agree with you if "economic" refers to the desire to maximize
ownership or enjoyment of exchange-value, which is the way it's commonly
used. But economists try to construct their reasoning to accommodate
all human preferences, including those that based on motivations that
aren't normally considered economic. Why not support that enterprise?
If the science of economics could be improved to deal adequately with
your favorite "non-economic" motivations it might well generate support
for your favorite conclusions.
>As for "non-economic" thinking; I really am not aware of any. All non-
>economic systems must take economic factors into account, even if only
>implicitly.
I think my only point was that people who concentrate on non-economic
factors often slight the economic ones, to the detriment of the
workability of their proposals.
>Maurras is showing how the State can legitimately take an activist role
>in society: by using the existing "organic" institutions, such as the
>family, communities, the church, labor unions/guilds, and so on - the
>essential idea of the corporate state is that the state is used as a
>coordinating mechanism, to allow the existing organic functions of
>society to function more harmoniously together, rather than at cross
>purposes against each other.
That's very likely right. My basic point was that in Maurras' view a
very great many things have to be left alone by the state, and to that
extent he could ally himself (if he were still among us) with the
libertarians in their battle against the modern state. The question
remains what contribution the state could make beyond that envisioned by
the libertarians, and on that point I'd be happy to hear any neo-
Maurrassian proposals.
>Wasn't Action Francaise always denouncing rampant capitalism and the
>corruption it spread in France?
I think they tended to complain about speculators and manipulators and
distinguish them from people who actually contributed to production. It
would have been helpful if their economic thought had been more
analytical and less mythical (say I, who know next to nothing about it).
>One final point I'd like to repeat: why should one assume that all
>dangers come from govt. interference with social organization?
One shouldn't. Dangers come from all possible directions. But
government is the social organization that has the power to tax and
otherwise use physical force to achieve whatever ends it sets itself.
Whatever dangers social organizations create are multiplied in the case
of government. Also, as government grows it tends to kill everything
else in society. How government should be constituted and limited is
therefore a delicate matter that requires a great deal of attention.
Hence the harping on the dangers of government.
>Is it not probable that some social organizations are also detrimental?
Sure. It seems even more detrimental, though, to grant government a
general commission to do away with all detrimental stuff.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Jul 23 17:21:17 EDT 1994
Article: 1957 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: La ultima vez...
Date: 23 Jul 1994 07:54:58 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 6
Message-ID: <30r0ei$nj4@panix.com>
References: <30jtfh$775@gabriel.keele.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Any general comments on the Right in Spain these days? The only thing
I've run into lately coming out of that part of the world has been
Almodavar's movies, which don't seem particularly CR.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Jul 23 17:21:18 EDT 1994
Article: 1958 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: A place at the table
Date: 23 Jul 1994 12:51:24 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 39
Message-ID: <30rhqc$oik@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Lately we have been told repeatedly, in connection with various
egalitarian demands, that no group can be denied its place at the
American table. "The table" seems a metaphor for acceptance as a full
and equal participant in public life, and in a larger sense for a full
and equal share of the benefits of American life generally.
It's an appealing metaphor in many ways, but oddly unconnected to the
reality of social life. There are no get-togethers at which everyone
is really welcome. When people sit down together they may do so in a
spirit of generosity that overcomes barriers, but there is something
specific that brings them together that would leave others on the
outside. Also, one of the reasons people are able for a time to
transcend conflicts and sit down with each other in a generous spirit
is that they know the sitting won't last forever. To apply the "table"
metaphor to America in 1994, a conglomeration of people whose purposes
diverge radically but will nonetheless have to live together for the
foreseeable future, is grossly inappropriate.
The metaphor would be comprehensible if the table in question were
thought of as one at which people were seated to draft a constitution
for society at large. It is somewhat plausible that at such a table all
significant points of view should be represented. The more diverse the
points of view, though, the less likely the constitution that is
produced will create a society that is at all unitary -- that is, that
has anything to which the "common table" metaphor could be applicable.
As it is, inclusion at the table turns out to be less universal than
the rhetoric would lead one to think. People who think the social
order should rest on a religious understanding of the world aren't
included. People who think the well-being of men, women and children
requires socially-accepted rules regarding sex and sex roles aren't
included. People who think ethnic ties are a legitimate principle of
social cohesion aren't included if they're white. People (the majority
of the American people) who think there ought to be significant
restrictions on abortion aren't included. When you think it through,
it turns out that very few people who have ever lived would be entitled
to a seat at the table hosted by liberals. So much for inclusiveness.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jul 24 12:45:21 EDT 1994
Article: 1960 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CR texts
Date: 24 Jul 1994 12:45:04 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 109
Message-ID: <30u5qg$ka2@panix.com>
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NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
pas@phantom.com (Wild.Boy) writes:
>Due to the nature of myth, due to the fact that it is the only means of
>consciously apprehending/creating the world, I do not see how
>'discrepancies between it and the world as you find it will loom larger
>and larger.' The myth _is_ the world as I find it; or, better, the
>world _as I find it_ can only be my myth.
My own current preoccupations were showing. I was using "myth" to mean
"compelling symbol chosen for its power to induce action and advance a
cause", as in "myth of the general strike". You of course had said you
were using it to mean "interpretive structure".
On the larger issue you raise, I would say that the world is something
beyond our interpretive structure. We can't articulate what that thing
is, of course. It seems to me that a sense of the impossibility of
adequately articulating the things that are most important lies behind a
lot of conservative and CR thought and gives rise to leftist accusations
of obscurantism and irrationalism.
>Certainly a plan will leave out certain aspects of reality (or the
>'earth'), but that is not an objection, at least, not to me. Whether
>leaving out 'too much' will not allow a 'new world' is certainly up for
>debate.
A common conservative complaint about leftists is that they tend to
exaggerate the workability of a technical approach to society -- "the
people" or some revolutionary elite decide what kind of society they
want and then design and carry through a program for getting there.
Social life, conservatives want to say, follows its own laws that can't
be fully understood and can't easily be manipulated to guide things
toward consciously chosen ends. Therefore social institutions should
mostly be left to go their own way and reformed when necessary mostly in
accordance with their internal standards rather than some overall
ideology.
The conservative problem in 1994 is that authoritative institutions have
themselves adopted a technical approach to society and it looks like
leaving them (for example, the Federal courts and the educational
system) to go their own way or to reform in accordance with their own
internal standards will only lead to greater left-wing radicalism. The
possible solutions to the problem that occur to me are:
1. Decide that things are hopeless and that the Dark Ages have arrived.
Look for the new St. Benedict and try to preserve as much as possible
through the times ahead.
2. Promote a hard counterrevolution, a revolution against the
Revolution. Build a political party, engage in political agitation and
propaganda, and ultimately seize State power and use it to reconfigure
social institutions in a way that will bring about a way of life that
embodies the things the Revolution has destroyed.
3. Work within the system. Assume that since liberalism is wrong, the
theories and institutions of a liberal society work at all only because
they embody illiberal elements and have internal contradictions that can
be dramatized. Look for things in the existing society out of which
something better could developed and defend and encourage those things.
There are objections against all three solutions, but I prefer 1 and 3
to 2, which I regard as hopeless.
>I suppose a crux of the disagreement is over whether man is a
>'creator.' I personally find much to disagree with in the concept of a
>'creator,' since it smacks of all the transcendent blah-blah of
>christianity and a divison between creator and created.
I don't see how man can view himself as the creator of the aesthetic or
moral worlds, or therefore of the political world. Nonetheless, those
worlds do exist and they seem to manifest purpose. So on this issue I
find the transcendent blah-blah of christianity more comprehensible than
anything else.
>Yes, the triumph of 'reason' killed the Gods, killed the divine and
>then intellectual standards. This reason, however, is the spirit
>animating most libertarian doctrine. I find it unlikely that a more
>thorough application of its logic will somehow bring them back.
I find most libertarian doctrine outrageous on a number of grounds.
Nonetheless:
1. A libertarian legal order need not give rise to a social order of
the kind most libertarians say they like. Its failure to do so was the
reason liberalism has evolved from something like today's libertarianism
into its current version. Before the creation of the modern
welfare/civil rights state the full development of self-seeking
hedonistic egoism was stymied by the necessity of self-discipline,
family responsibility and loyalty, and so on. So between the two I
prefer libertarianism.
2. Libertarians believe that there are large parts of social life that
should not be placed under central administrative control and subjected
to ideological standards but rather let evolve in accordance with their
own tendencies.
Therefore it seems to me that the alliance with libertarians against the
liberals remains a good one.
My comments relating to thorough application of logic had to do with
economic reasoning rather than libertarian doctrine. Libertarian
doctrine is mostly stupid; economic reasoning as such is not. Non-
stupid modes of reasoning can be developed and extended or at least be
made clearly aware of their own limitations so they do not destroy
things that ought not be destroyed. If you're more ambitious they can
be stood on their heads or transvalued. What you should try to avoid
doing with a mode of reasoning that is widely accepted, not wholly
without cause, is simply to reject it categorically.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jul 24 14:32:32 EDT 1994
Article: 1962 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Some work for you people to do ...
Date: 24 Jul 1994 14:31:49 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 14
Message-ID: <30uc2l$4ra@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Anyone who's tried to use the Resource Lists knows that CR texts are
hard to come by. Most of the classic texts have never been translated
into English, and in America those of us who can stumble through one
Continental language or another can't get copies anyway. It occurs to
me that most of them are old and probably off copyright by now. So the
obvious and low-cost way to republish them would be to scan them and
make them available by ftp. Does that sound like anything worth doing?
