Items Posted by Jim Kalb
From panix!jk Mon Jan 11 15:38:15 EST 1993
Article: 1 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: This Group
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 15:09:50 GMT
There has been no traffic on this group at my site for the past several
days. Does that show that the participants have chosen silence as their
weapon in the struggle against modernity, or does the explanation lie
deeper?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we
disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." (Montaigne)
From panix!jk Mon Jan 11 15:38:17 EST 1993
Article: 4 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Integrism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1ifmedINNgq6@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 07:41:19 GMT
drw@zermelo.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) writes:
>In article <1ifmedINNgq6@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> bp847@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jovan Weismiller) writes:
> For those outside the _Catholic_ counterrevolutionary sphere,
> Integrism is an ordinary term for the ideology which places Christ the King
> at the head of society, state, culture and civilization. Thus, it stands in
> opposition to all forms of the revolution which place the people, history,
> reason, humanism, race, etc. at the head.
>
>And leaves the *interesting* question of who speaks for Christ on
>earth. (As far as I know, even the Pope doesn't claim to be the
>unique spokesman for Christ.) A lot of wars have been fought over the
>point.
I'm not sure that it's more troublesome to say "Christ the King is at
the head of s., s., c. & c." than it is to say "the goal of the state
is to establish justice" or "the purpose of society is to further the
realization of the potential and goals of the individual". In either
case you're accepting some grand end for society the exact meaning and
appropriate implementation of which will be subject to dispute. The
Roman Catholics, at least, have a more orderly procedure for dealing
with such disputes than most.
It's true that such disputes sometimes lead to war. When the grand
principles are religious the wars are called religious wars; otherwise,
they're called by some other name. Why think that religious ages are
more violent than others? The wars of this century have certainly been
violent enough without having much to do with religion.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we
disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." (Montaigne)
From panix!jk Mon Jan 11 15:38:18 EST 1993
Article: 7 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: apparently a dilemma
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Jan8.062824.12094@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 17:51:18 GMT
In <1993Jan8.062824.12094@news.vanderbilt.edu> rickertj@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu (John Rickert) writes:
> Being a (Burkean) conservative, I am opposed to revolution. On the
>other hand, things seem to be approaching a condition in which revolution
>appears to be the only available recourse, given my deeper beliefs. More
>specifically, I have little hope in the culture in the United States today,
>and it appears to have taken hold so tenaciously that the usual means will
>not be of much avail.
What sort of revolution do you have in mind? Surely not the extralegal
seizure of power by an armed Burkean elite, followed by the forcible
implementation of their political and social program. Pascal's comment
that tyranny is the attempt to get in one way what can only be gotten in
another is very much in point on that idea.
If don't like the way of life you see around you, my suggestion is that
you and likeminded people develop a better way of life. It's still
possible in this country as a legal and practical matter to live
differently from the majority (consider the Mennonites, the Hasids or
the New York homosexual community). If your beliefs about how people
should live are valid, doing so would benefit you and your family and
friends immediately; it also might possibly work as a way of beginning a
general reform of culture, which political revolution clearly would not.
Maybe your point, though, is that a radical break with your society (for
example, choosing to associate mostly with people who disagree with the
goals that are publicly accepted as authoritative, cutting your
connections with big organizations, homeschooling your children, or
whatever) seems somehow unBurkean. It's certainly not what Burke would
have considered ideal, since he thought that man was a social animal and
he didn't like ideological factions. On the other hand, he took facts
very seriously and recognized that necessity can sometimes justify
revolution of one kind or another. For Burke, I think, society is the
condition of achieving the goal of human nature but it is not the goal
itself and it does not create the goal.
So I suppose my advice is to cheer up and join with other people in
living as well as you can under the conditions you have to deal with.
"Living well" may include politics, but in matters of culture it is not
primarily politics.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we
disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." (Montaigne)
From panix!jk Mon Jan 11 15:38:19 EST 1993
Article: 11 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: apparently a dilemma
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Jan8.062824.12094@news.vanderbilt.edu> <1993Jan8.175345.26614@panix.com> <1993Jan9.065659.28424@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 14:12:37 GMT
rickertj@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu writes:
>If I could make an excuse [for "revolution" posting], which is something
>generally to be avoided, I would say that it was pretty late at night when
>I made the post, and now it is not so clear to me what prompted it.
The post seemed to express a state of mind that is comprehensible enough
to me.
One motive for conservativism is the thought that since the world goes
beyond anything any of us can figure out, the good life requires us, in
order to get beyond what we are able to do individually, to take
advantage of the knowledge implicit in social usages and habits that
arise over time. It's just as well that's what the good life requires,
because it's a practical impossibility to avoid basing most of what we
think and do on faith that what other people think and do is valid.
Unfortunately, when we look around us in America in 1992 it seems that
the social usages and habits that are becoming more and more dominant
are motivated by a rejection of the notion that there's anything of
value in the world that goes beyond things (like social position and
physical pleasure, or at least comfort and equality) that the smallest
mind can apprehend immediately. You begin to wonder exactly what it is
that conservatism is supposed to conserve.
It can be upsetting, to put it mildly, and the thought that dominant
social trends are not the only or the most important things that exist
is not always as consoling as it no doubt should be. The point of
conservatism, after all, is that society is important even if it's not
ultimate.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we
disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." (Montaigne)
From panix!jk Mon Jan 11 15:38:21 EST 1993
Article: 12 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Hello!
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Jan10.105130.29523@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 19:45:44 GMT
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>Totalitarianism exists where the attempt is made to force one absolute
>truth, one good, one idea, one God, as the only truth [ . . . ]
>Essentially the ENR (the term New Right was coined by their enemies)
>is pagan in spirit, and passionately pro-European [ . . . ] The ENR
>would argue that the past 2,000 years has been a slow process of the
>de-paganizing of Europe.
Sounds like someone has been reading Nietzsche. One question: what do
they identify as the lost non-Christian and non-totalitarian Europe to
which they owe allegiance? For example, are there any pre-Christian
European thinkers that the ENR particularly likes? Any particular
pre-Christian European societies? Why did Europe become Christian if
Christianity is unEuropean?
>I believe that the process of social disintegration has gone so far
>that breakdown and revolution are inevitable. Moreover, the logic of
>liberal totalitarianism (and remember, American conservatives are
>simply right- wing liberals) is such that I doubt that any group which
>tries to resist assimilation into the mass culture will be allowed to
>exist [ . . . ] True, the authority of the State to do this is always
>under attack. But the collapse of State authority and instability will
>only lead to a greater, stronger tyranny. Anarchy = Tyranny.
I have more sympathy with this view than I would like, and sometimes
find Plato's account in Book VIII of his _Republic_ a compelling
description of what we are seeing. There, you no doubt remember, he
describes how society devolves from a mythical perfect order to a
military aristocracy based on honor, and then to a commercial oligarchy
based on profit, a democratic consumer society based on freedom,
equality and hedonism, and finally to a tyranny. The process moved
fairly quickly in the small states with which Plato was familiar, but
has moved very slowly in Western society as a whole. The fear, of
course, is that the vast scale and slow speed of the transformations we
are seeing makes them all the more complete and irresistible.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we
disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." (Montaigne)
From panix!jk Mon Jan 11 15:38:22 EST 1993
Article: 17 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ENR
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Jan11.001202.7408@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 16:50:16 GMT
In <1993Jan11.001202.7408@news.cs.brandeis.edu> deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu writes:
>In many ways, our modern
>political ideologies are secularized Christian heresies.
No doubt, but heresies are not the same as the thing itself. One can
think of religion as something that does not dominate the world but
instead provides a transcendental point of reference that enables us to
make sense of the world and our action in it, and find those things
good. Somewhat similarly, the concept of "truth" doesn't dictate
anything and doesn't refer to anything that we can altogether grasp, but
it gives a reference point for organizing and making sense of our
understanding of things. Modern political ideologies are rather
different.
>I should point out that ENR's "paganism" does not necessarily mean the
>revival of ancient religions - I am aware that some are doing this - u
>but rather, they mean by paganism a certain mentality, a "new hellenism"
>which can provide menaing and spiritual impetus to a rejuvenated Europe.
I would be interested in knowing more about which Greeks they have in
mind. People find affinities between Plato, the tragedians, various
post-Socratic philosophers, and Christianity, and Simone Weil would have
said there are affinities between Christianity and the Iliad. Maybe all
those people are wrong, of course -- I don't have a fully-developed
theory on the subject.
>(Karl) Popper accused Plato of being "the first totalitarian". Not sure
>the ENR would agree. Plato, in the Republic, is fixed on the one aim of
>building a strong, stable state, but there is no hint of the messianic
>desire to make the whole world adhere to his blueprint. An interesting
>problem.
Plato considered his republic possible, but just barely. He understood
the difficulties of politics, which the totalitarians think can be
obviated through the use of force. So I wouldn't call him a
totalitarian.
>I'm not sure if the transformations you mentioned are taking place as
>slowly as you might think [ . . . ]
What I had in mind (using the language of economics) was feudalism ->
capitalism -> consumerism -> [?], a series of transformations related to
those Plato describes, and that have taken hundreds of years. There are
no doubt other ways of thinking about the matter.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we
disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." (Montaigne)
From panix!jk Mon Jan 11 15:38:23 EST 1993
Article: 18 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Time to break up the US? (was: Re: apparently a dilemma)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Jan8.062824.12094@news.vanderbilt.edu> <1993Jan11.024218.21875@athena.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 20:10:56 GMT
In <1993Jan11.024218.21875@athena.mit.edu> norris@athena.mit.edu (Richard A Chonak) writes:
>Has anyone given any thought to the possibility of breaking up the US into
>several countries of more reasonable size?
It's hard to imagine much support for this. Abstract American
nationality is one of the few things we Americans have in common that
rise above day-to-day concerns, so people hang on to it tenaciously.
It would be odd in this newsgroup to criticize a proposal on the grounds
it is not immediately practicable, though. Quite possibly, arguing for
such a measure would be a way of dramatizing the need for public values,
such as those you mention, that go beyond what we now have:
>Here are some possible benefits (just off the top of my head, so to speak):
> -- each new nation would be more homogeneous in culture and values
> -- the break-up would be an instant step toward greater subsidiarity
> -- no more flag-worship: the new nations would identify patriotism
> more with place and people, less with 'democratic' ideology
Quite possibly the proposal would seem sensible as part of an overall
program designed to advance the sorts of things you mention. As such,
it might have the virtue (apart from any practical benefits if actually
carried out) of drawing attention to your cause.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we
disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." (Montaigne)
From panix!jk Thu Jan 14 06:54:59 EST 1993
Article: 31 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Time to break up the US? (was: Re: apparently a dilemma)
Message-ID: <1993Jan13.162612.29852@panix.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 16:26:12 GMT
References: <1993Jan11.024218.21875@athena.mit.edu> <1993Jan12.185154.21332@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC
Lines: 43
In drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) writes:
>For a political advocacy group,
>there's incredibly little theat passes here to tell what
>"counter-revolutionaries" thing about *anything*. All I've seen are a
>lot of references to obscure European political tracts and vague
>references to "undoing the French Revolution". The best I can tell is
>that you want some sort of fine-grained, hierarchical system that
>resembles feudalism.
Not all the participants have identical views. The newsgroup was
founded by some integrists, who seem to be lying low. They'll have to
speak for themselves when they reappear. The other people who have
been posting seem to share a dislike of certain features and
tendencies of modern Western society, such as materialism, radical
individualism and egalitarianism, and hedonism.
The problem is that the good life is difficult or impossible in a
society tending toward a condition in which the only things taken
seriously are on the one hand immediate sensations and impulses, none
of which is given priority over the others, and on the other hand a
universal bureaucratic state justified by its ability to advance the
satisfaction of all impulses without favoring one over the other. (I
am speaking mostly for myself here, although I believe others will be
sympathetic to what I have to say.)
Accordingly, intermediate structures are needed. That's the reason
for wanting your "fine-grained hierarchical system". The question
(using the language of social engineering) is where to get such
structures and how to ensure that they are taken seriously -- as
seriously as immediate personal impulse or the universal bureaucratic
state, say. My answer is twofold:
1. Limit through religious belief the peremptory authority immediate
impulse and the universal bureaucratic state would otherwise have.
2. Promote the authority of local and particular associations (such
as the family) through respect for tradition and through religious
sanction, and by devolving on them the practical responsibility for
people's welfare.