For which any sort of support would be available? [No harm asking.]
Does anyone have any favorite titles for such a project? I don't have
any immediate ideas as to how such an undertaking could be organized
and carried out, or even whether it would be useful to many people, but
I'd be interested in hearing the ideas of others.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Jul 25 06:33:41 EDT 1994
Article: 27822 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Freedom vs. Well-being of Society
Date: 24 Jul 1994 19:33:19 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 40
Message-ID: <30utnv$i7v@panix.com>
References: <30p2d5$5ou@search01.news.aol.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
bsharvy@efn.org (Ben Sharvy) writes:
>>> I know this question has been debated many times before, but which should
>>> be the higher goal for a society: individual freedom, or well-being for
>>> all? By well-being, I mean having sufficient food, clothing and shelter,
>>> being safe from others, having proper medical care, etc.
>
>You appear to mean "people" when you say "society" -- which should
>people try to maximize, you ask, individual liberty or well-being for
>all (as if it had to be one or the other). Using "society" as a synonym
>for "people" is confusing and technically inaccurate usage.
>
>Most anthropologists and social scientists will the term "society" to
>refer to some set of relationships among people. Since relationships
>cannot pursue goals such as "well being for all," your question has no
>real meaning.
I thought "society" was commonly used to refer to a collective entity
constituted by certain relationships among people, and that collective
entities can have goals. For example, General Motors has business goals
that are independent of the goals of any particular individual (the
goals would still be there even if the president of GM dropped dead and
so stopped having goals altogether). In 1954 containment of the Soviet
Union was a goal of the United States. That would have been true even
if it turned out that President Eisenhower was a communist agent. Laws
embody goals even after all those who enacted the law are dead.
Social goals are often more general than business plans or particular
foreign policy goals. The goals implicit in conventional morality are
an example. Another would be the goals implicit in a particular
political or social regime. For example, the goal of the welfare state
is prevention of individual hardship and indignity, while the goal of
the consumer society is consumer gratification. It seems the original
question relates to that kind of general social goal. If you prefer, I
suppose it could be rephrased "should people support laws, institutions,
customs, accepted standards, and so on that promote freedom or that
promote well-being?" I don't see what's lost by speaking of social
goals, though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Jul 25 14:57:19 EDT 1994
Article: 27867 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Freedom vs. Well-being of Society
Date: 25 Jul 1994 07:44:09 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 65
Message-ID: <3108i9$fke@panix.com>
References: <30utnv$i7v@panix.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
jamesd@netcom.com (James A. Donald) writes:
>"America" (actually the government of the United States) can have a
>goal such as containing communism. It cannot have a goals such
>as maximizing the welfare of US citizens.
The reasons you might have for believing this that occur to me are that
(1) people's welfare is whatever they define it to be and they define
their welfare idiosyncratically, (2) promoting the welfare of A often
conflicts with promoting the welfare of B and welfares can't be compared
or aggregated, (3) many of the things people view as part of their
welfare (for example, the self-confidence that comes from individual
triumph over adversity) can't practically be promoted by others, and (4)
a government with enough power and authority to undertake the promotion
of the general welfare will most likely reduce welfare.
Point (1) doesn't seem to affect much. Even if what people want varies
a great deal some things, like promoting economic opportunity and
prosperity and protecting people from various misfortunes seems likely
to help most people get what they want most of the time. Presumably
political popularity is a good measure of the things that help most
people get what they want.
Point (2), if accepted, does make it impossible to take maximizing
welfare as a goal. The problem is that if accepted it seems to make
lots of other things impossible also, like determining what constitutes
an aggression or an injury. Suppose A rapes B and (in a separate
incident) C whistles, causing sound waves to enter D's ear. Both B and
D complain that they've been subjected to physical invasion against
their wills. It seems to me that we can't determine that a crime has
been committed against B but not D without making a comparative
judgement as to the effect of rape and of whistling on the well-being of
the typical victim.
Point (3) shows there are limits on the ability of others to promote our
welfare, but doesn't show that they can't help at all. Even if they
can't deliver to us directly some of the things we want they can usually
facilitate or do something to remove obstacles to our acquisition of
whatever it is. Also, most people do want some things that can simply
be given to them.
Point (4) strikes me as a different point from the one at issue, which
the very basic issue whether "the general welfare" is a notion that
makes any sense at all.
Obviously, I've been arguing with myself here and I may well have missed
your real point (I responded to Mr. Sharvy's post without having read
many of the articles in this thread).
>To take an extreme example "we" can seek to keep the peace, but only
>"I" can seek sexual gratification.
People can seek the sexual gratification of other people. A well-
disposed and attractive woman would find it possible to bring about the
sexual gratification of a great many men if that were what she wanted to
do. More generally, the government might promote sexual gratification
by subsidizing houses of ill fame, requiring television stations to
broadcast pornography, paying for plastic surgery and charm school to
remedy ugliness and bad manners, engaging members of the public as
practical lab instructors for high school sex education classes, and no
doubt in many other ways. The point is not whether any of those things
would be good to do, but rather whether it is possible for persons other
than A to seek A's sexual gratification. I think it clearly is.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Jul 25 21:43:52 EDT 1994
Article: 1968 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CR texts
Date: 25 Jul 1994 21:43:00 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 31
Message-ID: <311pn4$eam@panix.com>
References: <30llpo$ack@panix.com> <30sksi$lms@dockmaster.phantom.com> <30vdt3$dsa@dns1.NMSU.Edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
tminnix@nmsu.edu (Timothy O. Minnix) writes:
>: Yes, the triumph of 'reason' killed the Gods, killed the divine and then
>: intellectual standards.
>
> I don't understand something here. How can reason kill intellectual
>standards?
My answer would be that any sort of orderly thought will be called
"reason" by those who engage in it and accept it as valid. Others may
find fault with it and dispute its claim to universal validity. The
scare quotes are a sign that Wild.Boy is doing just that.
It seems to me that the kind of reason that killed the Gods and the
rest of it is the kind that claims that everything worth paying
attention to can be reduced to formal logic and human desires,
aversions, goals, and sensory experience. It should be obvious that
that kind of reason does away with the Gods and the divine, since the
Gods and the divine by definition transcend (and so can't be reduced
to) human things. It also seems that it will eventually do away with
all intellectual standards, since intellectual standards by definition
are things that constitute the measure of (and so transcend) all actual
thought and so can't be reduced to the contents of thought such as
desire, aversion and so on.
People who reject the sort of reason Wild.Boy complained about usually
have an expanded view of what constitutes reason and often believe that
faith is necessary as well as reason for knowledge and rational action.
I don't know what his views are on that subject, however.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jul 26 12:51:38 EDT 1994
Article: 1973 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Tactical (and educational) alliances.
Date: 26 Jul 1994 12:48:17 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 47
Message-ID: <313eoh$7rg@panix.com>
References: <01HEXP2Y55749C2YED@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU> <94207.072040U24C1@wvnvm.wvnet.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Terry Rephann writes:
>What do C-Rs have in common with the [libertarians]? I disagree with
>Mr. Kalb's argument that laissez-faire economic dogma is shared
>(although he is correct in pointing out that Burke paid some lip
>service to the prevailing Whig economic formulas).
I wouldn't say that the dogma is shared, only some of the motives that
lead libertarians to adopt the dogma. Although CRs commonly view
society as hierarchical in some sense they don't typically favor unitary
systems of central administrative control. They tend to think of most
knowledge as implicit and so attainable only through participation in
particular traditions associated with particular practices. Therefore,
they think that what look like rational systems of data collection and
central evaluation and decisionmaking don't work. You mostly have to
let the people involved do things in their own way.
In America in 1994, with respect to most actual political issues, which
relate to whether the administrative state should take over
responsibility for something, such views should create a principled
alliance between CRs and laissez-faire ideologists. In addition, in
situations in which left to themselves CRs would restrict laissez-faire
they aren't likely to approve of the actual restrictions proposed by the
liberals, because their goals are not the liberal goals, and so they are
likely to find a tactical alliance with libertarians appropriate.
>The libertarian/neocon/paleo alliance has outlived its usefulness. It
>has become dull, unrewarding, and intellectually enervating.
It's true that things have been going nowhere, and it would be nice to
come up with some way to transform the debate rather than try to decide
which of the existing forces to throw one's (extraordinarily minute)
weight behind.
>So, it's time to adopt more of a flexible networking approach to
>building and maintaining an active resistance to the current liberal
>status quo. That new course carries a certain amount of risk and
>introduces many challenges. We will occasionally find ourselves
>challenged by stone-age Leftist remnants , but that's a small price to
>pay for the opportunity to sharpen our arguments and spread the word
>about other aspects of the C-R program that have received little
>attention.
I'm perfectly happy to talk to anyone and find whatever common ground
can be found.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jul 26 17:09:20 EDT 1994
Article: 1974 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: lazy fair
Date: 26 Jul 1994 12:51:16 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 50
Message-ID: <313eu4$89e@panix.com>
References: <01HEY36TBU689C2YED@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU> <30lm0g$anv@panix.com> <94207.073307U24C1@wvnvm.wvnet.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Terry Rephann writes:
>>How government should be constituted and limited is
>>therefore a delicate matter that requires a great deal of attention.
>>Hence the harping on the dangers of government.
>
>It sounds like here, Mr. Kalb, that you are advocating an architectural
>or administrative solution to the problem of concentrated power.