I hope that suggests an overall viewpoint that helps make sense of
some of the things that have been said.
From panix!jk Thu Jan 14 11:28:43 EST 1993
Article: 38 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Nation? Constitution? Where?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Jan13.063755.21640@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 15:57:35 GMT
myempire@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Matt J. Martin) writes:
> While the cultures you mention may appear quite different, close
>examination reveals that the differences are mere reactions to
>different environments.
That suggests that societies that have long been established in similar
environments should always have similar cultures. Is there any evidence
that is true?
> I'm not saying we have to abaondon cultural diversity or try to
>"take up the white man's burden." I'm saying that it's about time we
>have a world government. One that won't be blinded by petty national
>interests. One that will have the bests interests of humanity, as a
>species, at its core.
And who would run such a government? How would its decisions be
enforced if the locals didn't like them?
A free government relies, I think, on a great deal of cohesion and
voluntary cooperation among its citizens. Such conditions don't exist
globally, and aren't likely to exist anytime soon. So it seems that a
world government of the sort you envisage would not be a free
government; rather, it would be a dictatorship of guardians who aren't
blinded by petty national interests and have the best interests of
humanity at heart. Where could such people be found? How could they
avoid the corruptions of power? (I hope your login name doesn't suggest
your answer!)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we
disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." (Montaigne)
From panix!jk Thu Jan 14 11:28:44 EST 1993
Article: 39 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: What's this counterrevolution stuff, anyway? (was: Re: Time to break up the US?)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Jan13.162612.29852@panix.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1993 16:04:28 GMT
I had written:
1. Limit through religious belief the peremptory authority immediate
impulse and the universal bureaucratic state would otherwise have.
2. Promote the authority of local and particular associations (such
as the family) through respect for tradition and through religious
sanction, and by devolving on them the practical responsibility for
people's welfare.
drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) comments:
>OK, that's better -- You're stating something *positive* here -- an
>emphasis on religion, asceticism, hierarchy.
A couple of points:
1. We're using the language of means/ends rationality (limit or
promote X by means of Y; emphasize Z). That's convenient but
misleading. Another way to look at it is to view man as naturally a
religious and hierarchical animal, and conditions that put religion and
hierarchy in disarray as conditions that prevent man from realizing his
nature. So the point of 1. above is that in the absence of religion we
get chaos and tyranny, neither of which are our true element.
2. I wouldn't say that I'm arguing for asceticism, only for cutting
impulse and sensation down to size. They are part of a larger world and
are not the authoritative part. I have nothing against pleasure as
such.
3. The authority of hierarchy is not absolute because it too is part of
a larger world. A lot of the discomfort with hierarchy that people feel
today seems to be based on the notion that to have authority over
someone is simply to have power over him, meaning the right to use him
any way you wish for whatever purposes you happen to have. If you
believe in an objective moral order that can justify and limit authority
the notion of hierarchy will give you less trouble. Which would be a
good thing because, among other reasons, hierarchy is inevitable.
>But do you really want to increase your parent's power over you?
If I understand the increase as part of a scheme of things that leads
to a better life for people generally, why not?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we
disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." (Montaigne)
From panix!jk Sat Jan 16 11:44:39 EST 1993
Article: 47 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: What's this counterrevolution stuff, anyway?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1993 13:13:22 GMT
drw@banach.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) writes:
>In article jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
> Another way to look at it is to view man as naturally a
> religious and hierarchical animal, and conditions that put religion and
> hierarchy in disarray as conditions that prevent man from realizing his
> nature.
>
>Speaking as a person who is *not* "naturally" religious,
Do you have grounds other than introspection for that view? My grounds
for the view that if you are right your case is rare enough to be
irrelevant to a discussion of society in general include both history
(even the very few officially non-religious societies that have existed
seem to make a religion out of something), and the reflection that
people feel the need of justifying every scheme of rules and standards
by reference to something that transcends the particular scheme.
>your world sounds pretty nasty to me.
Sorry to hear it. The question, of course, is what the world we all
live in is like, what we can make of it, and what we can't make of it.
>Who, after all, is to determine what man is "naturally"?
Every system of ethics or politics and every society has at least an
implicit view of what man naturally is. After all, it makes no sense
to have rules or standards regarding man or any other object without
having a view as to what man or that other object was before the
adoption of the rules and standards. (Things like chess pieces and
mathematical symbols are irrelevant exceptions.)
Your question, though, was who is responsible for determining that
view. We all are, to some extent. In addition, every society has
people who are treated as having particular expertise on at least some
aspects of the matter. In the United States in 1993, the recognised
authorities include psychologists and the Supreme Court.
>This discussion is getting too close to letting the Church get its
>fingers on the State for my tastes...
The state -- especially an active state that views itself as
responsible for the welfare of particular individuals -- is going to
govern based on some conception of what people are like and what a good
life is. Why is it worse to pay attention to the views of religious
authorities on that matter than psychological or legal authorities?
It's worth saying that I'm not arguing for clerical government.
(Personally, I'm not a member of any church and my own religious views
are quite vague.) Religion can't be forced, and Pascal tells us that
tyranny is the attempt to get in one way what can only be got in
another. Nonetheless, it seems to me that government can't be divorced
from religion and attempts to do so are misconceived and artificial.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Alles Erworbne bedroht die Maschine, solange
sie sich erdreistet, im Geist, statt im Gehorchen, zu sein." (Rilke)
From panix!jk Sat Jan 16 11:44:41 EST 1993
Article: 48 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Nation? Constitution? Where?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1993 13:16:11 GMT
myempire@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Matt J. Martin) writes:
>>> While the cultures you mention may appear quite different, close
>>>examination reveals that the differences are mere reactions to
>>>different environments.
>
> Anthroplogically speaking, there are really no detatched cultures that have
>evolved in truly similar environments. But in our post-industrial society we
>can see some evidence to support my theory. Currently the entire western
>world can be seen as pretty much one culture.
The comparative uniformity of Western culture could be explained by
mutual cultural influence. You apparently believe that even in the
absence of such influence French and American culture would be
converging. That might be true, but how is it something that close
examination reveals? It seems odd to speak of close examination
revealing something for which direct evidence (pairwise comparison of
detached cultures in similar and varying environments) is unavailable.
>And there is evidence to suggest that the system of international law
>is as effective as any judicial system in any one country.
What is that evidence?
>>A free government relies, I think, on a great deal of cohesion and
>>voluntary cooperation among its citizens.
>
> Your fooling yourself. Especially if you think any effective government has
>ever existed based on "voluntary cooperation." Universal self-interest makes
>that impossible.
I agree that effective government can't be based solely on voluntary
cooperation. That's one reason I found your comment on international
law surprising. But neither can effective government be based solely
on coercion. Some degree of voluntary cooperation is always needed,
and the more voluntary cooperation there is the less coercion is needed
and the freer the government can be. (That's why political thinkers
used to speak of "republican virtue".)
>There would have to be adequate checks and balences to prevent
>power-hungry world governors.
If they are well-designed and legality is observed, checks and balances
make it hard for a government to act unless there is a general
consensus in the ruling classes that something should be done. In
effect, my claim is that there are enough differences and oppositions
among the people of the world that a sufficient consensus for effective
government could be reached only within a small ruling class that
viewed itself as something set apart from all the contending factions.
But if that's right, then who would guard that small class of
guardians? If there were effective checks from outside the small class
within which consensus can be reached, then government would be
ineffective.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Alles Erworbne bedroht die Maschine, solange
sie sich erdreistet, im Geist, statt im Gehorchen, zu sein." (Rilke)
From panix!jk Sat Jan 16 11:44:42 EST 1993
Article: 49 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: What's this counterrevolution stuff, anyway?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Jan13.162612.29852@panix.com> <15JAN199316281080@mivax.mc.duke.edu>
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1993 15:13:37 GMT
seth@mivax.mc.duke.edu (Judge Not) writes:
In article , jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes...
>[I]n the absence of religion we get chaos and tyranny, neither of which
>are our true element.
>
>Is there an objective measure of our true element?
Our true element is the element in which what is best in us can
florish. That measure is as objective as other matters regarding what
we should and should not do.
>Does your true element correspond to mine?
I don't know you, but I would think they are very likely to correspond
in fundamental respects at least.
>Do I have the right to force my element on you?
What should be done if people's true elements differ in important ways
depends on circumstances. If "Judge Not" is a pen name for Mr. Dahmer,
who until recently was living in his true element, then I do think I
have the right to force my element on you. A less extreme case is
someone whose true element is Viking Iceland. If most other people
find that their true element is the 20th century Swedish welfare state,
then that someone is out of luck. On the other hand, if your true
element is metalwork and mine is woodworking, maybe we can work
something out.
>In the absence of religion we only get atheism.
"Only" suggests atheism has no consequences. Why shouldn't one's
fundamental understanding of what the world is like have consequences?
>Chaos and tyranny can exist quite well in religion, as past Popes have
>shown (I use pope for an example since I was born catholic; my intent
>is not to discredit catholicism).
My claim was that atheism is sufficient for chaos and tyranny, not that
it is necessary.
>There are many well-ordered societies without choas, tryanny, religion
>or "political hierarchy". Usenet is one.
Usenet does not bear the responsibility for dealing with suffering,
death, human failure and self-destructiveness, economic scarcity, or
the ability people have in other settings to get their way by force.
It also doesn't aim very high -- people who get overly caught up in it
are sometimes told to "get a life". What's sufficient for a small
fragment of society like Usenet need not be sufficient for society as a
whole. (BTW, there *is* a hierarchy in Usenet -- I, for example, do
not have the power my systems administrator does.)
>In the absence of hierarchy you get freedom.
For human beings, "freedom" makes sense only in a social world since
almost everything we want, from hamburgers to winning the Nobel Prize,
depends on society. But the social world includes people who are quite
different from each other and whose intentions may conflict. Sorting
out the conflicts and establishing long-term and complex forms of
cooperation requires some sort of hierarchy, it seems to me. So
freedom requires hierarchy.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Alles Erworbne bedroht die Maschine, solange
sie sich erdreistet, im Geist, statt im Gehorchen, zu sein." (Rilke)
From panix!jk Sat Jan 23 06:25:41 EST 1993
Article: 84 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Nation? Constitution? Where?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Jan21.235301.10403@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 03:24:04 GMT
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu writes
>Let me be more specific about my examples: Rome itself started out as a
>real, organic people who were very proud to say "Civis Romanus sum". By
>the time "Rome" had become completely abstract and universal, it was
>simply a system of government and a set of shared language(s),
>culture(s) and vague ideals. Eventually, every- body in the empire
>became a citizen - precisely at the moment when Roman citizenship had
>become a meaningless concept.
It would be interesting to know more about this. It is my impression
that the complex made up of Roman government, language, culture and
ideals kept their magnetism for a long time. Many barbarians very much
wanted to be part of the Roman world, for example.
China may be a similar case -- the magnetism of a similar cultural and
political complex lay behind the expansion of China from a
comparatively limited area in the valley of the Yellow River to its
present extent. My understanding is that Chinese civilization and
culture and the Chinese empire have always had a very close connection
-- our word "China" comes from the Chin dynasty that united China in
the 3rd century B.C., and the Chinese term for a Chinese person is "man
of Han", after the Han dynasty, while in Canton the expression is "man
of Tang", after the later Tang dynasty that first made Canton part of
China.
>I certainly would not reject such universal ideals out of hand, but I
>would like to make the point that such universalisms tend to erode the
>foundation of particular loyalties on which the universal (or at least
>partially universal) loyalty is built.
It seems to me that we need both universalism and individualism, but
neither should be at the expense of the things in between. How you do
that is the great problem. Probably it is best if the universal
element in society remains ideal (like the concepts of "Greece" before
Alexander, "Christendom" in the Middle Ages, and "Europe" in early
modern times) while our practical life and loyalties remain with things
that are closer to us. Maybe it crushes the human spirit for the
universal element in society to be something that has too much
practical reality. (Again, it would be instructive to consider Rome and
China, the universal empires of their day.)
Remind me to bring all this stuff down to earth some day . . .