My intention was more to give reasons for harping on the dangers of
concentrated power than to suggest a solution. I do prefer structural
solutions (e.g., federalism) to administrative ones. If we rely on
administrators to guard us from the machinations of the powerful, who
will guard us from the guardians?
>As Ross Perot pointed out in the 1991 Presidential debates, his
>financial empire (which ranked on the lower end of the Fortune 500
>list) commands more resources than a small, rural state like Arkansas.
What does that mean? I would imagine that the total value of taxable
real estate in Arkansas, for example, is greater than RP's net worth.
Arkansas also has the legal power simply to order people to do things,
which RP doesn't.
IBM is a big company with a lot of money, but how much political power
do it and other very large concerns typically exert nationally or in
the states in which they have a presence? More than the big landowners
did in Virginia or the Congregational clergy in Connecticut in 1787? In
states and municipalities, do the big companies have more effective
power than smaller privately-held companies that are locally prominent
but don't get much scrutiny? Do car-makers have more influence on U.S.
politics than cotton-growers once did? If big companies are more
powerful than state governments how come they sometimes go down the
tubes and disappear when things don't go their way but the same doesn't
happen to state governments? It seems to me big companies mostly try
to make money. If they think they can get the government's help in
doing so very likely they will make the attempt, but the solution to
that is probably not making the government a bigger source of economic
plums by increasing the scope of government control of the economy.
>I'm also unclear about your hostility to administrative 'solutions'?
In another post I suggest problems with administrative solutions based
on the kind of knowledge needed to make good decisions. As suggested
above, _quis custodiet custodies ipsos_ is another problem. Also I'm
attached for a variety of reasons to the idea of self-government, and
self-government requires decentralization of the responsibilities that
the administrative state centralizes.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Jul 26 20:00:18 EDT 1994
Article: 27973 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Freedom vs. Well-being of Society
Date: 26 Jul 1994 18:22:19 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 47
Distribution: na
Message-ID: <3142ar$oha@panix.com>
References:
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
pajerek%tels24.telstar.kodak.com@kodak.com (Don Pajerek) writes:
>The 'well-being of society' is such a remote, abstract goal that there
>is no way to provide it directly. To begin with, people will tend to
>define their own well-being in different ways.
>
>Freedom, on the other hand, is simple and tangible, and easy to provide
>directly: just don't institute a repressive government.
Is it that simple to provide freedom? I suppose it is if you define it
appropriately, but the definition isn't that obvious.
To be absolutely free would be to experience no barriers to pursuing
one's goals. There must be some barriers, though, because the world is
imperfect, and if you reduce one barrier (crime) you may increase
another (an oppressive police force). So a choice must be made among
evils, and I don't see how the choice can be made without reference to a
view of what goals are more important and so more deserving of
protection (in other words, what goals are more closely related to
people's well-being).
Also, and maybe more fundamentally, people differ on what counts as a
barrier that restricts freedom. Some people count only the things that
would be forbidden by the laws of Libertopia. Others think that the
existence of barriers should be determined by comparison, and all
arrangements that make some people (rich white males, the able-bodied,
the mentally normal) better able to realize their goals than others
create comparative barriers so the only free society would be one in
which the government enforced equality. Still others think ignorance
makes it impossible for people to know what their goals really are, and
vice makes it impossible for them to pursue their goals effectively, so
a government can best realize freedom by freeing people from their
ignorance and vice. Views on what those things are vary; some think
that the most damaging sort of ignorance is ignorance of the truth of
the Catholic faith and the most damaging vice is religious indifference,
so that the government should promote freedom by supporting propaganda
on behalf of Catholicism and penalizing the expression of inconsistent
views.
It seems to me that all these views of "freedom" could be adopted in
good faith. So instead of simply laying it down that "freedom" is the
proper goal of politics it seems necessary to define and justify a
paricular conception of freedom and to show why that should be the goal.
I think it will be hard to carry out that kind of justification without
taking some sort of view as to what constitutes human well-being.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Jul 27 08:35:39 EDT 1994
Article: 1978 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CR texts
Date: 27 Jul 1994 08:19:44 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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pas@phantom.com (Make Mine Molotov!) writes:
>I have to disagree with whether a 'technical approach' to society is
>unworkable. It seems to be far too successful, to the point that even
>many objections to such an approach still use the rhetoric of the human
>sciences. Unfortunately social life can be and is easily manipulated to
>chosen ends, like any chemical or manufacturing process. Social
>institutions, as entities capable of articulating their own,
>independent needs/desires have no language of their own to do so and
>must frequently borrow the language of eonomics, marketing and
>administration.
It seems to me the approach is unworkable because it's unable to come up
with worthy goals, and because it can't achieve even the goals it sets
itself.
The goals are unworthy because the technical approach requires clear
operational definitions of what it is aiming at, and ultimate goals are
what they are because they are larger than we are and therefore
impossible to grasp fully. To define something clearly is to isolate it
from the rest of life and look all round it to see what it is and isn't,
and you can't do that with the most fundamental things. Also, the
technical approach treats as waste to be eliminated whatever differs
from its clearly defined goals. Since ultimate ends differ from clearly
defined goals, the technical approach defeats ultimate ends.
Perhaps more to the point on the issue of workability, the technical
approach destroys the social cohesion and the coherence of individual
character that are necessary to achieve even its own stated goals. It
takes time for this problem to become as obvious practically as it is
theoretically because the things that maintain cohesion persist for a
while after the destruction of their sources. In 1994 the problems are
obvious; since you live in New York City I shouldn't have to argue the
point. For additional evidence, consider the state of social life in
the communist and post-communist countries, the increasing expense and
declining standards of the European welfare states, and the _Statistical
Abstract_ and _Statistical History_ of the United States, which show a
turn for the worse in social welfare in the late sixties and early
seventies.
I agree that the technical approach has been successful in the sense
that it has become widely accepted and technospeak is now the language
of the mainstream. That kind of success is not what I meant by
workability.
>A holding action, or nostalgia for the age before the decline?
Times are bad because a particular kind of thinking and mode of social
organization has developed too much at the expense of everything else.
Certainly defense of remaining nonconforming areas of social life and
preservation of the memory of other ways of being are part of the
response. Beyond that, though, the world is not a monolith and new
developments need not all go in the same direction. There are things in
the existing order that can be turned in a counterrevolutionary
direction. I suggested economic analysis as an example in the realm of
thought.
>Not an appealing choice, particularly since it isn't clear to me, at
>least, when you date the beginning of this decline to.
Life is hard, and I don't have any date for the beginning of a decline.
The particular problems we are talking about have histories that include
dates, but there has never been a utopia.
>: Therefore it seems to me that the alliance with libertarians against the
>: liberals remains a good one.
>
>Again, I do not see much difference between the two, nor is one implied
>in your reasoning.
There is a very large practical difference between the two.
>Certainly modes of thought that value pluralism and difference owe
>something to liberal thinking: the break, though, is when the
>differences are not subsumed into a greater whole. In other words, when
>they are taken seriously and not as a dialectical tactic aiming at a
>higher truth.
Libertarian thought is obviously incomplete. It strikes me as a
fragment of liberal thought that with some reworking could be fit into a
counterrevolutionary system.
To expand: liberal thought ("the maximum equal satisfaction of actual
individual preferences is the supreme good") seems to me the obvious
consummation of libertarian thought ("freedom for each to do what he
feels like doing, including freedom to acquire property and do what he
wishes with it, is the supreme political good"). However, the fact that
there are libertarians suggests to me that people draw back from such a
consummation. They want people to be free to make their own decisions
in many respects, but they also want the supreme good to have something
in it that doesn't reduce to the satisfaction of individual preferences.
In libertarianism, of course, that part of the good is outside the scope
of politics. If it turns out to be impossible to limit politics that
way, many people attracted to libertarianism may find that a
counterrevolutionary view preserves more of their outlook than
liberalism does.
I suppose what I'm saying is that it's easier for counterrevolutionaries
to make common cause with those (libertarians) who have an undeveloped
philosophy that doesn't subsume pluralism in a higher truth than those
(liberals) who recognize that it must be subsumed in a higher truth but
subsume it in the wrong higher truth.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Jul 27 08:35:40 EDT 1994
Article: 1979 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CR texts
Date: 27 Jul 1994 08:21:16 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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tminnix@nmsu.edu (Timothy O. Minnix) writes:
>Now, it's certainly possible to develop a system of thought that
>postulates certain human goals for use as moral axioms, but in so doing
>one effectively wipes out any notion of a 'universal' system of ethics
>which might be discovered by this reason, since there are as many
>desires as there are people and if these motives are axiomatic (ie,
>rational primaries not to be reduced further) this gives rise to a
>large array of moral systems, all equally 'rational' ...
The point seems to be that unless one can start with a mental blank and
derive a view of the world from pure reason then all views of the world
are ultimately arbitrary. (You speak of moral systems, but there seems
to be nothing special about morality.) I don't see why that's right.
Each of us starts off with a view of the world that is mostly something
that grew up within our society and family before we came on the scene.
Then we continue the development, criticizing and modifying the various
elements of our view based on how coherent they are with other elements
and our experience, how reliable they have been as a guide to thought
and action, whether they allow us to make sense of the world and the
things we do, and so on. We are all convinced that as a result of that
process we come to understand things better and come closer to the
truth. What possible grounds could we have for rejecting that
conviction? Doesn't the claim that all systems of thought are
unjustified refute itself?
As to the universality of systems of thought, it may be that all systems
of thought when developed ultimately either fall apart or converge on
some final system. There is no proof that happens, but if the
assumption that it does makes it easier to understand our situation then
I don't see why the assumption should not be made.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Jul 27 08:35:41 EDT 1994
Article: 1980 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Some work for you people to do ...
Date: 27 Jul 1994 08:35:03 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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In <94207.080530U24C1@wvnvm.wvnet.edu> Terry Rephann writes:
>Another idea would be to create a C-R mail order bookstore
>(because many C-R titles are available in print but cannot be purchased
>from one location). Yet another idea is to create an American C-R
>journal.
I wonder how much demand there would be for such things? Or maybe you
will hold me to the neocon supply-side laissez-faire dogma that
entrepreneurs create supply that creates its own demand . . .
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Jul 27 21:17:08 EDT 1994
Article: 1983 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: alliances
Date: 27 Jul 1994 21:14:53 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 47
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DEANE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU (DAVID MATTHEW DEANE) writes:
>It is of course possible, as Mr. Kalb hopes, that a push for
>libertarian solutions might limit the size of the state and allow
>groups to go their own ways, forming self-deteriming communities. I,
>however, have my doubts about the practicality of what in theory sounds
>reasonable. In practice, it is very hard to get people to fight for
>purely abstract ideals, whereas more concrete motivations can work
>wonders - not just monetary, but also familial, historical, national,
>etc. - what some would call "myths".
Sure, but what's wrong with bad cop/good cop? The bad greedy bigots
want something (weakening of the civil rights laws, say) and are making
trouble, and the idealistic libertarians who speak the language of John
Locke explain why it accords with universalistic ideals to let the bad
greedy bigots have their way. That's pretty much the way the civil
rights and civil liberties movements have worked, only with signs
reversed.
>I am inclined to agree with the ENR thesis that successful political
>action can only occur if preceeded by successful penetration of the
>culture & public consciousness: that is, the Gramscian struggle for
>hegemony must take priority over purely political efforts.
The correlation of cultural forces must shift. If the main enemy is
full-blown liberalism, libertarianism can contribute to that shift.
Also, why not penetrate as many places as possible? If (as you seem to
agree) libertarianism is only a fragment of a political philosophy, why
not penetrate it and expand it in the right direction? That could even
be done in good faith if one construes the central insight of
libertarianism to be something CRs can sign on to.
>Towards that end, many on the right and left, including greens,
>"gramscian socialists" or Frankfort School-influenced leftists (like
>those at Telos), have more to offer towards the growth of an
>intellectual counter-revolution, than does anything offered by
>libertarians or neo-cons.
As stated, I'm happy to discuss things with anybody. I'd certainly
rather talk to a smart commie than the average net libertarian. On the
other hand, I'd rather talk to the average net libertarian than to the
average Phil Donohue fan. One thing to bear in mind in all this is that
there just isn't that much right-wing theorizing in comparison with the
masses of left-wing theorizing, so it wouldn't be surprising if a lot of
the better theoreticians are on the left.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Jul 27 21:17:10 EDT 1994
Article: 1984 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CR texts
Date: 27 Jul 1994 21:16:42 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 42
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tminnix@nmsu.edu (Timothy O. Minnix) writes:
>I didn't mean that nature provided the axioms, just that one possible
>set of axioms for human thought would imply that what we sense is all
>there is, an idea which itself would derive from a basic assumption
>that we ought not accept as 'knowledge' anything which cannot
>ultimately be accepted by all honest seekers of truth regardless of
>religious worldviews.
Does your derivation work? I very much doubt that all honest seekers of
truth would ultimately accept that what we sense is all there is. (If
they didn't, then what your axioms would imply would not be
"knowledge".) For starters, no-one senses mathematics, I don't know
anyone who sensed the Big Bang, and I don't sense minds other than my
own. Of course, it's possible that all honest seekers of truth would
ultimately accept that what we sense is all there is. On the other
hand, many people think that all honest seekers of truth would
ultimately accept the Catholic faith. It's hard to know before the end
of time what people will ultimately accept.
>To me, for a context to be 'unjustified' would imply that it was either
>logically self-contradictory or directly disagreed with an observable
>fact of nature (eg, medieval views of a flat Earth). I'm not too sure
>what you mean by 'unjustified', Mr. Kalb.
I suppose I think that if one available view is clearly better than
another, then the other is unjustified.
>I find your idea of all systems possiblity being invalid in some basic
>sense much more interesting. What do you think would become of thought
>per se in such an event?
Thought and language would become impossible. Samuel Beckett apparently
thought that such an event had already occured.
>Do you think it necessary, as I do, that all thought must be
>'systematic' (ie, proceeding from some basic assumptions which form a
>'system' for conceptualization) in some way?
Yes.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Jul 28 17:24:10 EDT 1994
Article: 28108 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Freedom vs. Well-being of Society
Date: 28 Jul 1994 06:30:46 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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jamesd@netcom.com (James A. Donald) writes:
>Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) wrote:
>> Is it that simple to provide freedom? I suppose it is if you define it
>> appropriately, but the definition isn't that obvious.
>
>> To be absolutely free would be to experience no barriers to pursuing
>> one's goals.
>
>This assertion is utterly bizarre.
I thought it was a perfectly straightforward definition of "absolute
freedom".
>Are you just throwing flame bait, are you playing devils advocate as
>Brian Milch is, or are you trying to make the old totalitarian argument
>"True freedom is impossible, so there is nothing wrong with us using
>torture and concetration camps."
None of the above. The point was that absolute freedom makes no sense,
so if you want to say that the sole legitimate purpose of politics is
freedom you'll have to explain why your conception of freedom is the
right one rather than some other. I don't know how someone could give
such an explanation without appealing to the consequences of the
various conceptions for human well-being.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Jul 28 22:02:34 EDT 1994
Article: 1988 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: lazy fair
Date: 28 Jul 1994 21:57:56 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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Terry Rephann writes:
>The property is distributed among landholders (both small and large).
>The state probably only owns a small portion of total state land
>acreage. If it tried to confiscate an inordinate amount of private
>land (through some eminent domain loophole), taxed it excessively, etc.
>labor and capital would put on their walking shoes. Not exactly a way
>to run a state economy or fill up the revenue coffers. The public
>sector is hemmed in by common sense and self-interest.
Sure, but if GM started to put a lot of the resources that as a legal
matter they could draw on into various political enterprises they'd
likely run into problems too. Most big organizations that have lots of
people of different sorts involved and that exist in a world that
includes lots of other similar organizations are hemmed in and tied up
in all sorts of ways. Whatever they do is likely to go a lot easier if
it fits in with what the various people involved think the organization
is supposed to do. In the case of governments that's governing and in
the case of businesses that's making money.
There's an obvious danger that businesses will try to make money through
improper influence on government. Having lots of people in the
government making lots of administrative decisions that have major
economic effects does not (to repeat myself) seem a good way to reduce
that risk.
One issue is whether national and international companies or local
concerns create more dangers. It seems to me they create different
dangers. Local enterprises are more likely to do things that are
grossly improper -- bribery, kickbacks, outright fraud, patently
improper influence, and so on. Enterprises with far-flung operations
tend to worry that the locals are basically suspicious of them and will
get annoyed if they do something plainly illegal and so tend to watch
their step a little more. Also, home offices worry that their divisions
will get involved in messes that will hurt elsewhere, and it's hard for
big bureaucratic organizations to establish the kind of information and
control systems they feel comfortable with for things that most people
consider plainly improper. So it's not the internationals that tend to
be involved in the hard-core corruption. On the other hand, enterprises
with far-flung operations favor uniform standards and free movement
across borders, so CRs tend to think they are more of a threat in the
grand scheme of things.
I'm not sure that really gets to the heart of the matter, though.
International corporations like uniform standards and mobility because
they increase efficiency and so make profit-making easier, but they
have the same effect for smaller enterprises. That's why one of the
main activities of trade associations is devising and promoting uniform
standards and another is developing foreign markets. So even if the
international corporations were all broken up I'm not sure economic
trends would be that different. In a way, CRs complaining about
multinational corporations in 1994 seems to me rather like CRs
complaining about Jews in 1894. The complaints have some plausibility,
because both were at the forefront of developments CRs don't like. It
seems to me, though, that neither caused anything major to happen that
wouldn't have happened anyway.
Another issue is whether society has changed since (say) 1787 such that
the unbalanced power of particular private economic interests (Boston
merchants, land speculators, or Virginia planters in 1787; IBM or GM
today) is now more of a problem. I doubt it. A more diverse economy
means that any particular economic interest will have a harder time
moving society in any particular direction. In the Old South cotton was
king. Today almost everywhere there is a variety of industries with
conflicting interests, no one of which can be dominant. In addition,
easy transport and communications mean that an enterprise in Chicago or
Japan can in effect have a presence in Alabama and vice versa, so that
particular enterprises have less effect on the situation at any
particular place, which is the resultant of the conflicting influences
of the myriad enterprises participating in increasingly efficient and
competitive global markets.
One sign of the decline in relative power of particular economic
interests is the sort of ruling class we have developed. Our current
rulers, who speak through the major media, the universities and so on
and who act through the government bureaucracies, don't represent the
steel industry or any other particular economic interest. They
represent themselves and the mode of social organization (capitalist
free markets supervised by a centralized bureaucracy) that makes them
all-powerful. So what's needed is not something that gives one part of
that overall social organization (the central bureaucratic part) more
power over the other part (the free market part). What's needed is
something that would cut it all down to size and create more room for
things that are neither bureaucratic nor market.