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Alles Erworbne bedroht die Maschine, solange
sie sich erdreistet, im Geist, statt im Gehorchen, zu sein." (Rilke)
From panix!jk Mon Feb 1 20:53:47 EST 1993
Article: 58 of panix.restaurants
Newsgroups: panix.restaurants
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: PLEASE DON'T MOVE TRAFFIC TO nyc.food (was Re: PLEASE MOVE...)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb1.205933.27413@panix.com>
Distribution: panix
Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1993 22:09:01 GMT
In <1993Feb1.205933.27413@panix.com> des@panix.com (Don Samek) writes:
>What's _wrong_ with panix.restaurants!?
Nothing, but why not open the discussions up to other people in NYC?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Tue Feb 2 05:52:09 EST 1993
Article: 96 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: censorship left and right
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb1.163807.18891@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1993 03:10:54 GMT
TROTTEJE@ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu (Jackson Trotter) writes:
>Mr. Kalb's recent posts on the subjects of the American Dream and the
>Decline or rather, the Death of Thought, were splendid. Perhaps, Jim,
>you would elaborate on the claim (to paraphrase) that genuine thought
>requires genuine depth of experience, something not generally available
>in a consensual society?
If we deal with things only to the extent we consent to them we come to
know them only insofar as they conform to our desires. But thought is
the attempt to understand something that is real and therefore does not
depend on what we want. So thought is called forth by having to deal
with things we don't consent to.
>I for one wonder whether the objection to government funded art which
>deeply offends the sensibilities of most Americans is the same as
>policing speech. But then again ...
I don't think so. If the American people want to patronize art, then
like other patrons they should be able to support the art they like
best. If they delegate to someone the choice of what to support they
ought to be able to revoke the delegation if they don't like the
choices that are made.
An objection to congressional oversight of NEA grants might be made on
the grounds that politics has no place in judgements of artistic merit,
but such an objection would seem disingenuous under the circumstances.
People who think art should be political and who pooh-pooh
"disinterested judgements of merit" shouldn't be shocked when art
becomes political.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Tue Feb 2 05:52:26 EST 1993
Article: 64 of panix.restaurants
Xref: panix panix.restaurants:64 nyc.food:1
Newsgroups: panix.restaurants,nyc.food
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: You're in nyc.food!(was: PLEASE DON'T MOVE TRAFFIC TO...)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb1.205933.27413@panix.com>
Distribution: panix
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1993 03:15:08 GMT
mara@panix.com (Mara Chibnik) writes:
>jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>
> >Nothing, but why not open the discussions up to other people in NYC?
>
>How long have you lived in NYC, Jim?
15 years.
>If we tell all of Them about Our best places, they'll get all crowded
>and we won't be able to keep going there.
So go to places no one would ever go to on a bet. Like a good
(comparatively) cheap French restaurant in Brooklyn. There have been
three in the time I've lived here and they've all folded because they
couldn't get enough business. (OK, I'm being cranky, but it's only a
couple of months since the last one tanked and it's still a sore
point.)
On a more positive note: there's a Filipino restaurant I like on the
east side of 8th Avenue between 39th and 40th street. $5.50 gets you
two entrees (say you're having a "combination"), rice and soup. No
lines to get in. Bring your own beer and watch your purse (an admirably
slick thief stole a friend's while we were there).
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Sat Feb 6 20:53:17 EST 1993
Article: 108 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Culture, tyranny and stuff
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1993 19:29:55 GMT
Lines: 96
Yet another addition to the series of articles setting forth my personal
views on a variety of subjects, this time on certain aspects of the
relationship among community, culture and politics:
A good life requires participation in a way of life that is shared with
other people. The shared way of life may have arisen in any of several
ways. Most often it will have simply grown up among people who live
together. Ethnic communities are of this type, and the difficulty of
leaving such a community shows the depth and breadth of what is shared.
A common way of life may also arise more consciously, as in the case of
a community with a way of life based on religious doctrine. Such a
community may be fragile initially, because doctrine will not be
applied or understood in the same way by people whose habits and ways
of life differ. Later, the requirement that a member leave the
community if he comes to reject community doctrine may continue to
cause fragility. However, to the extent that the habits and way of
life of a community become thoroughly permeated by religious doctrines
that provide a satisfying way of understanding oneself and the world,
the community's way of life will be much more stable than that of a
mere ethnic community. Doctrine helps maintain a community because it
is the communal element in thought, and thought that is stabilized by
doctrine may help a community respond to changing circumstances or
outside influences in a way that permits it to retain its integrity.
Primitive communities with custom but no doctrine readily lose their
integrity, while the Jews and the Parsees have retained theirs for
thousands of years because they are religious as well as ethnic
communities.
Modern economic conditions and methods of communication have greatly
reduced the cohesion of communities based on either ethnicity or
religion. Today's ruling class prefers to base its rule on rational
hedonism and treats ethnicity and religion as nothing more than
vehicles for communal self-assertion. The predominant view in the West
is that ethnicity and religion are irrational because they are not
universal, and that they have the vices of irrationality -- excluding
what ought to be included, forbidding what ought to be permitted and
requiring what ought to be optional. In short, from a modern
perspective they are exclusionary, repressive and tyrannical, and may
not justifiably serve as the basis of social order.
If ethnic and religious bases for social order are rejected, an attempt
may be made to base it on universal values such as liberty and
equality. Since such values do not have enough content to provide a
basis for an entire way of life, such an attempt is likely to take a
pluralistic turn -- to promote the creation of communities based on the
common values that particular people happen to have within a larger
political and social order that, although not a community, is
universally acceptable because it is universally beneficial.
Such a solution is not likely to be practicable in the long run. The
benefits conferred by a pluralistic political and social order must be
benefits that are desired by almost everyone without regard to taste.
These will be the benefits comprised in prosperity. But it is unlikely
that a social order viewed by its members merely as a source of
material benefits can long endure.
Such an order is likely to be destroyed from the outside or inside.
The threat from the outside is obvious -- any society must be defended
against foreign enemies, and men sacrifice themselves only to defend
what touches them deeply. The threat from within is less obvious but
no less real. A pluralistic society is justified to its members by its
ability to confer material benefits on all; however, in practice these
benefits will vary greatly among the communities of which the society
is composed because the material well-being of each community depends
on its way of life and its members' natural endowments. As a result,
the social truce that is the essence of a pluralistic society is likely
to be broken by fights over the distribution of such benefits.
It may be possible to compose such disputes for a time, especially if
prosperity is generally increasing. The measures necessary to do so,
however, will require ever more extensive government action to
redistribute wealth among the communities. Such action has the natural
effect of destroying the life of the separate communities that make up
the society and were originally the setting in which the good life
could develop. As a result, the pluralistic society of many
communities will become a soulless unitary society. Since people
cannot bear to live in such a society, they will feel an irresistible
impulse to attempt to turn it into a community through the adoption of
values beyond material well-being, and pluralism will collapse.
It is unlikely that such an attempt to turn a pluralistic society into
a community will be successful. Values cannot be adopted by fiat;
people must recognize them and incorporate them of their own volition
into their way of life. Pluralism evolved because people could not
agree on values, and the jealousies that lead to the collapse of
pluralism will not make such agreement more likely. Furthermore, a
state bureaucracy forced to choose values beyond material prosperity
and security is unlikely to choose anything other than compulsory
equality or state power, both of which are inconsistent with community
and both of which lead to tyranny, which thus appears to be the final
stage in the evolution of pluralism.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Sun Feb 7 11:54:39 EST 1993
Article: 1599 of panix.chat
Newsgroups: panix.chat
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Peak activity?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1993 12:10:43 GMT
Lines: 12
emlee@sun.panix.com (Edward M. Lee) writes:
>I recall that at MIT, [peak activity] was more like Sunday, before
>classes on Mondays, although you can depend on quite a few people
>online even on Christmas.
It seems Panicoids are slightly more mainstream than MITsters, then.
The only time I've ever been the sole user online here was this past
Christmas, at about 7:30 in the morning.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Sun Feb 7 17:58:42 EST 1993
Article: 5001 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: SOMETHING NEW FOR THIS GROUP: CHINESE PHILOSOPHIES
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <2B74B5E2.8723@news.service.uci.edu>
Date: Sun, 7 Feb 1993 20:08:33 GMT
Lines: 69
eaou079@orion.oac.uci.edu (Francisco Szu-Chien Su) writes:
>Let's discuss, first of all, Confucius' thoughts, and let's imagine how
>Plato or any other Western philosophers would respond to Confucius'
>philosophy. Any of you who are familiar with Confucius, what do you
>think of Confucius' argument of the "proper language" and the ways one
>should follow to become a "gentleman"? In addition, what do you think
>Plato, Aristotle, or any other Western philosophers would respond to
>Confucius' thinking?
I think Confucius was more practically minded and much less interested
in abstract philosophical issues than most Western philosophers. To
compare his views to those of the philosophers you mention:
1. One can think of Plato as a radical and Confucius as a
conservative. In his _Republic_, Plato views his ideal society as
something that needs to be constructed in accordance with a plan
rationally worked out _de novo_. He views his own society and
tradition as essentially flawed, so creating the good society would be
a very difficult task requiring (if it can be done at all) a lot of
very high-handed conduct. Confucius, on the contrary, views his ideal
social order as something that in a sense already exists and could be
made fully actual by letting things be what they already naturally
were. The call for the rectification of names is obviously related to
this belief that there is a single legitimate political order. The
Emperor, the officials, the gentlemen, fathers, sons and common people
already had their natural place in the scheme of things, and the chaos
of Confucius' time was caused by people -- especially the upper classes
-- ignoring what they knew or should have known was their duty and so
overreaching themselves. If they had any doubt as to what their duty
was they could instruct themselves by correctly interpreting the
records of antiquity or the _Songs_. (In contrast, Plato wanted to
make up his own myths about the past and to do away with the Greek
equivalent of the _Songs_.)
2. If we look at Aristotle's _Politics_ some reasons for the
difference in outlook suggest themselves. Aristotle deals with the
variety of political constitutions that existed in the Greek world and
considers the characteristics of each, particularly with respect to
durability. His viewpoint is that man is a political animal, but there
have been a variety of states of which none is perfect and none lasts
forever. That was the natural outlook for someone who grew up in a
world that had never been politically unified and in which it was the
self-sufficient city rather than the universal empire that was the
political ideal. As a result, Aristotle's outlook is far less reverent
and far more analytical than that of Confucius. The difference in
perspective also results in Aristotle's ethics being rather more
individualistic and less self-effacing than Confucius'.
3. What Plato would have said to Confucius if they could have gotten
together and talked things over is an interesting question. Plato and
Confucius both thought of the Good as something transcendent of which
people generally had only a confused notion. Each would have agreed
that there needs to be a ruling class educated into habits of
self-restraint and public spirit, and that music, poetry and so on
should be part of that education. They might have disagreed on the
usability of actually-existing institutions in making a better society.
In part that disagreement may have been due to differences in their
surroundings that caused Confucius to think of all under heaven as part
of a single political order and Plato to think of political orders as a
multiplicity from which one could pick, choose and construct anew if
need be. In addition, Confucius' world was run by feudal lords and
noblemen who at least theoretically recognized obligations like those
Confucius thought appropriate, while Plato's world tended to be run
more explicitly for the benefit of whoever happened to be in power.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Mon Feb 8 06:12:28 EST 1993
Article: 4724 of sci.philosophy.meta
Xref: panix sci.philosophy.tech:7541 sci.philosophy.meta:4724 sci.skeptic:33410
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech,sci.philosophy.meta,sci.skeptic
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Consciousness and morality and all that
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb6.210846.1012@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1993 01:16:02 GMT
Lines: 25
pelton@ecf.toronto.edu (PELTON MATTHEW ALAN) writes:
>The criteria for deciding between [moral systems] are pragmatic or
>practical. You decide which is best based on utility, naturality, and
>effectiveness. You can then determine which system is best -- i.e.
>most useful. It is the best mora; system. But that has nothing to do
>with its truth. It is still arbitrary. It is not THE moral system, or
>the RIGHT moral system -- simply the best moral system. Truth has
>nothing to do with it,
If it really is the best moral system, what sense does it make to say
that it is arbitrary, or to deny that it is the right moral system and
consists of true statements about morality?
You seem to believe there is something distinctively good and right
about using utility, naturality and effectiveness as criteria for
judging moral systems. That's very odd, because what you say elsewhere
suggests that you believe that using those criteria is no less
arbitrary than consulting Leviticus or flipping a coin.
Which is it? Are your criteria as arbitrary as everyone else's, or is
there really something special about them?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Wed Feb 10 05:30:47 EST 1993
Article: 11440 of alt.config
Xref: panix alt.config:11440 alt.revolution.counter:123
Newsgroups: alt.config,alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Proposal for alt.revolution.counter
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb8.000935.23017@news.ysu.edu> <16B6FEB79.C96@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1993 03:27:44 GMT
Lines: 62
nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson) writes:
>>>The purpose of this group would be to give a discussion area for people who
>>>espouse political ideologies _opposed_ to the ideas of the French (and
>>>subsequent) Revolutions.
>
> Is this a serious posting? Are there really enough people
> with this interest?
If USENET has room for alt.sex.bestiality, why not
alt.revolution.counter? Among other things, you should remember that
the net is international and many European countries have significant
monarchist movements.
> If so, then what are the main ideas of the French Revolution
> that they are opposed to?
Liberty, equality and fraternity. For classic discussions in English of
why that trio cannot be accepted without restriction as the basis of a
political system, see _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ by
Edmund Burke and _Liberty, Equality and Fraternity_ by James FitzJames
Stephen (Ginny Woolf's uncle). If you don't have time for a reading
list, you might consider that some people think (i) the purpose of
politics is the promotion of the end of human nature and (ii) that end
is virtue in community rather than the unrestrained pursuit of whatever
desires one happens to have (liberty) without any preference given to
one desire over any other (equality). Such people may be somewhat odd
but they do exist, and they tend not to like the French revolution and
its slogans.
> Any why the French revolution?
> The earlier American revolution was also a semi-democratic
> revolution against a monarchy (although the precipitating
> events were probably more the fault of the Parliament).
The American revolution was largely a defensive matter in which the
colonists wanted to preserve from Parliamentary revision as much as
they could of the status quo that had already evolved in the colonies.
The French revolution was intended entirely to destroy the existing
order of things in favor of a new order to be discovered by abstract
reason and enforced by terror.
> Also, isn't it a little late? This is an intriguing bit of
> weirdness and I'd like to hear more about it.
Fundamental political issues are never settled. Ten years ago people
would have said it was a little late to undo the Bolshevik revolution.
The French revolution was three times as long ago as the Bolshevik
revolution, so maybe it will take 30 years to undo instead of ten.
That only means that alt.revolution.counter will have a longer run than
the alt.gorby.* hierarchy.
> Note that I'm posting this on the tiny chance that the original
> proposal was serious. My nonsense detectors were pegged reading
> the whole of the original.
To coin a phrase, there are more things in heaven and earth than are
dreamt of in your philosophy. I will be looking forward to your
participation in a.r.c.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Sat Feb 13 18:23:34 EST 1993
Article: 256 of nyc.general
Newsgroups: nyc.general
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: MORE ADL BIGOTRY?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <160.2684.uupcb@factory.com> <1lgpiiINN6ck@calvin.NYU.EDU>
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1993 17:05:21 GMT
Lines: 39
In <1lgpiiINN6ck@calvin.NYU.EDU> roy@mchip00.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
> From a purely gramatical point of view, I would say that whether you
>capitalize "white" depends on what part of speech it's being used as. In
>"white Protestant", white is an adjective modifying Protestant, which is a
>noun.
I don't think so -- proper adjectives are capitalized, just as proper
nouns are. Compare Democratic infighting (battles within a particular
political party) with democratic infighting (battles that everybody can
take part in).
>The real debate is whether Protestant is a proper noun or not; it
>should only be capitalized if it's a proper noun.
I would say it should, whether used as an adjective or a substantive,
unless being used in a descriptive sense to refer to people who are
protesting. When used (say) of the Lutherans it no longer means "those
who protest" but rather has to do with a particular set of traditions
within Christianity that began with acts of protest almost 500 years
age.
> Is "black" an adjective or a noun? I guess it depends on context.
>In "The black man bought a newspaper", it's clearly an adjective. In
>"Blacks have darker skin than Whites", I would say both "Blacks" and
>"Whites" are adjectives, although I suppose one could make a case (a weak
>one in my book) that they are both adjectives modifying the unwritten word
>"people", in which case neither would get capitalized.
Here again I would say use as an adjective or a noun is irrelevant.
Logically it probably makes most sense to capitalize "white" and "black"
when used to refer to the two main racial groups in this country.
People usually don't do that though, and I go along with the general
custom. The original poster thought that failure to capitalize "black"
showed a lack of respect; I disagreed on the grounds that people usually
don't capitalize "white" either.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Sun Feb 14 11:28:25 EST 1993
Article: 139 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: which revolution etc.
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb13.204104.6114@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1993 14:47:26 GMT
Lines: 105
TROTTEJE@ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu () writes:
>Given Mr. Kalb's affection for the heretic Blake (whose poetry is
>nonetheless sublime, I'll grant) one would have thought he might be
>sympathetic to the notion that it is the Industrial Revolution "we" are
>against.
Heretics are worth reading because they see some things very clearly,
even though they don't have a grip on the whole picture.
In this area I don't claim to have a good grip on the whole picture
either, and my request that Mr. Worley expand his remarks was not ironic
even though my wording was rather facetious.
My previous .sig quote, from Rilke, was somewhat to the point:
"Alles Erworbene bedroht die Maschine, solange
sie sich erdreistet, im Geist, statt im Gehorchen, zu sein."
("The machine threatens all that we have gained as long as it presumes
to exist in the realm of the spirit rather than that of obedience.")
The Industrial Revolution has given men power over their physical
surroundings. In many ways that is a good thing. If you are a parent
(as I am) it is difficult not to prefer a world in which modern medicine
exists to one in which it does not.
On the other hand, power magnifies vices, and one standing human vice is
our tendency to convert means into ends. Another vice that has been made
worse by the Industrial Revolution is our tendency to forget our
limitations and in imagination to cut the universe down to the size of
our desires, our beliefs and our ability to control.
As to what "our" attitude to all this should be: it seems to me that
reacs are people who have noticed that modern institutions and ways of
thought ignore important things, and so are led to prefer earlier
institutions and ways of thought. Earlier times cannot literally be
restored, though, since what they were was an outcome of myriad
circumstances that no longer exist. In addition, what earlier times
were became what is now, so it is likely that problems now can be traced
to problems that existed then. So our goal must be to find ways of
realizing under changed conditions valuable things that have been lost.
Obviously, doing so would require changes in any of the new conditions
that are simply inconsistent with ultimate goals. Some of the things
associated with the Industrial Revolution are no doubt in that category,
but very likely many are not.
In addition, it's not clear to me which things associated with the
Industrial Revolution can be changed. At some point the reflection that
our ability to reconstruct the social world is limited has to enter the
discussion.
>Of course, Blake's "Satanic mills" have been for the most part displaced
>by the labyrinthine corridors of the managerial-techno revolution, but
>one might plausibly argue that a "neutral" technology is merely abstract
>nonsense.
It would be nonsense if man were fundamentally an economic producer. In
that case, the state of technology might reasonably be thought to
determine the organization of production and therefore of society
generally, and the necessary organization of society might be thought to
determine ideology. That's a view that many people have held, but I
prefer to believe that technology does not imply ideology, and that one
may sensibly distinguish between a power such as technology and the use
that is made of that power.
>In any case, the Industrial Revolution was driven by an ideology born of
>the bloodless abstractions of the French Revolution--at least in part,
>since we mustn't forget the Calvinist contribution.
I thought it mostly emerged in provincial England before the French
Revolution out of the solution of practical problems by practical men
with no particular concern with abstractions.
>Indeed, one might speculate that the French Revolution owes something to
>the Jansenist loathing of matter. Beneath all schemes of total
>liberation (Rousseau, et al.) lurks this gnostic dualism which seeks,
>above all, liberation from the "world-prison."
Very likely.
>The ancient gnostics satisfied their dreams of liberation by postulating
>a "Hidden God"--a God beyond God, a nihilistic conception if ever there
>was one [ . . . ]
I know nothing about the gnostic notion of a Hidden God, but from the
words it sounds like no more than the notion that God is transcendent
and therefore not to be identified with anything else, including our
conceptions of him. What more did the gnostics mean?
>All modern ideology of the progressivist stripe is gnostic in this
>sense, that it seeks total liberation from imprisoning institutions,
>unseen ideologies. The revolt against nature, against any defining and
>limiting "human nature" assumes an "authentic" ineffable selfhood which
>"yearns to be free" from the dross of its created--and, therefore,
>dependent or creaturely--status.
Nietzsche is interesting on this point because he doesn't believe he
doesn't believe in any authentic ineffable selfhood either. It's part
of what makes his thought so wonderfully incoherent.
Back to the Industrial Revolution -- what did Voegelin think of it?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Sun Feb 14 22:05:08 EST 1993
Article: 144 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: What Revolution are we against?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <199302142230.AA08163@yfn.ysu.edu>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1993 02:50:02 GMT
Lines: 17
ae852@yfn.ysu.edu (Jovan Weismiller) writes:
>Interestingly enough, there _are_ some raving loonies (my description)
>in the Integrist movement who _are_ Luddites. My question to them is
>always, "How do you plan on getting rid of the surplus population?,"
>since if we get rid of technology and go back to pre-Industrial
>Revolution ways, the earth will not be able to support the great
>majority of its current population.
Are any of them willing to compromise? I understand that quite high
yields can be attained without machinery or chemical fertilizer if
you're willing to be otherwise scientific in your approach to
agriculture. (If we had a few organic gardeners or Amish in the group
I'm sure we could hear more on the subject.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Mon Feb 15 06:01:44 EST 1993
Article: 144 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: What Revolution are we against?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <199302142230.AA08163@yfn.ysu.edu>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1993 02:50:02 GMT
Lines: 17
ae852@yfn.ysu.edu (Jovan Weismiller) writes:
>Interestingly enough, there _are_ some raving loonies (my description)
>in the Integrist movement who _are_ Luddites. My question to them is
>always, "How do you plan on getting rid of the surplus population?,"
>since if we get rid of technology and go back to pre-Industrial
>Revolution ways, the earth will not be able to support the great
>majority of its current population.
Are any of them willing to compromise? I understand that quite high
yields can be attained without machinery or chemical fertilizer if
you're willing to be otherwise scientific in your approach to
agriculture. (If we had a few organic gardeners or Amish in the group
I'm sure we could hear more on the subject.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Mon Feb 15 09:17:15 EST 1993
Article: 149 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: 1989 and all that (was: Question of a newbie gentleman)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb10.195839.8367@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz> <1993Feb14.223313.26937@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1993 11:52:17 GMT
Lines: 25
comjohn@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Mr. John T Jensen) writes:
>I do not at all believe in any idea so silly as the 'end of history.'
>The problem with that sort of thought appears to me to be the idea of a
>'line of political development.'
Do you think that the idea of a line of political development is silly?
For example, I would have said that there has been a line of p.d. in
the West in the direction of greater individual liberty and equality,
both supported by an increase in the direct responsibility of the state
for individual welfare. I would have also said that when a particular
line of p.d. comes to an end people who believed in it may feel that
history has come to an end. I take it you disagree?
>Indeed, I hope that the progressive idea itself is dead. I don't think
>you'll have to do very much reintroducing, actually. I suspect that
>the world (cf ex-Yugoslavia; or Islam) will do its own reintroducing
>very nicely.
I hope the return of non-progressive ideas will sometimes have better
consequences than it seems to have had so far in the Balkans or in the
Islamic world.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Mon Feb 15 16:44:07 EST 1993
Article: 148 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Puritanism and the Revolution
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <199302150140.AA28135@yfn.ysu.edu>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1993 11:50:59 GMT
Lines: 19
ae852@yfn.ysu.edu (Jovan Weismiller) writes:
>The Revolution is essentially puritanical, which probably is tied up
>with the fact that so many of its founders were Protestants of
>Calvinist back ground (Rousseau and Marx come to mind).
My understanding is that the Revolution is the attempt to make the
world conform to an explicit scheme devised by human rationality, and
therefore distrusts things like instinct, impulse and the body that
resist such attempts. Although Calvinism may reflect something of the
same impulse, I don't think the Revolution follows from Calvinism. For
example, de Sade, another great revolutionary, was a French nobleman
with no Calvinist background that I know of, and the Revolution has
achieved some of its most dramatic triumphs in countries whose
traditions were not Protestant (France and Russia) or even Christian
(China and Indochina).