I'm not sure what that would be. Conceivably there could be fundamental
controls on both business and government that apply categorically and
don't require administrative discretion and legislative rejiggling.
What would they be, though? Heavy taxes on transport and communications
that can't be changed without a constitutional amendment, to encourage
localism in business? A constitutional limitation on the combined
length of the U.S. Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports,
and all the other things promulgated as law? Laws forbidding all
advertising except classified ads? Abolition of public schools beyond
grade 8 to reduce the degree to which it's our rulers that educate us?
>New York City almost went bankrupt. So did Chrysler. The Feds saved
>each of them. These entities were just too big to allow them to fail.
Far more big companies than governments have disappeared through
bankrupcy. Even if the feds had done nothing the New York City
government would still be with us. It's also worth noting that
Chrysler has severely downsized and improved product and efficiency,
while the NYC government hasn't.
>Didn't the founding fathers increase the size and scope of govt. when
>they tacked on the legislative and judiciary branches? Think of all
>that extra administrative overhead (and intervention) that could have
>been saved! Why not add an extra branch (like the fascists did) that
>takes into account this other locus of power?
The point is not that government should be eliminated, only that there
are some things it does better than others.
What did the fascists do and how did it work out?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Jul 28 22:02:36 EDT 1994
Article: 1989 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Tactical (and educational) alliances.
Date: 28 Jul 1994 22:00:02 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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cla04@cc.keele.ac.uk (A.T. Fear) writes:
>John Grey a one time Lib philosopher has just written a pamphlet where
>he claims that the espousal of a free market philosophy has made the
>realisation of Conservatism impossible in this generation.
For what specific issues does he think the free market rhetoric causes
problems?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Jul 29 17:29:05 EDT 1994
Article: 28252 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Freedom vs. Well-being of Society
Date: 29 Jul 1994 13:13:52 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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bcmilch@aol.com (BCMilch) writes:
>If we consider positive rights, we see that the wealthy really do not
>have their standards of living reduced by taxation.
I'm not sure why you say this is so. What positive rights do the
wealthy receive that compensate them with respect to their standard of
living for what they lose by taxation?
>And the poor are saved from death by starvation. The poor may lose a
>sense of self-reliance, but they gain life.
The cases of widespread starvation in this century that I can think of
did not occur in places where negative rights were secure. Several of
them occured in times of foreign and domestic peace in countries (the
Soviet Union and China) with governments that were wholly convinced of
the superiority of positive rights to negative rights and were widely
admired abroad for that conviction.
>Tell me, do you think what is happenning in Rwanda now is horrible?
>Note that the problem there is not negative rights violations. The
>problem is that people's positive rights are not being fulfilled.
What problems would there be in Rwanda if people's negative rights were
secure there?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Jul 29 19:13:42 EDT 1994
Article: 1994 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CR texts
Date: 29 Jul 1994 19:13:34 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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pas@phantom.com (Make Mine Molotov!) writes:
>One of the goals of operational/'enlightened' thinking is a social
>world in which each part is interchangeable and equally manipulable,
>where each element is reduced to its lowest common essense. When the
>focus is placed on economic goals, this comes to each person being an
>equally good consumer. In the political realm, it means that anything
>that stands in the way of interchangeability must be eliminated: hence
>the mania for 'equality.' This program seems to have been successful. .
>.This counterargument assumes that the goal was to create a world worth
>living in on terms other than operational logic. I don't think that was
>the case.
I think you're overlooking the supply side. The overall substantive
purpose of the program has been to establish an orderly system that
maximizes the equal fulfillment of people's actual preferences. The
intended method has been the operationally rational ordering of all
persons and things in a universal machine that turns all available
resources into economic outputs and distributes those outputs in a way
that maximizes some combination of equality and efficiency. The program
won't work if it turns out that the people who grow up in such a society
can't be made into functioning components of the machine because of poor
social discipline, disordered character, and so on. I think that's what
we're seeing, and we're going to be seeing more of it.
Liberal society has only worked so far because it hasn't been perfectly
liberal. That's the truth at the basis of the neoconservative movement.
I think we would agree that neoconservatism is unstable and tends to
turn into liberalism. If so, then a neocon that recognizes that
liberalism leads to catastrophe (as neocons presumably do) will have to
move further to the right, perhaps to a paleo position. Quite possibly
the reverse dialectic could be continued.
>since [liberalism and libertarianism] both stem from the same ideology
>and adhere to the same logic that leads to where we are now I cannot
>see why following the 'less evolved' of the two will not lead us right
>back to the 'more evolved' of the two.
It's a question of whether (as I suggested above) a line of social
development can reverse if experience shows it leads to catastrophe, or
whether you have to go through the catastrophe. If you have to go
through the catastrophe then no political action can do much good.
Certainly there have been people who have intellectually reversed the
progression for themselves. It may seem doubtful that an entire society
could do so, but sometimes pendulums do swing, and it seems to me even
more doubtful that some heroic political movement could cause society to
jump to some totally different state in a manner that has no connection
to long-established lines of development.
>: Libertarian thought is obviously incomplete. It strikes me as a
>: fragment of liberal thought that with some reworking could be fit into a
>: counterrevolutionary system.
>
>Certainly each axiomatic starting point already carries the seeds of
>its own 'higher truth.' The question is whether there is one higher,
>transcendent truth that can stand outside various systems of thought
>and be used as a yardstick to measure them by. That does not seem to be
>the case.
Axioms can be incomplete. The libertarians have programmatically made
their axioms incomplete. If the liberal way of completing
libertarianism leads to catastrophe and a CR way doesn't then without
begging questions the CR way can be judged better.
>This is the old mono/poly debate all over again.
Were you a lurker at the time of the last go-round on that, which Mr.
Deane and I had?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Jul 29 19:15:52 EDT 1994
Article: 1995 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CR texts
Date: 29 Jul 1994 19:14:45 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 58
Message-ID: <31c2h5$rr@panix.com>
References: <314k6o$6d0@dns1.NMSU.Edu> <315jfs$57g@panix.com> <31bi7e$8ja@dockmaster.phantom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
pas@phantom.com (Make Mine Molotov!) writes:
>I don't think that anyone is claiming that all systems of thought are
>unjustified. It would be difficult to do so and remain coherent. All
>are justified on their own terms, insofar as they are consistent from
>their axiomatic starting points.
>From what point of view could someone assert that all systems of thought
are equally justified? From within each system inconsistent systems are
obviously unjustified, so it seems it would be from a position outside
every system of thought.
>The fact that one is born into a culture which will inform one's
>thinking and being seems to argue for a fatalistic view of ethics and
>ideology.
I don't see how one could coherently have a fatalistic view of ethics
and ideology. Ethics and ideology give meaning, while "fate" seems to
mean that something has no meaning, it simply is what it is and that's
the end of it. So it seems that a fatalistic view of ethics and
ideology would be the view that meaning has no meaning, which is hard
for me to follow.
>Again, it's not clear that "we come to understand things better and
>come closer to the truth."
Does anyone seriously believe the contrary? If not, I see no point in
pretending to do so.
>We may simply come to interpret more things in the light of our culture
>and realize that culture's truths more evidently.
>From what perspective would it appear to you that you were doing only
that? From within your culture's perspective you would be coming closer
to the truth, so it seems it would be from a perspective outside your
own culture.
>The idea of progress implicit in your reasoning is an exception, not
>something universal in time and space. It seems to be an odd point to
>argue from a CR perspective...
You mean there are societies in which people don't believe they learn
and come to understand things better as time goes by?
>: As to the universality of systems of thought, it may be that all systems
>: of thought when developed ultimately either fall apart or converge on
>: some final system. There is no proof that happens, but if the
>: assumption that it does makes it easier to understand our situation then
>: I don't see why the assumption should not be made.
>
>Because it hasn't been borne out and the implications lead to horror.
"Ultimately" is a long time. Also, the assumption that (for example)
the systems of morality of different groups have no common referent to
which they tend, so that "we" and "they" are not members of any common
moral world, can also lead to horror.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Jul 29 19:15:54 EDT 1994
Article: 1996 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: lazy fair
Date: 29 Jul 1994 19:15:32 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 12
Message-ID: <31c2ik$11q@panix.com>
References: <94209.103308U24C1@wvnvm.wvnet.edu> <319nn4$6eu@panix.com> <31bqvh$n40@dns1.NMSU.Edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
tminnix@nmsu.edu (Timothy O. Minnix) writes:
>Why not go back to the idea of federalism and make regulation of
>economic activity a local affair?
Actually, I like the idea of federalism, but people were complaining
that it inevitably slides into consolidation (as it in fact has in the
U.S.) or doesn't deal with the existence of powerful national and
international organization and interest groups so I was trying to get
other suggestions.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jul 31 05:45:36 EDT 1994
Article: 2010 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CCR: Catholic Counter-Reformation
Date: 30 Jul 1994 15:38:01 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 12
Message-ID: <31ea6p$qsa@panix.com>
References: <31dohr$at@nyx.cs.du.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
nmonagha@nyx.cs.du.edu (N.O. Monaghan) writes:
>I promise on the holy Books of the Church and on the holy Cross of
>Christ, my Lord and my King, fidelity to the doctrine, sentiments and
>practices of the Phalangist Communion of the Catholic, royal,
>communitarian Counter-Reformation and French counter-revolution
There have also been phalangist movements in Spain and in Lebanon. Do
they have something in common other than the name? Also, what does the
Count of Paris think of all this?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jul 31 05:45:44 EDT 1994
Article: 28385 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Freedom vs. Well-being of Society
Date: 30 Jul 1994 15:34:03 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 14
Message-ID: <31e9vb$mnv@panix.com>
References: <31bdcg$6mj@panix.com> <31dspk$9tk@search01.news.aol.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <31dspk$9tk@search01.news.aol.com> bcmilch@aol.com (BCMilch) writes:
>The people in the refugee camps in Goma are not being oppressed or
>deprived of freedom. They voluntarily fled to that area, with no real
>threat of the RPF chasing them. Now they are free to go home. However,
>many can't, because they are physically too weak and don't have enough
>food for the journey.
I don't understand -- they voluntarily fled someplace where they
weren't going to be able to get any food, and their voluntary fleeing
there had nothing to do with deprivations of negative rights? Why were
they fleeing?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jul 31 06:14:46 EDT 1994
Article: 2023 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CCR: Catholic Counter-Reformation
Date: 31 Jul 1994 06:14:28 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 12
Message-ID: <31fti4$sl0@panix.com>
References: <31dohr$at@nyx.cs.du.edu> <31ea6p$qsa@panix.com> <31eck2$qlp@nyx10.cs.du.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
nmonagha@nyx10.cs.du.edu (N.O. Monaghan) writes:
>I would probably think that CCR French Phalange is closer to the
>Carlist tradition in Spain [. . .] One of the tenets held by the
>Carlists was that not only should the king be of the correct descent
>but that he should be suitable and prepared to uphold tradition.
What's happened to the Carlists in Spain since the re-establishment of
the monarchy there? Also, how much of a force is monarchism in France
these days? I've heard very little about it recently.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jul 31 15:03:18 EDT 1994
Article: 2024 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: alliances
Date: 31 Jul 1994 06:16:32 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 18
Message-ID: <31ftm0$spd@panix.com>
References: <01HFBWLI11HK9C2H5S@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
DEANE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU (DAVID MATTHEW DEANE) writes:
>I suspect that even well intentioned efforts to reverse the course of
>libertarianism are not likely to succeed; worse, they could drag
>another generation of conservatives down with them [. . .] Of course,
>the ENR approach of gaining cultural hegemony is slow too; and the
>attempt to go against the grain of the Locken orthodoxy of the (make
>that Lockean orthodoxy) of the English-speaking world is certainly
>ambitious.
How does one establish cultural hegemony other than by reconfiguring
the materials offered by the existing culture in a direction and
pattern more to one's taste, that is, by penetration and subversion?
If a movement is going itself to be subverted by close engagement with
the existing culture perhaps it would be better for it to give up
hegemonic designs and concentrate on self-development.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jul 31 19:12:11 EDT 1994
Article: 2027 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Tactical (and educational) alliances.
Date: 31 Jul 1994 15:28:11 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 25
Message-ID: <31gu0b$j3f@panix.com>
References: <3190nd$7k3@gabriel.keele.ac.uk> <319nr2$71j@panix.com> <31ggko$s9n@gabriel.keele.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
cla04@cc.keele.ac.uk (A.T. Fear) writes:
>However I suspect given the tenor of this piece the argument is that
>laissez faire breaks down communities both in reality and the feeling
>that there is such a thing leading to anomie. The Thatcherite misquote
>'There is no such thing as society only individuals and families' has
>often been used to put this case forward.
It would be interesting to know what he has to say. To continue with my
current hobbyhorse, it seems to me that the stupider laissez faire
ideologists tend to deny the existence of community but laissez faire
institutions break down communities less than the welfare state does.
What political measures now attainable would be more favorable to
community than minimal government is a question I would like to see
intelligently discussed. Perhaps one problem with an alliance with
libertarian ideology is that it makes such discussion impossible.
What did Mrs. (is it now Lady?) Thatcher actually say? It seems to me
perfectly legitimate from a conservative or CR viewpoint to deny the
existence of "society" in its usual polemic sense of a single locus of
decision to which all conditions that could be affected by government
action are attributed and to focus discussion on individuals, families,
and other communities more limited than society at large.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sun Jul 31 19:12:15 EDT 1994
Article: 28460 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory,talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.economics,alt.politics.radical-left,alt.politics.libertarian
Subject: Re: What part of the GNP is not GNP? (was: Who Did In the Commies?)
Date: 31 Jul 1994 19:05:47 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 46
Message-ID: <31haob$37m@panix.com>
References: <31bsqd$hu0@saltillo.cs.utexas.edu> <31goop$6sg@panix.com> <31h468$c2@peaches.cs.utexas.edu> <1994Jul31.212332.10100@midway.uchicago.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
Xref: panix talk.politics.theory:28460 talk.politics.misc:185965 alt.politics.economics:6938 alt.politics.radical-left:20699 alt.politics.libertarian:37212
In <1994Jul31.212332.10100@midway.uchicago.edu> thf2@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Ted Frank) writes:
>If I make a bookcase for myself, it's not GNP. If my neighbor
>makes a bookcase for herself, that's not GNP. If I take that
>same bookcase and trade it for a bookcase my neighbor made, it
>is.
>That's a very real criticism of the GNP measuring process. It
>goes double in the case of child care.
What's the problem supposed to be? Right now it appears that GNP is
intended to measure the monetary value of goods and services produced
for exchange, with some things that those doing the computations view as
inaccuracies (e.g., the exclusion of most black market and bartered
goods and services) but which could also be viewed as definitional
features of the number being computed. Like housing starts and freight
car loadings, that number is useful for many purposes.
One could also try to compute a different number that includes goods and
services of a kind generally produced for exchange but produced for
oneself. Presumably that number would include do-it-yourself carpentry
projects. There could also be a number that includes the value of goods
and services that might be produced for exchange, and so could be given
a market value, but which people provide without payment largely because
of the personal relations involved. Caring for one's own children,
companionship services to family and friends, and sexual services to
whomever are obvious examples.
One could also have a number that includes everything done to bring
about some good for which a minimum monetary value could be inferred
from the willingness to give up something else. That number would
include everything people did in preference to earning as much money as
possible (e.g., watching TV instead of taking a second job, working as a
teacher instead of some higher-paying job, using Central Park as a park
instead of a parking lot) at a value equal to the foregone income.
Presumably this final number would be a measure of the highest GNP that
could be achieved if all human efforts were devoted to that goal and so
would be a measure of existing technology and resources.
All these numbers would be of interest for various purposes. None of
them would measure human well-being. An apparent advantage of GNP as
now computed is that the computation can be done with fewer arbitrary
assumptions than for the other numbers and so gives more information
about actual conditions than the other numbers would.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Aug 1 05:50:20 EDT 1994
Article: 28504 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Freedom vs. Well-being of Society
Date: 1 Aug 1994 05:47:05 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 14
Distribution: na
Message-ID: <31igap$55a@panix.com>
References: <3142ar$oha@panix.com> <31hk4o$nf4@news.delphi.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
In <31hk4o$nf4@news.delphi.com> jwas@news.delphi.com (JWAS@DELPHI.COM) writes:
>>To be absolutely free would be to experience no barriers to pursuing
>>one's goals.
>This defines omnipotence, not freedom.
Absolute freedom and omnipotence are the same thing. To mean anything,
freedom must be greatly limited. So to say "the only legitimate goal
of politics is freedom" isn't very helpful unless the limitations on
freedom, and why those are the limitations that ought to be imposed
rather than some others, are explained.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Aug 1 08:34:02 EDT 1994
Article: 2033 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CR texts
Date: 1 Aug 1994 08:33:58 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 77
Message-ID: <31iq3m$mmk@panix.com>
References: <31bhnm$8j9@dockmaster.phantom.com> <31c2eu$hc@panix.com> <31i964$d7o@dockmaster.phantom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
pas@phantom.com (Make Mine Molotov!) writes:
>It seems clear, to me, that people's 'actual' preferences exist from
>minute to minute and are quite easily manipulated.
In its ideal the liberal system manipulates preferences only to
establish and strengthen itself (e.g., it propagandizes in favor of
liberal tolerance, diversity and openness, which consist in rejection of
all principles of social order other than its own, it teaches reverence
for The Constitution, which turns out to be the same as liberal ideology
and practice). A Marxist-flavored objection is that it is mostly
powerful material interests that do the manipulating, turning everyone
into an economic consumer and everything into a factor of economic
production. My response is that it is the liberal ruling class, which
controls the state and the instruments of propaganda, rather than the
capitalists, who are far too shortsighted, self-seeking and divided to
act collectively, that tends to control everything for its own purposes
and therefore in the end to constitute the dominant material interest.
>Many paleoconservatives (in Europe, at least, where therm makes sense)
>do not subscribe to any idea of federalism, free-markets, or much else
>of the liberal tradition. American conservatives, on the other hand,
>have no tradition but liberalism.
Paleoconservatism will be different in different countries. In each
country it takes the society of an earlier day as a guide, but
reinterprets and reconfigures it to avoid the line of development that
society actually led to.
>I interpret a paleo position in this context as merely being liberal or
>incoherent (i.e., economic liberlalism and to hell with the community,
>free enterprise, less state on economic matters, but put the police in
>_his_ bedroom, let's make this a christian country while we're at it,
>etc.). It's very hard to see anything besides oppportunism in the
>American 'right.'
I would say that the American paleo position accepts most of the
institutions of economic liberalism but gives them a different purpose.