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Mon Feb 15 16:44:08 EST 1993
Article: 149 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: 1989 and all that (was: Question of a newbie gentleman)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb10.195839.8367@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz> <1993Feb14.223313.26937@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1993 11:52:17 GMT
Lines: 25
comjohn@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Mr. John T Jensen) writes:
>I do not at all believe in any idea so silly as the 'end of history.'
>The problem with that sort of thought appears to me to be the idea of a
>'line of political development.'
Do you think that the idea of a line of political development is silly?
For example, I would have said that there has been a line of p.d. in
the West in the direction of greater individual liberty and equality,
both supported by an increase in the direct responsibility of the state
for individual welfare. I would have also said that when a particular
line of p.d. comes to an end people who believed in it may feel that
history has come to an end. I take it you disagree?
>Indeed, I hope that the progressive idea itself is dead. I don't think
>you'll have to do very much reintroducing, actually. I suspect that
>the world (cf ex-Yugoslavia; or Islam) will do its own reintroducing
>very nicely.
I hope the return of non-progressive ideas will sometimes have better
consequences than it seems to have had so far in the Balkans or in the
Islamic world.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Tue Feb 16 13:19:59 EST 1993
Article: 152 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: which revolution etc.
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb16.062022.13977@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1993 17:27:18 GMT
Lines: 51
TROTTEJE@ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu () writes:
>I meant only to assert that the argument for neutrality repeated often
>enough may blind us to the degree to which every technology is driven by
>ideological imperatives. Television, to name one recent technology which
>affects us all in a more or less pervasive fashion, is so utterly
>captive to the drives of egalitarian consumerism (if I may so term it)
>that it is difficult to imagine it otherwise.
I can imagine people producing television programs for the same reasons
people write histories or poems and people watching the programs in the
same spirit. Technology is a power to do something, and power requires
discipline. When changed conditions facilitate new vices (for example,
when Indians are introduced to alcohol or Americans to TV), new taboos
are needed and it is only prolonged experience of the vices that makes
the need for new taboos clear to people generally. So maybe in times to
come social restrictions will develop around TV watching that prevent
people from simply doing it whenever they please.
One difficulty, of course, is that TV itself, and a lot of other things
in modern life, make it more difficult for the taboos and other social
arrangements that are necessary for the good life (virtue in community)
to develop. Such things normally come out of our membership in small
communities, and TV and so on loosen our connection to such communities
by making the individual less dependent on the people immediately around
him for necessities and diversions.
One response would be to take a more conscious approach to developing
the institutions, customs and habits that are needed for the good life
than has been necessary in the past. The dangers of conscious social
engineering have been made clear by recent history, but something of the
sort may be unavoidable under modern conditions. I take it that the
integrists are one example of a movement that proposes that society be
guided by a set of authoritatively established and rationally
articulated principles.
>Will it be any different when there are 500 channels? Can aone imagine a
>way in which television might be employed for political purposes that
>would not immediately reduce the "political" message to an "esthetic"
>one?
One problem with the use of TV for political purposes is that TV is a
one-way affair, if only because it takes a lot of time and effort to
produce a watchable TV program. TV is different in that way from usenet
or talk radio, say. It's true that Plato made the same complaint about
the written word -- a written discussion may seem very wise but if you
want to ask a question you're out of luck. TV is worse in that respect,
though, because images are harder to question than words.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Thu Feb 18 06:02:24 EST 1993
Article: 154 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: 1989 and all that (was: Question of a newbie gentleman)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb14.223313.26937@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz> <1993Feb17.005600.1176@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz>
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1993 19:22:53 GMT
Lines: 62
comjohn@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Mr. John T Jensen) writes:
>I think you have swallowed a statist line of jive in being able to say
>in the same paragraph that people have (a) greater liberty; (b) greater
>equality; and (c) greater dependence on the state for individual
>welfare. (a) and (b) are mutually incompatible, and (c) is hostile to
>both (and they to it).
I'm sure I've swallowed lots of jive in my time, but in this instance I
think I'm innocent. In saying that (a) and (b) were the goals and (c)
the means of the line of development we are discussing I did not intend
to say that it could all possibly work in the long run. One of the
things that brings things to an end is internal inconsistencies, and it
was the internal inconsistencies of the progressive movement that led to
the events of 1989.
It seems to me that what was at work in the progressive movement was
that people more and more came to understand the point of life as the
realization of their own particular desires, whatever those desires
happened to be. As a result, any restrictions on the pursuit of those
desires in the name of some greater good determined by other people came
to seem oppressive. So people demanded more liberty. In addition, if
the only thing that makes something worth pursuing is the bare fact that
someone desires it, then (since all desires are equally desires) every
desire of every person is equally worthy of support, and equality
becomes another demand. But one consequence of accepting such a
conception of liberty and equality is that people lose both
self-reliance and the ability to rely on traditional small-scale
associations (most importantly, the family). So the state has to enter
the picture to support the process. As you point out, it can't last.
>You have also, it seems to me, agreed with me by speaking of 'particular
>lines coming to an end.'
Why should I want to disagree with you?
>If you mean only that there are trends in history and not that those
>trends are uniform, unending, and irresistible, then no one would
>disagree with you. But 'line of political development' as a secular
>overarching trend (not a short-term trend in this or that group and this
>or that area) does seem to me to me to be contrary to the experience of
>real history. In short, history doesn't work like that.
I really don't know whether there are identifiable trends in history as
a whole. I suspect that there are (for example, I think there is an
overall trend toward improved technology), but that sort of speculation
was not what we were discussing. I believe we were talking about a
particular set of trends manifested in the French and Bolshevik
revolutions, as well as in the consumerist welfare societies of the
West, and speculating whether that set of trends reached some sort of
final crisis in 1989. That set of trends lasted for centuries and has
profoundly affected politics from China to Peru. From a very exalted
perspective such trends may seem short-term and localized, but I don't
find it surprising that their end should appear to some people as the
end of history.
>Keep hoping!
I certainly shall.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth." (Blake)
From panix!jk Fri Feb 19 13:12:19 EST 1993
Article: 161 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: What Revolution are we against?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <199302142230.AA08163@yfn.ysu.edu> <1993Feb18.215452.11902@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1993 13:29:20 GMT
Lines: 47
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>Mr. Worley (if I'm remembering the right name) has a good point, I
>think, if we remember that the Industrial Revolution was not due
>primarily to a revolution in technology (I seem to recall that there
>were proposals for textile factories as early as the 16th century,
>thanks to the punch-card system of automation) but rather to a
>revolution in the organization of production itself, including the
>factory system, industrial discipline, the alienation of the worker
from
>the product of his labor, and the subjection of traditonal conceptions
>of social organization to the liberal, economic view of society. If
this
>sounds vaguely Marxist to you, it is - Marx may not have advocated good
>solutions to the problem, but he did know how to describe it.
But Marx viewed the revolution in the organization of production as a
consequence of the stage of development the "productive forces" had
reached, and I always assumed that technology was one of the more
notable productive forces. You seem in part to be saying that the
Industrial Revolution was driven by the liberal, economic view of
society. Marx, though, thought economics gave rise to ideology, and not
the other way around.
There's some sense to Marx's line of thought. Suppose one assumes that
improving economic well-being is an overriding goal (as it might be even
if not formally recognized as such if no other goal is as strong,
durable and widespread). Then people will tend to organize production
in the way that is most efficient under the circumstances (including the
state of technology) and to find reasons to call the resulting system of
social organization "good".
Marx would have made that assumption as to all men at all times and
places. If you reject its necessary truth, though, there is less reason
to believe that modern technology and methods of production cannot be
housebroken.
>Also, we should avoid the tendency to equate the participants in the FR
>with 19th and 20th century revolutionists...
There are both similarities and differences. The similarities include
rejection of tradition and transcendental or revealed religion, and
belief in their own ability to remake the world in accordance with a
theory, by force and terror if necessary.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Fri Feb 19 13:12:21 EST 1993
Article: 162 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: 1989 and all that (was: Question of a newbie gentleman)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb17.005600.1176@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz> <1993Feb19.012412.15816@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1993 13:31:04 GMT
Lines: 30
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>When the state is a natural product of a society, which functions for
>the benefit of the society, than I see no problem with the State as
>such. Only when the State becomes alienated from Society do I have any
>objections...if the first is statism, than I support statism, if the
>second is statism, than I reject it.
To accept "statism" is to accord divine status to the state. There's a
tendency to do so today because people believe that the good, the
beautiful and the true, and reality generally, are socially constructed,
and that the state determines how things are going to be in society.
(To reject the former belief is to be thought obscurantist; to reject
the latter is to be thought a reactionary who denies the possibilities
of social reform.) But it follows from this line of thought that the
state is the creator of all values and of the world generally, and is in
fact God.
>What will redeem this birth is that history will once again have
>meaning...mankind will not be doomed to spend eternity in the
>air-conditioned shopping malls of Benthemite happiness and social
>utility.
>
>Mr. Kalb no doubt has a less hyperbolic view on all this.
I agree that what people want in the long run is not happiness as
hedonistically conceived, but to feel that their lives make sense.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sat Feb 20 10:03:43 EST 1993
Article: 7762 of sci.philosophy.tech
Xref: panix sci.skeptic:34359 alt.feminism:8034 sci.anthropology:1925 sci.philosophy.tech:7762
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.feminism,sci.anthropology,sci.philosophy.tech
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Is Male Dominance Universal? (was Re: More Goldberg Responses to "Patriarchy" Debate)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1m3aseINNiit@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov>
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1993 13:45:07 GMT
Lines: 13
rspear@sookit.jpl.nasa.gov (Richard Spear) writes:
>humans have developed upon the template of 'infraprimate' physiology and
>behavior [ . . . ] the forces that retained (and continue to promote)
>this relationship and sustain patriarchal polities are social now, not
>biological.
Is it your view that patriarchal patterns of behavior that were once
based on biology are now exclusively social because human evolution has
eliminated all biological propensities to engage in such patterns?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sat Feb 20 10:03:49 EST 1993
Article: 12590 of talk.politics.theory
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: mandatory civics education justified?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb19.142322.2431@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu>
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1993 13:38:48 GMT
Lines: 94
chang@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu writes:
>> 1) Children are told to express themselves about things which they have
>> no knowledge or experience about, and then that their opinions are
>> equally right.
>
>i think the reason children are taught this is because at when kids
>are young, it is not as important to teach them particular ideas or
>ways of thinking, but rather to help establish their sense of self and
>individuality.
I don't see what is worth having about a sense of self or individuality
that depends on the notion that all opinions, no matter how uninformed
or confused, are equally right. It seems to me that children should
learn that some things really are better than other things, that
experience and effort can help us know what those better things are, and
that a lot of people have been putting a lot of effort into that project
for a long time so it's smart to learn from your elders. Then children
will be able to develop a sense of self based on the notion that there
are a lot of good things in the world, that society is a collective
effort to realize those good things and has often been successful in
doing so, and that one has the ability -- which will grow over the years
-- to participate in and add to that effort.
>i don't disagree with you as much on this particular example [death
>education], but on your general approach, which seems to be that we
>shouldn't expose children to a wide variety of concepts. heaven knows,
>they might start thinking about these issues, and before you know it,
>we have...
Children like to be told things they can rely on. In teaching children
it seems to me best to start off with basic and concrete things that
people do in fact rely on in day-to-day life -- basic skills like the
three R's, basic facts like where things are (geography) and when things
happened (history), basic moral virtues like honesty, kindness, respect
for elders. Attempts at abstraction or serious inventiveness generally
misfire. Consider the "new math".
>> 3) In sex education courses, children were
>> a) shown movies of couples actually having sex
>
>oh no! not sex! it's only the most natural undertaking known to
>humankind...
All societies surround sex with taboos, so I suppose sexual taboos are
natural. I don't know of any society in which it's customary to engage
in sexual intercourse in public, so in particular some degree of sexual
reticence seems natural. It's true that at least since the time of the
Cynics some people with a taste for abstract thought have considered
taboo and reticence contrary to nature, but that only shows that
educated cluelessness has a long history.
>> 4) In a "values clarification" course, one child came home not
>> knowing whether or not stealing was right.
>
>that proves the success of the course, not the failure. it shows that
>the student has learned to think critically, not to blindly follow his
>or her parent's teachings. the best way to ensure a widespread
>following for an idea is to have a good idea. compliance through
>ignorance does not sound very compelling to me as good public policy.