Statism is bad not because it keeps individuals from doing what they
feel like doing but because it inhibits, distorts, and supplants the
communities, and the institutions and habits relating to personal
culture and morality, that naturally develop among men and that promote
the greatest political good, which is virtuous freedom in community.
The institutional deviations from the classical liberal tradition
include soft nationalism (e.g., anti-immigration and anti-NAFTA) to
provide a reasonably stable setting within which communities and so on
can develop. They also include the presumption that what the government
does will presuppose and support the moral institutions of society, for
example by taking at least a formal stand against outrageous violations
(e.g., pornography).
I don't see anything particularly opportunistic about it. You say
liberalism is America's only tradition, but the development of
liberalism and the radicalism of the resulting demands shows that the
liberalism of our tradition is not identical with the increasingly self-
consistent (and I believe self-annihilating) liberalism of today.
Americans did and do believe a variety of things for all the reasons
people can have for believing anything. If the dominant interpretation
of what people did and believed in the past leads to catastrophe it
seems appropriate to develop a different interpretation. People in the
past may have been naive about what they really thought because they
didn't know how it would play out. Maybe we'd be most faithful to the
Founders by interpreting the Founding as something other than a stage in
the progression leading to John Rawls.
>: >This is the old mono/poly debate all over again.
>
>: Were you a lurker at the time of the last go-round on that, which Mr.
>: Deane and I had?
>
>No, but it seems like it may have been interesting! Were they the same
>types of issues?
What else? (There must be a pun involving "mono/poly" here, but I can't
quite think of what it is.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Mon Aug 1 08:37:19 EDT 1994
Article: 2034 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: CR texts
Date: 1 Aug 1994 08:36:08 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 88
Message-ID: <31iq7o$n61@panix.com>
References: <31bi7e$8ja@dockmaster.phantom.com> <31c2h5$rr@panix.com> <31ib9q$d95@dockmaster.phantom.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
pas@phantom.com (Make Mine Molotov!) writes:
>Birth is an act of fate, it is something that the person who was born
>had not the slightest control over, nor can anyone change the fact of
>death. The fact that they are fated does not make them 'meaningless,'
>however.
You don't control your birth and the fact of your death. If you think
that all purpose reduces to human purpose then "fate" may be an
appropriate word.
>: >Again, it's not clear that "we come to understand things better and
>: >come closer to the truth."
>
>: Does anyone seriously believe the contrary? If not, I see no point in
>: pretending to do so.
>
>I'm sorry, but I do believe the contrary.
If you don't believe that you personally come to understand things
better and come closer to the truth then why do you go to all those
bookstores?
>The viewpoint you espouse seems to imply an ultimate intelligibility to
>the cosmos, a 'History' and a set of 'laws' that can be uncovered that
>will make reality transparent. It seems to place far too much faith in
>the idea of progress, while you clearly are not pleased with what that
>progression is toward.
The ultimate intelligibility of the cosmos need not imply that its
intelligibility will become transparent to us through some historical
process. The attempt to reduce all things to human things is a bad
habit of the liberals.
>: You mean there are societies in which people don't believe they learn
>: and come to understand things better as time goes by?
>
>Yes. The idea of a history with a beginning, a middle and an end produced
>tremendous changes in the west (imported from Judaism via Christianity,
>secularized during the enlightenment and leading to both the Marxian end
>of history and the weaker liberal faith in progress).
I was talking about something more basic, whether particular people
believe they individually learn things.
>Whether individuals believe that _they_ learn more and whether cultures
>believe that there is qualitatatively more to be learned outside of
>what their own traditions have to offer are two different issues that
>you seem to have conflated.
Agreed that the issues are different but not that I was conflating them.
I do think the one leads to another. The cultures I am aware of all
think that their own traditions don't exhaust reality. People recognize
that they themselves learn things, that the oldest and wisest know
things other people don't, and that there are things even the oldest and
wisest don't know. That's one of the reasons people talk about spirits
and gods. The knowledge of a child is qualitatively different from that
of an adult, and that of an adult is qualitatively different from that
of the ancestors, gods or whatever. I think people recognize that. The
knowledge that ancestors and gods possess is not part of human
tradition, though.
>Merely because something may or may not happen someday does not seem to
>be grounds to believe that it will happen or that we should reason as
>if that were the case. It can be rhetorically convenient, but it's
>equally convenient to argue the opposite.
We should make the assumptions that are necessary to give sense to what
we can't avoid doing. For example, we should assume that our first-
person present-tense sense experience relates to some larger world not
reducible to that experience, that we have a personal identity that
persists over time, that our memories are in general reliable, that the
future will in general resemble the past, and so on. Evaluative
objectivity and the human ability to approximate that objectivity seems
to me such assumptions.
>However the desire to see a common morality in all humanity is equally
>problematic because there will always be peoples whose values we do not
>share.
Why not deal with the problem by seeing the common morality as something
transcendent that all human moralities relate to as what justifies them
but which can never be perfectly captured by any of them? On that view
we're all in the same moral universe and we have some respect for the
moralities of other peoples although we may legitimately believe that
some are objectively better than others.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Aug 2 07:10:45 EDT 1994
Article: 2038 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: random comments
Date: 1 Aug 1994 13:48:46 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 42
Message-ID: <31jchu$cn9@panix.com>
References: <01HFE4LB6QBK9C44MJ@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com
DEANE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU (DAVID MATTHEW DEANE) writes:
>>...but laissez faire institutions break down communities less than the
>>welfare state does.
>
>The above statement is only apparently true, it seems to me, if one only
>looks at our current situation, and ignores earlier periods.
Sure, but that was then and this is now. The issue is not whether
strict laissez faire is the summum bonum but whether laissez faire
theories capture important aspects of the summum bonum that are ignored
by current liberalism and that are practically important with respect to
current issues. If so, then it seems to me a principled alliance is
possible.
>It is no accident, as Christopher Lasch and others have pointed out,
>that many left-wing or populist social/political movements demonstrate
>quite conservative views on social issues, even as they fight against
>"conservative" economic policies.
People seem to believe that economic libertarianism in the long run
implies full-blown current liberalism. It seems to me at least as
likely that the economic aspects of current liberalism (central
administrative controls to carry out state responsibility for
individual material welfare) would in the end imply the whole theory.
If it's the state that in the end is responsible for what happens to
each of us, then institutions other than the state and the habits and
conventions that support them rather recede into the background. At
the limit all we're left with is momentary individual sensations and
desires and the universal state.
>>I wonder wha our political discourse would be like if people stopped
>>thinking and communicating in terms of 'rights'.
>
>I really don't think that is possible, in that all societies and
>cultures have some conceptions of rights and shape their thinking
>accordingly.
Very few societies have viewed rights as abstract fundamental principles
of analysis, though.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Aug 2 07:10:51 EDT 1994
Article: 28567 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory,talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.economics,alt.politics.radical-left,alt.politics.libertarian
Subject: Re: What part of the GNP is not GNP?
Date: 1 Aug 1994 16:03:49 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Lines: 16
Message-ID: <31jkf5$cj4@panix.com>
References: <1994Jul31.222639.12506@midway.uchicago.edu> <31j2q4$put@panix.com> <31jc03$109@DGS.dgsys.com> <31jja5$8rs@panix.com>
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In <31jja5$8rs@panix.com> gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>In effect, the areas which belonged to women were
>annihilated in thought when the idea of the "gross domestic
>product" was concocted. It's not very subtle.
Personally, I'd rather what I did and what I got for it were eliminated
from the formal accounts. For starters, you don't get taxed on what's
off the books.
In reality, of course, "GDP" is an obvious ploy by feminists who wanted
to eliminate the separate role of women and used the concept to
convince policymakers that the destruction of the household economy
would increase national well-being.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Tue Aug 2 17:28:05 EDT 1994
Article: 2055 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: lazy fair
Date: 2 Aug 1994 14:17:58 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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DEANE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU (DAVID MATTHEW DEANE) writes:
>>Sure but that was then and this is now.
>
>But if we "turn back the clock" in regards to economic liberalism, we will
>necessarily be confronted by the same dilemmas which led to the creation of
>the welfare state in the first place.
Why can't we be smarter this time around, with the benefit of
experience, and choose different horns of the dilemmas? For example,
when the restored society based on economic liberalism turns out to be
unstable we may resolve the instability differently because this will
be the second time around and we'll be smarter.
>The free market, left to itself, also tends to recreate centralized
>administrative controls, whether as part of the state or apart from it.
Why say that? Within particular firms the market may create centralized
controls if those controls contribute to the success of the firm, but I
don't see why in general the market would tend to create such controls
for society at large. More often markets tend to break down
administrative structures because they offer a more effective form of
rationality.
>The problem with the free market is that it can only respond to the
>more immediate, short-term stimuli.
The responsiveness to longer-term considerations is real, but depends on
the time value of money. A more fundamental problem, I think, is that
the market doesn't take into account externalities like environmental
degradation very well. The law of nuisance is some help, but doesn't
really do the job. Also, as you point out, the market tends to draw
everything into a single worldwide economically rational system. It's
easier to say no to the market than to the state, but it's still hard to
fight gravity.
The strategy of those who are soft on libertarianism, of course, is to
withdraw from administrative control of the market as a general thing,
but define particular areas of intervention. For example, one might
have tariffs and other barriers to international trade to maintain
national identity, taxes on pollution to make companies internalize
environmental externalities, and so on.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Aug 3 15:45:21 EDT 1994
Article: 2059 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: lazy fair
Date: 2 Aug 1994 18:11:34 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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References: <01HFFM1C0CBW9C12CE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU> <31m2km$d3l@panix.com> <31ma62$mhs@dns1.NMSU.Edu>
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tminnix@nmsu.edu (Timothy O. Minnix) writes:
> To me this whole question is sort of moot since markets
>obviously depend on some kind of administrative structure for proper
>functioning. In basic 'mom-and-pop' types of market economies the
>structure may be very simple - a government only concerned with keeping
>up the roads and the police force so goods may be transported without
>fear of robbery.
That would be a government that provides particular services that can't
be easily provided privately for various reasons (e.g., the "free rider"
problem). Libertarian theoreticians spend a lot of time, energy and
ingenuity arguing how long the list has to be. A government that
provides such services needs an administrative structure for itself but
doesn't provide one for society at large.
>In the transnational corporate capitalism of modern times, commercial
>interests often demand more extensive governmental intervention in
>people lives such as military excursions to foreign lands to prop up
>rulers friendly to the above interests (eg, the Gulf War).
Commercial interests may ask the government to do things, but I don't
think they give the major impulse to government intervention in people's
lives.
Most particular interventions benefit some commercial interests at the
expense of others. They don't increase the national wealth, but only
redistribute it, and some are losers. An intervention that benefited
most commercial interests (the Gulf War) would likely be undertaken for
nationalist reasons (maintain the flow of cheap oil and clip the wings
of a troublemaker) by an interventionist government even if commercial
interests had no voice in the matter. Certainly transnational corporate
capitalism could exist and thrive if all that existed were a minimal
government of the kind described above.
>Add to this the loss of ecclesial power which may occur in an advanced
>capitalist nation and it becomes difficult to avoid the interventionist
>welfare state we now have in the United States. This is because
>churches used to dole out a lot of the alms to the poor in addition to
>serving as focal points for local volunteerism.
I can think of no evidence that it was decline of charitable giving or
increase of unremedied misery that led to the welfare state. It's worth
noting, for example, that charitable giving went up substantially during
the Reagan years.
> I'm not sure how one avoids controlling the market 'in general'
>while regulating particular areas of it. Could you explain to me the
>difference between 'general' and 'particular' market intervention?
The government could enforce contracts, punish frauds, maintain roads
and harbors, impose taxes on pollution equal to some estimate of the
value of the damage, establish tariffs and immigration controls to
preserve national identity, and do other such things, but not try to
affect the distribution of income, the representation of particular
groups in particular professions or positions, the development of
particular industries or regions, and so on.
Economists and libertarians have devoted a lot of thought to which
interventions could be justified on the grounds of "market failure" and
which are redistributive. I suppose I was making some such distinction.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Wed Aug 3 15:45:31 EDT 1994
Article: 28771 of talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Subject: Querulous queries
Date: 2 Aug 1994 21:30:55 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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This is supposed to be an international newsgroup, and there's been a
lot of political theory in a lot of different places for a long time, so
how come all we ever have here is Americans arguing about different
phases of the liberal tradition? Has the New World Order triumphed to
that degree? And how come everybody posts in groups of 20 articles
crossposted to 15 groups? Does the capitalist system and free trade
mean that all posts have to be mass produced and made equally available
everywhere?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Thu Aug 4 21:03:07 EDT 1994
Article: 2063 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: markets
Date: 3 Aug 1994 16:16:24 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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DEANE@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU (DAVID MATTHEW DEANE) writes:
>Now that we are entering into a new stage of capitalist development,
>the trend is not towards industrial discipline, but rather towards
>consumerist indiscipline; consequently capitalism is less concerned
>with the behavior of its workers in the workplace, and more concerned
>with their behavior outside the workplace, as consumers. Therefore
>capitalists turn their efforts towards breaking down those barriers
>(ethnicity, language, religion, community, nation, etc) which stand in
>the way of an efficient consumerism (try taking a look at a Bennetton
>advertisment to see what I mean).
It's worth noting that Plato thought that societies that honor wealth
above all characteristically break down because the rulers find
licentiousness profitable and encourage it. The next steps are the
democratic society, based on the equality of all preferences, and when
the equilibrium among preferences breaks down, the tyrannic society,
based on the irrational and violent rule of the strongest appetites.
See books viii and ix of the _Republic_.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Fri Aug 5 16:02:50 EDT 1994
Article: 2065 of alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Subject: Re: Tactical (and educational) alliances.
Date: 4 Aug 1994 21:36:36 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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Stuart writes:
>Of course, the Libertarian/traditionalist 'alliance' in the UK was
>never one between equals but a process parasitism and absorption of the
>latter by the former [. . .] Principal amongst these 'traditionalist'
>policies were support for Ulster Unionism and, certainly amongst Monday
>Club types, British colonial issues such as support for Rhodesia and
>South Africa.
What did the traditionalists amount to? You put the word in quotes.
In the States one got the impression that there were the
Thatcherite/libertarians and there were the wets, and the wets were
conservative in the sense that they wanted to continue whatever the
existing order was (in this case, the welfare state) but use different
rhetoric and have their own men at the top. One never heard of any fans
of throne, altar and sword. There was also Enoch Powell, but he didn't
count because he was a racist and besides he was into Nietzsche and
Thucydides. Have I left anything out?
>the collection of misfits and social inadequates who made up the ranks
>of the student Libs.
A problem the libertarians have. Presumably the presentable people end
up in the most mainstream of the parties, which in the United States is
probably the moderate Democrats. The left-liberal Democrats include
Hollywood and fashion, but they also include most of the top Clinton
appointees who (as the Rothbard-Rockwell Report observes) are the
ugliest on record. I haven't seen enough CRs to know what they look
like on average. Presumably we all bear a striking resemblance to Louis
XIV.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
From panix!not-for-mail Sat Aug 6 03:24:16 EDT 1994
Article: 6757 of alt.society.conservatism
Path: panix!not-for-mail
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: alt.society.conservatism
Subject: Re: Politics and the Social Disciplines
Date: 5 Aug 1994 18:52:14 -0400
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
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edrahn@gate.net (Ed Rahn) writes:
>This is the a priori assumption that the behaviors of human beings are
>programmed by their social environment [ ... ] This can be contrasted
>to the view that human beings, all but those with genuinely serious
>mal-functions of their neural machinery, choose their behavior
>according to considerations of self-interest, and make rational
>calculations of the costs and benefits of various courses of action.
Is the difference between the two views so great? If people act based
on cost-benefit analysis then their acts are determined by the costs and
benefits attached to various courses of action in their social
environment. If that's right, then someone with the power to manipulate
the environment could make people do what he wants.
Another possibility is that what people do depends on a whole bunch of
things including religious and cultural values, personal loyalties and
antipathies, group identities, and so on. Conceivably one might claim
that all those things reduce to some combination of programming, social
environment, and cost-benefit analysis, but the point most relevant to
your main concerns is that the situation is too complicated for any
bureaucracy to understand and manipulate.
>As our species developed, evolution placed a premium on the ability to
>learn new behaviors, as opposed to automatic performance of inherited
>behaviors or the the rote repetition of responses learned during a
>critical period in early ontogeny.
One thing our species has developed to a far greater extent than any
other is culture. The ability to learn new behaviors is mostly social
rather than individual. It seems to me that the strong social element
in everything we do makes social engineering hard to take seriously,
since the social engineers have to be able to stand outside society, see
it whole, and redesign it for some purpose.
>The theory must say that under some set of circumstances, X will occur,
>and not some alternative outcome. A theory that can "explain", after
>the fact, any particular result at all, is not testable, hence not
>scientific. Such a theory is far worse than wrong, it is, strictly
>speaking, nonsense.
Is evolution nonsense? I can't think of any specific predictions it
makes.
In order to talk sensibly about politics you need a much broader view of
what counts as a good theory that is supported by the evidence.
> There are many researchers in psychology who practice the
>scientific method, and are doing genuine objective scientific research,
>but those branches of psychology which are not scientific are precisely
>those which have been most influential in determining public policy.
>This is not surprising - scientific objectivity would prevent an
>exponent of a theory from making more sweeping claims for it than are
>warranted by the evidence, but the media are attracted to the most
>sensational stories, hence the most media attention is awarded to those
>schools of thought that are least objectivelly demonstrable. What
>trickles down to the general populace, and is invoked to justify
>certain political decisions, is little more than psychobabble.
But public policy must be based on factual assumptions that go far
beyond what can be extracted from the evidence using standards that
physicists would accept as adequately rigorous. Are all such
assumptions irrational? If so, then Freudian, Marxist or radical
feminist assumptions are as good as any.
>Today our streets are littered with "street people" - drug addicts,
>alcoholics and the mentally deranged [ ... ] Consider for a moment the
>alternative, the choice model. According to it, criminals make
>calculations of the risk/return ratio involved in criminal behavior. As
>the severity of punishment, and more importantly, the probability of a
>conviction after an arrest are reduced, crime becomes more attractive.
The choice model can't explain everything. Some criminals may be
maximizing their utility based on cost/benefit analyses, but the street
people you mention clearly aren't. Also, if you don't like social
engineering I don't see why you like the choice model. The choice model
tells you how to do the engineering--just set up the appropriate rewards
and punishments.
It seems to me that people tend to behave themselves if their way of
life depends on family and community networks in which people maintain
long-term relations based on mutual obligations. Government social
programs disrupt such networks by creating well-funded bureaucracies
that compete with them. Hence all the social wreckage.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com) Quem Jupiter vult perdere prius dementat.
Do let me know if you have comments of any kind.
Back to my archive of posts.