Critical thought about morals or anything else is a fine thing as long
as there is the necessary background of accepted standards and
practices. Discussion of whether an idea is a good idea requires, among
other things, a general consensus as to what "good" means. That is why
the education of children mostly consists of teaching them accepted
standards and practices, and critical thought comes after that basic
material has been mastered. In this respect morals is no different from
anything else. Students of physics don't start off by being asked about
their personal theories of the universe, and basketball coaches who want
winning teams begin by drilling their players in fundamentals.
Brilliant innovations come later.
>> 6) Children were often told not to tell their parents of school activities.
>
>i don't think that is necessarily good nor necessarily bad. in some
>situations, it might be good and vice versa. i think your view is too
>constrictive of the child, though, as if we need to strangle the child
>if we are to keep control.
You are speaking as if the issue were whether children are to be subject
to authority at all. That's not the issue raised by the example, though
-- the children were being *told* by the school what not to do. Rather,
the issue is whether it should be the parents who are responsible for
the children's well-being or the state. I think it should be the
parents. The average parent cares for the child more than the average
educational bureaucracy and is certainly no more misguided.
Incidentally, I don't understand your use of the words "constrictive"
and "strangle". What relevance do they have to whether children let
their parents know what the schools are having them do?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sat Feb 20 10:03:50 EST 1993
Article: 12591 of talk.politics.theory
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: mandatory civics education justified?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb17.123907.2384@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu> <38627@uflorida.cis.ufl.edu> <185448@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Distribution: usa
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1993 13:41:58 GMT
Lines: 33
pcollac@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Paul Collacchi) writes:
>[P]eople are actually free to create themselves, but that they can only
>exercise true freedom by choosing knowledgably between real
>alternatives. The unexamined life leads to unexamined choices which
>yields unintended consequences.
People obviously aren't free to create themselves, and they can't know
and examine anything without first accepting a tremendous amount without
question. That's why being a parent is such a responsible position.
Our children are dependent on us to such a degree that we make the world
they live in. That's not a right of the parent -- it's a necessity for
the child.
>I often wish they/we/I didn't have to wait until being full grown adults
>to become aware of *this* option.
It might be nice if we sprung full-grown from the head of Zeus, but we
don't. We can't lift ourselves by our bootstraps, and we can't make
choices at all without already having values, beliefs and habits of
thought. So we all have to start life by getting those things from
someone, and I think the world will be better if people get them from
their parents than if they get them from the state.
>I'm very glad for a public school system which is not afraid to present
>"what's so" about this world, and I'm sorry that you fear it.
Public schools have trouble teaching children to read and write. You
seem to think they are well suited to supplant the influence of parents
in more complex and subtle matters. That puzzles me.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sat Feb 20 16:13:15 EST 1993
Article: 164 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: 1989 and all that (was: Question of a newbie gentleman)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb17.005600.1176@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz> <1993Feb19.012412.15816@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Feb19.235720.5742@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1993 15:53:53 GMT
Lines: 54
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>In article , jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>>deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>>
>>>When the state is a natural product of a society, which functions for
>>>the benefit of the society, than I see no problem with the State as
>>>such [ . . . ]
>>To accept "statism" is to accord divine status to the state [ . . . ]
>I don't see how your definition of statism follows from my acceptance of
>the state as a natural part of the social order.
It doesn't. You said "what's the problem with statism?" and I presented
a definition of statism that refers to a set of views that many people
tend to hold and that is indeed troublesome. I also presented an
account of how people might come to accord divine status to the state.
>The point I was trying to make was that the state exists to perform
>certain functions, and that only when the state becomes an end in
>itself, to the detriment of everything else, only then do I have an
>objection.
I don't disagree. To accord divine status to the state is to make it
not only an end in itself but even the supreme end of all ends. Neither
you nor I approve of doing so.
>Of course reality is not socially constructed, and since the state is a
>part of reality, its ability to manipulate reality as a whole is limited
>by factors beyond its control, but this does not mean that the state, or
>society, or whatever, is not capable of bringing about change, for
>better or for worse.
I agree with you. Not everyone does, though. Many people are unwilling
to admit that we did not create ourselves, and that reality is not a
social artifice that can be reconstructed to further whatever goals one
happens to have. Think of discussions of whether there is such a thing
as "intelligence" and (if so) whether it has a genetic component, or of
whether there are innate differences between men and women.
>People did not invent the state to create values - people invented the
>state to enforce the values that they already held. What those values
>should be is the proper realm of religion and philosophy, not the state
You seem to be of the view that values exist apart from actual social
institutions, and that as such they can be known through theological and
philosophical science. If so, I agree with you but not everyone does.
My point was that the contrary view can lead to statism as I defined it.
BTW, congrats on your new-found quoting skills.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Feb 21 13:49:44 EST 1993
Article: 167 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Progress and Utopia
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb20.193008.8266@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 14:58:03 GMT
Lines: 43
TROTTEJE@ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu () writes:
>Christopher Lasch, in a recent article in the journal "Salmagundi"
>(Fall 1992), writes (in a footnote): "the idea of progress, in its most
>compelling form, is quite distinct from the expectation of Utopia. It
>rests on the expectation that the widening of men's horizons, the
>constant expansion of the desire for a more abundant existence, will
>generate an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to
>satisfy this desire. The idea of progress owes nothing [contra Voegelin
>et al.] to the millennarian imagination, nor does it provide any more
>than an incidental support for totalitarianism.
The idea Lasch describes strikes me as utopian, but it views utopia as
something that is perpetually coming rather than something that will
fully exist at a particular time. Nonetheless, the progressive believes
that each specific utopian desire (the abolition of war, for example)
may be realized at some particular time in the future. The idea of
progress is the idea that future as a whole is utopia.
Obviously, so conceiving utopia makes a difference in some respects. If
utopia is always under construction and never quite arrives the
totalitarian temptation to try to create it all at once with strong-arm
methods does not arise. Nonetheless, the progressive feels a kinship
with the totalitarian, viewing him as a progressive in a hurry.
Accordingly, the progressive tends to support the totalitarian on the
grounds that the changes the totalitarian wants to make are changes in
the right direction, and changes in the right direction are what the
progressive lives for.
>[I]ts persistence, long after the ideological collapse of utopianism in
>the 1940s, indicates that it does not depend on the vision of future
>perfection.
What does Lasch mean by "the ideological collapse of utopianism in the
1940s". Has he forgotten the 60's so soon? Didn't he ever learn to
pronounce "Nicaragua" with a trilled "r"? Also, I don't see all that
much difference between a vision of future perfection and a vision of
future approximations to perfection that become indefinitely closer.
(All you Spengler fans: doesn't Oswald say something about Western man
and the infinitesimal calculus that is relevant here?)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Feb 21 13:49:46 EST 1993
Article: 168 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: What Revolution are we against?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <199302142230.AA08163@yfn.ysu.edu> <1993Feb18.215452.11902@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Feb20.003242.6676@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 15:01:28 GMT
Lines: 81
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>Classical liberal assumptions were already firmly in place in England by
>the 17th century - consider Hobbes, Locke, the English Civil War, the
>so-called "glorious revolution" of 1688, etc. At this same time, the
>enclosures of common lands and other modernizing efforts in agriculture
>were helping to bring about the revolution in agricultural output which
>made the English Industrial Revolution feasible...since these
>modernizing efforts in agriculture were a direct result of liberal
>ideology, I would say this is a pretty clear indication that ideology
>can drive a revolution in the organization of production and not the
>other way around [ . . . ] [A] revolution in the means of production
>based solely on 18th century technology could still have gone far - just
>look how long water power was used after the invention of the steam
>engine.
I suppose one could add that people develop knowledge and skill to do
the things they are interested in doing (Romanesque sculpture or modern
industrial production, as the case may be), and also point to people who
have rejected available technology because it didn't fit in with the way
of life they wanted (firearms in pre-Meiji Japan; the internal
combustion engine among the Amish).
One question is whether the striking success of one line of endeavor
leads people to conform themselves to the outlook and habits associated
with it but when problems appear support tends to fragment. If so, at
some point problems regarding the further development of industrial
technology could lead people to abandon the habits of thought that until
that time had been associated with that development, while continuing to
use the technology already developed.
What would you consider the classical liberal assumptions? I would say
that the main one is that the common good of society is safeguarding the
pursuit by each man of his own good as he himself defines it. That
assumption doesn't seem to depend on any particular state of technology.
One question is the extent to which by itself it leads to hedonistic
materialism. One might say that to accept that assumption is to treat
whether something pleases someone as the criterion for whether that
thing is that person's good, which is the hedonistic criterion. One
might also say that to the extent the accepted conception of the common
good relates only to things that everyone in fact agrees on, the objects
it is concerned with will tend to be material things because material
things are easier to demonstrate. Other views may be possible, though.
>[M]odern technology and modern methods of production are not necessarily
>the same thing.
True enough. One question is what limitations there are on social
organization and outlook if one wants to preserve modern technology.
>Liberalism has never been able to explain how - once it has rejected
>tradition and religion, and established "liberty" and "equality" - it
>has never explained how it can possibly keep the process from going
>even further...a la communism, the welfare state, libertarianism or what
>have you.
Communism always seemed to me the logical final stage. If I'm right
that the basic assumption of classical liberalism is that the common
interest is safeguarding each man in the pursuit of his own interest,
then at first libertarianism is the essence of liberalism. But nothing
human stays the same. If safeguarding me in pursuing my interest is
good, then guaranteeing that I will attain my interest must be better,
and the welfare state becomes the ideal. Any qualms I may have that
Peter is being robbed to pay Paul (a.k.a. me) can easily be allayed by
the reflection that since society could have been organized in a variety
of ways, and some of those ways would have been more advantageous to
Paul and less advantageous to Peter, the assumption of neutrality
contained in the distinction between safeguarding and favoring someone
in the pursuit of his interest is unjustified. But if you start
worrying about the injustice implicit in social organization due to the
practical effect that any particular set-up has in favoring the
interests of some over those of others, you will only be satisfied by
social arrangements that make everyone's interests the same. The
communist movement was the attempt to create such arrangements.
This analysis, that treats communism as the natural goal of the
progressive movement, makes the events of 1989 seem extraordinarily
important to me.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Mon Feb 22 18:34:42 EST 1993
Article: 171 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Puritanism and the Revolution
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <199302150140.AA28135@yfn.ysu.edu>, <1993Feb18.231230.13268@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1m98jjINN2fd@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1993 16:13:20 GMT
Lines: 26
In <1m98jjINN2fd@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> norris@athena.mit.edu (Richard A Chonak) writes:
>It
>would be more accurate to say that Catholicism has had to fight a
>perennial battle against doctrines which held man and the body in
>contempt: from ancient Gnostics who believed that matter was evil, to
>medieval Albigensians who forbade marriage, to Puritans who thought
>fallen man was "totally depraved".
>Orthodox Catholicism thinks matter and the human body are just great,
>since God made them.
Is it clear that Puritanism was to the contrary? That's not the
impression I get from the descriptions of Eden (including the love life
of Adam and Eve) in _Paradise Lost_.
> Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
> All is laughter, love, and wine;
But this statement would still make sense if the word "Catholic" were
deleted. Ireland and Belgium are Catholic countries where the weather
isn't particularly good, and neither is famous for laughter, love and
wine.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Feb 23 15:30:29 EST 1993
Article: 178 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: What Revolution are we against?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <199302142230.AA08163@yfn.ysu.edu> <1993Feb18.215452.11902@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Feb20.003242.6676@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Feb23.042427.5706@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1993 20:24:03 GMT
Lines: 24
In <1993Feb23.042427.5706@news.cs.brandeis.edu> deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>Has Mr. Kalb read Tomislav Sunic's book? He has a section which outline some of
>the ENR arguments (or rather, the arguments of an individual who is a source
>for ENR ideas on the subject) which point to this very outcome of liberalism.
I haven't seen the book. Judging by the samples of Mr. Sunic's prose
that have appeared in _Chronicles_ I don't think I'd be able to read the
whole thing. Maybe I'll take a look at it for the references.
>I would argue
>that "communism" as we understand the word, is not necessarily the last stage,
>but rather, some form of totalitarian, egalitarian leveling is the final
>outcome of liberalism in practice. It may even be impecably "democratic" -
>Nietzsche's "last man" if you will.
By "communism" I mostly understand totalitarian egalitarian leveling.
It would be the ultimate horror if that state of affairs were indeed
impeccably democratic. I don't think that would happen, though, if only
because people would become too disorderly and brutal in their personal
lives for democracy to work.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Thu Feb 25 07:14:59 EST 1993
Article: 180 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Progress and Utopia
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb20.193008.8266@news.vanderbilt.edu> <1993Feb23.040355.5159@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1993 14:15:48 GMT
Lines: 23
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>As to Spengler...I seem to recall something about Faustianism, the
>infinite desire of Western Man to explore, discover, learn new things.
>If Spengler was right, then the essence of the West is "progress" and
>the West is then the quintessential "progressive" civilization.
But he also thought that no culture goes on forever, and that the
Faustian culture of the West had in fact completed whatever it was it
was going to do and had become a "civilization" which (like that of
China) might go on for hundreds of thousands of years without producing
anything important. So we're back again to "the end of history".
>From this perspective the question arises what an essentially
progressive civilization does when people begin to realize that its
possibilities of development have been exhausted. One possibility is
narrowing of vision and self-deception ("things are much better than in
the past and are getting even better, and if you question that you're a
bad person"); another is absorption in intoxicants (sex and drugs;
money, power and position) or the day-to-day (consumerism).
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Feb 28 11:52:18 EST 1993
Article: 182 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Sex and Free Love
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1993 12:28:56 GMT
Lines: 197
Things have gotten slow in this newsgroup lately, even with religious
arguments, so I thought I would say something about sex. After all, the
latest issue of _Chronicles_, a leading paleoconservative publication,
has a picture of a naked woman on the cover. (Some might call it a
photograph of a female nude in bronze, but that art stuff cuts no ice
with me.) What I wrote is long-winded and abstract enough to satisfy
all you Spengler fans, but maybe not many others. If anyone wants to
read it, though, I would be interested in comments.
Liberation
In this country the movements for women's liberation and for the
relaxation of traditional sexual morality have made remarkable progress
without serious opposition. Such success exemplifies the serious
practical consequences in America today of the poverty of thought on
morality and social issues and the progressive expansion of
egalitarianism and hedonism.
How men and women can live together happily and productively is a basic
problem in social organization. The well-being of both sexes and their
ability to raise children successfully depends upon the solution to this
problem. If, as women's liberation demands, the relation between men
and women is to be based on the elimination of socially-recognized sex
roles, the problem becomes insoluble.
If there are no set sex roles, so that a man and a woman as such have no
special rights and obligations regarding each other, their relations are
their private affair. They can have dealings with each other or not as
they choose, and the terms on which they deal are determined by mutual
consent. Traditional family arrangements, which brought with them
extensive and unavoidable duties, are replaced by private agreements to
cooperate as to particular aspects of one's life. In other words,
something like a free market obtains in relations between the sexes.
In such a free market, it is imprudent to stake much upon agreements
regarding sexual matters because they can't be enforced. Agreements
regarding economic matters are enforceable because the interests of the
parties can be reduced to money, which provides a standard for
determining the intent of the parties and the appropriate remedy when
the agreement is breached. In sexual and family life, however,
objectively determinable interests and purposes are so interwoven with
those that are subjective and personal that determining what the parties
agreed on and the appropriate remedy for a breach is usually quite
difficult.
The consequence is that that after liberation relations between men and
women become distant. Since it takes a rare degree of faith to treat
something wholly private as real, people in general no longer rely on
such relationships. In the economic sphere the free market requires
participants to deal with each other at arm's length and to exercise
shrewdness and self-reliance to avoid being taken advantage of. In the
sphere of sexual and family relations the free market requires yet more
distrust, because the disappearance of the publicly enforceable element
in sexual relationships means that such relationships last only as long
as both parties wish them to last, and people's wishes change.
The attachment between mother and child is an exception to the rule that
family attachments disappear after liberation. Children are incapable
of independence, and mothers have a natural attachment to their children
that is reinforced by the child's dependency. Liberation causes this
relationship to deteriorate, however. Since in an egalitarian society
there is no social support for unconditional relationships with other
people, a mother has no grounds for thinking that her child will
maintain an attachment to her when he no longer needs her, and feels
exploited because she is giving her love unconditionally and has no
grounds to expect the like in return. She may react to such painful
feelings by anger against the child, by withdrawal, or by attempting to
make the relationship permanent (perhaps by incapacitating the child for
independence). Each alternative is bad for the child.
The difficulties of raising children are made worse by the distance or
absence of the child's father, which will be the norm in a sexually free
and equal society. A father's connection to his child is initially
indirect. In the past a father might have been tied to his child by a
web of social relations, or more concretely by his need for a helper in
his business or desire for heirs; today the tie is through the mother.
If that relationship is broken easily, for practical purposes the child
will lack a father. If the child is a boy he will grow up without a
model for how he can contribute to society. Whether a boy or girl, the
child will not grow up in a domestic order embracing two adults and so
will have no intimate experience of objective moral standards.
Accordingly, he is likely to find it hard to participate in community or
to form relationships based on mutual respect. As a result, relations
between the sexes and between parents and children will sink over time
into what one would expect among people who have no respect for
themselves or others.
The degradation of sexual life brought about by the circumstances of
family life just discussed is aggravated by the ordinary effects of a
free market. A free market is based on participants choosing freely in
accordance with the tastes that they happen to have. To reject the free
market as an ideal is to reject the view that all tastes are equally
valid and therefore to reject egalitarianism. To accept it is to accept
the tastes people have -- their consumer preferences -- as an ultimate
standard that requires no justification.
The natural effect of such an ideal is self-seeking hedonism. If my
tastes, whatever they may be, are beyond criticism by others, they are
also beyond my own criticism, and the only ground for my choices is my
immediate pleasure. Also, the normal effect of a free market is to
diversify tastes, to increase aggregate consumption, and to increase the
importance placed on consumption generally, while making taste cruder
and reducing the significance of particular acts of consumption and of
the manner of consumption. Extended to sexual relations, the free
market thus eliminates intellectually the categories of sexual license
and perversion while fostering the conduct that would fall into such
categories if they still existed. It makes sex incapable of functioning
as a sustaining part of a durable bond between men and women.
Since sexual liberation and egalitarianism damage or destroy the family,
the repair of the family requires that relations between the sexes be
governed by the principle that it is right to treat men and women as
differing in nature -- that is, in accordance with authoritative sex
roles -- and both social custom and legal institutions should conform to
that requirement. Since sex roles are necessary for a tolerable
society and in most cases correspond to the characteristics individual
members of each sex in fact possess, by nature and nurture, the fact
that they do not fit some people is not a sufficient reason for
rejecting them.
The details of such roles will vary in accordance with circumstances.
Objections to truly outmoded sex roles can be accommodated, but the
basic features will continue to be be the traditional ones based on the
innate differences that in general distinguish the sexes. For example,
women are generally better adapted to caring for small children. They
carry and give birth to the baby, and in the natural course of things
nurse it during the first months of life, and so have a necessary
physical connection to the child. The emotional effect of this
connection is heightened by women's diffuse sensuality, which is engaged
by the baby and by the close physical contact of tending and nursing it.
Women's responsiveness to immediate feeling and sensation and the
vagueness of their sense of themselves as persons separate from those
they love further enhances their sympathy for small children. This
special relationship to small children readily grows into a special
responsibility for the home in general as the setting for the immediate
and intimate relations in which both women and children tend to feel in
their element.
Conversely, men tend to be more interested in the instrumental than the
immediate, and their relations to others tend toward a mixture of
competition and cooperation that suits the marketplace. Since it is
less characteristic of men to take pleasure in immediate personal
relationships than pride in protecting those who rely on them, they are
more suited to be the ultimate authority in the family as well as its
breadwinner and primary representative to the public world.
Such a restoration of traditional sex roles has its difficulties. Sex
presents vividly the contradiction in man's nature as animal and as
rational agent, and the dogma of sexual equality eliminates the
difficulty of thinking about sex by eliminating thought. Also, the
decline in the immediate economic and social importance of family
relationships makes it easier to avoid thinking about the difficulties
created by sexual freedom and equality, and a democratic consumer
society takes short views.
Nonetheless, there are contradictions within the revolution against
traditional sex roles that would facilitate their restoration. Like
other people, feminists recognize that women are fundamentally different
from men and this recognition has become increasingly explicit recently.
Only feminist illogic and the difficulty of rational thought about
questions relating to basic social organization have preventing wide
recognition that different roles for men and women are appropriate.
For example, we have seen that the well-being of mothers is inconsistent
with formal equality of rights between the sexes and freedom in their
dealings with each other. In addition, the rise of pornography and
sexual harassment as feminist issues demonstrate an increasingly
explicit awareness that such formal liberty and equality can hurt
women. Monogamy, and sexual restraint generally, is more egalitarian in
substance than sexual freedom but will not exist unless marriage is
binding, which it can not be unless it is thought of as the union of two
different sorts of person that need each other to form a complete whole.
Moreover, the government can contribute to a restoration simply by
ceasing to undermine traditional sex roles. Anti-discrimination
measures, and the welfare state generally, are intended (among other
things) to make women economically independent of particular men and
therefore to help realize the goals of women's liberation. Abandonment
of such measures would contribute to a better life for all by helping
knock the props out from under the illusion of equality.
The rejection of liberation in sexual matters may also be aided by
popular rejection of egalitarianism and hedonism on account of their
inability to give people what they really want. In addition to more
direct effects the recognition of such inability may have, it is likely
to prompt a search for and eventual acceptance of transcendental values
as authoritative. If transcendental values are taken seriously, people
will be less likely to view the working world -- the organized
production and distribution of publicly recognized and transferable
goods -- as the sole source of dignity, and something like their
traditional and necessary roles are likely to become more palatable to
men and women.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Feb 28 18:37:34 EST 1993
Article: 5209 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb22.231043.26425@news.eng.convex.com> <1993Feb28.100744.27717@Princeton.EDU>
Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1993 17:43:34 GMT
Lines: 22
Bob Mahoney writes:
> "....[S]uppose it were like this: people-seeds drift about in the air
>like pollen, and if you open your windows, one may drift in and take root
>in your carpets or upholstery. You don't want children, so you fix up
>your windows with fine mesh screens....[O]ne of those screens is
>defective; and a seed drifts in and takes root. Does the person-plant
>who now develops have a right to the use of your house?"
>What it comes down to (to remain within an almost intractable story) is
>whether or not someone could be expected to go through his/her entire
>life with (1) their windows hermetically sealed, to prevent such seeds
>from entering, or (2) his/her apartment unfurnished, to prevent them
>from planting.
Why not say that if you want to open your windows now and then it's OK
to do so, but you may find yourself stuck with obligations that you
really didn't want? You seem to believe that people should be bound
only by the obligations they specifically choose. Why?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Mon Mar 1 14:29:42 EST 1993
Article: 186 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: What Revolution are we against?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <199302122317.AA11424@yfn.ysu.edu>
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1993 03:23:59 GMT
Lines: 40
drw@euclid.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) writes:
>[A]lthough technology is *intrinsically* morally neutral, the
>introduction of a technology can have social consequences (e.g., the
>introduction of coined money causing the concept of the "free man") and
>it often takes certain social prerequisites for a particular technology
>to be introduced.
[Addional example: U.S. capitalism => development of microcomputers +
unstable employment.]
I'd like to suggest a couple of possibilities:
1. The setting that most favors the initial development of a thing may
not be necessary for the use or further development of that thing. I
don't think that _Macbeth_ could be written today, but that circumstance
makes it all the more a benefit to us that we have it. Another example
is war, which may lead to technical advances or social changes that
people make use of and extend in peacetime.
2. It's quite hard to know whether the setting in which something (like
the development of microcomputers) happened is the only setting in which
that thing could have happened. Maybe if the West had stayed mostly
agricultural and business enterprises mostly small and local
microcomputers might nonetheless have appeared in the year 2525. Why
not?
3. If social trends tend to destroy themselves, then there's nothing
contradictory about opponents of a trend making use of the results of
that trend. It's possible that the microcomputer is a consequence of
the trends identified with the French Revolution but will nonetheless
contribute to ending those trends. That might happen, for example, if
(1) the French Revolution means materialistic and hedonistic
individualism, (2) in the long run, m. & h. i. requires the
interventionist state, and (3) the microcomputer makes the
interventionist state ineffectual by making society impossible to
supervise due to improved communications.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Mon Mar 1 18:01:33 EST 1993
Article: 187 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Puritanism and the Revolution
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <199302150140.AA28135@yfn.ysu.edu>, <1993Feb18.231230.13268@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1m98jjINN2fd@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU>, <1993Feb23.052345.6856@news.cs.brandeis.edu>,<1mhcqtINN92v@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <1993Feb26.190043.20992@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1993 19:33:14 GMT
Lines: 8
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>We could do a lot worse than going back to traditonal Catholicism and
>Monarchism. That is not my preference, however.
Can you tell us what your preference would look like?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Mar 2 13:18:38 EST 1993
Article: 5228 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb28.100744.27717@Princeton.EDU> <1993Mar1.081938.799@news.wesleyan.edu> <1993Mar1.162929.9402@news.eng.convex.com>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 00:46:38 GMT
Lines: 40
In article <1993Mar1.081938.799@news.wesleyan.edu> RGINZBERG@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Ruth Ginzberg) writes:
>In jk@panix.com writes:
>> Why not say that if you want to open your windows now and then it's OK
>> to do so, but you may find yourself stuck with obligations that you
>> really didn't want? You seem to believe that people should be bound
>> only by the obligations they specifically choose. Why?
>Coming back to reality here, what kind of (emotional, at least) quality of
>life do you imagine a person born & raised under such a description
>(obligation with which his/her mother -- note: usually not father -- has
>been "stuck": one that she did not want, but that she is "bound to" because
>people ought to be bound by some obligations which they did not choose).
>Gee, mom, I love you too...
[I should note that my newsfeed has problems, and I didn't see Ruth
Ginzberg's original post, but only Peter Cash's extract from it.]
I used the description because it was the one given to me and I wanted
to make a conceptual point, not because I thought it captured the
emotional essence of most real situations. In fact, people like to tell
themselves coherent stories about their lives in which their experiences
are somehow justified and the way things might have been if the world
had been quite different doesn't play much of a role. So if abortions
were unobtainable as a result of a general understanding that having an
abortion is wrong, I would imagine that feeling "stuck" carrying a
pregnancy to term would be on a par with feeling "stuck" having to work
for a living -- an occasional mood that hits some people more than
others, but not something that many people take seriously.
In addition, as Peter suggests, most women aren't made of stone, and a
mother is likely to become attached to her child even if she did
originally feel her pregnancy as something she was stuck with. It's not
clear to me her attachment would be less in that case than if she viewed
the child as something she happened to choose to carry to term but could
just as easily have aborted.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Mar 2 17:21:26 EST 1993
Article: 5246 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb28.100744.27717@Princeton.EDU> <1993Mar1.081938.799@news.wesleyan.edu>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 19:15:43 GMT
Lines: 47
RGINZBERG@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Ruth Ginzberg) writes:
>For those who believe that pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood are
>appropriate "punishments" for those who have committed the sin of
>engaging in unapproved heterosexual intercourse (or even for those women
>who have been raped, i.e., are pregnant as a result of having a violent
>crime committed against them): Consider what a profoundly anti-child
>position this stance represents. No child could possibly grow up
>emotionally thriving, knowing that its very existence was purely because
>it was the punishment to which its mother was sentenced.
>
>I think that this (the above) is *SOME* Catholics's interpretation of
>the notion of Original Sin: That the Original Sin is the fact that
>one's mother & father had sex in order to conceive (that is why Jesus
>allegedly could be born without Original Sin -- no sex involved in his
>conception).
I find this discussion puzzling. I know of no-one who holds the view
described in the first quoted paragraph. It appears that someone who
held that view would think abortion was OK for women who had engaged in
approved sexual intercourse (presumably, married women) but not for
others. I don't believe that's a view that a significant number of
people hold, though.
The second quoted paragraph describes a somewhat different view, that
all sexual intercourse is sinful and that pregnancy and childbirth are
appropriate punishments for it. That view doesn't seem consistent with
the way most pro-life people feel. For example, most women not only
like sex but also want to have children. Under the suggested view such
women would be really bad people who commit sins and get rewarded for
it. In fact, though, most pro-life people don't think mothers of large
families who like their lives are bad.
You seem to be presenting your view of the thoughts and feelings that in
many cases lie behind the pro-life position. It might be worth saying
in that connection that pro-choicers often seem to have difficulty
understanding that it is possible to believe and to feel that the unborn
child is something valuable that (barring some very good reason to the
contrary) ought to be preserved and fostered rather than destroyed, and
that holding someone responsible for doing the preserving and fostering
is not the same as punishing that person. Consider, for example, that
both fathers and mothers are held responsible for the care and support
of their minor children even when they don't feel like doing so, and the
enforcement of that responsibility is not intended as a punishment.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Mar 2 19:36:38 EST 1993
Article: 5253 of talk.philosophy.misc
Xref: panix alt.atheism:42109 talk.philosophy.misc:5253
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Reason to be good
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb27.160727.13622@ncsu.edu> <1mu00pINNpjq@shelley.u.washington.edu> <7310254955127@spatial.eid.anl.gov>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 22:25:44 GMT
Lines: 17
shugrue@spatial.eid.anl.gov (Leon Shugrue) writes:
>Can anyone out there give me a self-sustained reason to good over bad.
>Or to do what's right over what's wrong? An inherent quality of goodness
>that makes it preferable to 'badness'?
It seems to me that "good" is the word we use for the most fundamental
goals of our actions. So if something seems good to us, no additional
reason is needed to choose it over what seems bad; to find it good is
already to feel that we have a reason for choosing it that no other
reason could possibly match.
It may be, by the way, that the above commits me to the view that no-one
ever knowingly does wrong.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Mar 2 19:36:39 EST 1993
Article: 5254 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar2.044847.12124@Princeton.EDU>
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 22:58:28 GMT
Lines: 28
Bob Mahoney writes:
>[I]f I understand the "people seed" argument correctly (and, I admit,
>it's difficult to do so), the intuition she's trying to elicit is that
>we shouldn't have to pay *any* consequences, because having our windows
>open is essential to human life. Or, to translate, sex is such a
>natural part of life that, even if it does result in pregnancy, we
>shouldn't have to put up with the complications of pregnancy if we don't
>want to.
But lots of things that are essential to human life have consequences.
Eating is essential to human life. Does that mean it's wrong for the
production and preparation of food to require effort? Or if sex is
essential to human life, does that mean that if I'm not getting any my
rights are being infringed?
Neither engaging in sexual intercourse nor having the windows open is
literally essential to a particular human life, so maybe the argument is
the one suggested in your second quoted sentence, that those activities
are such a natural part of human life that burdening them in any way is
oppressive. But that can't be right either, since pregnancy and
childbirth are also natural parts of human life. So I remain somewhat
at a loss as to what the force of the hypothetical is thought to be.
(For what it's worth, I'll admit that "people seeds" that drift in the
window aren't a natural part of human life.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Fri Mar 5 05:43:47 EST 1993
Article: 4979 of sci.philosophy.meta
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Foundationalism and Fallibilism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Feb26.190036.23626@galois.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1993 15:17:47 GMT
Lines: 38
theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill) writes:
>Have you never been certain about something that later turned out to be
>false? I have. It is irritating to be really *sure* of something (a
>synonym for 'certain' in ordinary speech) and then to have that shown
>to be false, but it happens. One can respond in a couple of ways:
>
> "Well, I guess I wasn't really certain after all."
>
> (This keeps you epistemologically pure with respect to the
> technical sense of 'certain' in much of philosophy, but it
> is a rather odd thing to say in common discourse. A quite
> appropriate counter response would be, "Yes you were. You
> were just wrong.")
But I thought the subject of discussion was knowledge. If you say you
"know" something, and it turns out to be false, then "I guess I really
didn't know it after all" is the normal response.
>As the term 'knowledge' has been used throughout the history of
>philosophy, we don't need no stinking knowledge.
Do you have some other usage of the term "knowledge" in mind that you
think is better? One in which it would be normal to say "I knew XYZ,
but I also knew I might be wrong and in fact I was wrong"?
>Justified belief is just fine -- and it's all you'll ever get (or all
>you can ever justifiably believe you can ever get).
I think "justification" is usually understood as justifying something
less certain by something more certain, and we find it satisfying to the
extent we don't feel the need to question the more certain thing. So
some people are made uneasy by the notion of a system of justified
beliefs in which the justification for particular beliefs is other
beliefs that we explicitly recognize may be false.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Fri Mar 5 05:43:55 EST 1993
Article: 5276 of talk.philosophy.misc
Xref: panix alt.atheism:42200 talk.philosophy.misc:5276
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Reason to be good
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <7310254955127@spatial.eid.anl.gov>
Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1993 15:20:57 GMT
Lines: 29
po.CWRU.edu (Keith M. Ryan) writes:
>>>Can anyone out there give me a self-sustained reason to good over bad.
>>>Or to do what's right over what's wrong? An inherent quality of goodness
>>>that makes it preferable to 'badness'?
> I may be wrong, but I think that [the above] question was more
>along the lines of:
>
> Why ought I do things which other's tell me is good.
> Eg: why ought I follow this set of laws and rules.
>
> As opposed to following what he beleives and feels is the good.
If someone believes and feels something is good he doesn't just feel
that he likes it. In addition, he believes and feels that he should
like it and other people should like it too. In other words, goodness
is something that (if it exists at all) exists for other people as well
as oneself.
But if something (like goodness or the atomic weight of sodium) exists
equally for oneself and for other people, then presumably other people's
views regarding that thing ought to count for something, and if there is
a generally accepted view on the matter it ought to count for a lot
unless one has some special reason to think the generally accepted view
is wrong.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sat Mar 6 18:04:47 EST 1993
Article: 5289 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar2.044847.12124@Princeton.EDU> <1993Mar3.202805.10307@Princeton.EDU>
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1993 11:42:03 GMT
Lines: 41
Bob Mahoney writes:
> I don't think she's trying to argue that it's our *right* to
>have sex; rather, that it's our right to be *able* to have sex without
>taking on the responsibility for another life that might result.
We may have reached a blank wall here. So far as I can tell, one might
as well claim that it's his right to be able to have sex without taking
on the responsibility for getting the consent of his intended partner.
(Not that the two claims are indistinguishable, but it's equally obscure
to me why someone might accept either.)
>>But that can't be right either, since pregnancy and childbirth are also
>>natural parts of human life.
>
> And no one's depriving us of the right to become pregnant or bear
>children. At least not in her argument.
Why isn't it sex-that-may-lead-to-pregnancy that is the natural part of
human life?
> Perhaps a related argument that Thomson presents (and which I
>have omitted) might clear things up: someone leaves her window open for
>fresh air and a robber climbs in and steals things from her apartment.
>I omitted this part because I thought the connection between
>impregnation (a morally neutral act) and robbery (a morally debatable
>act) only makes things cloudier. But the gist is that we can't say to
>the woman "You invited the robber into your apartment because you left
>the window open, and therefore you are responsible for the robbery."
If I entrusted her with my collection of Rembrandt etchings (most people
don't realize how fabulously wealthy I am) and she left them lying
around in her apartment with the window open and somebody swiped them, I
think I would have a good claim against her. So maybe the issue is
whether the unborn child is more like (i) a famous work of art that
she's not the owner of, or (ii) a VCR that she is the owner of and
could smash to pieces if she felt like it without anyone having cause to
complain.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 7 16:40:49 EST 1993
Article: 191 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Puritanism and the Revolution
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1mhcqtINN92v@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <1993Feb26.190043.20992@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Mar4.173351.8350@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1993 18:25:21 GMT
Lines: 34
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>Hmmm...leaving aside the ENR's paganism (which is a complex issue and
>tends to generate more heat than light in some quarters), my own
>preferences would be Protestantism and Republicanism.
That seems odd to me, at least if I can ignore your wish to leave
paganism aside. Speaking very impressionistically, Protestantism and
republicanism seem to me poles apart from paganism.
Protestantism seems to be a rejection of beliefs, practices and
institutions thought to distract from a direct relation between the
individual and the single ultimate reality. How could you be less pagan
than that?
Also, if paganism is the belief that there are lots of quite distinct
ultimate realities it seems that its natural political expression would
be a society in which there are lots of independent political powers,
each supreme in its own area. To the extent that republicanism locates
ultimate authority in a single place (like the body of men capable of
bearing arms) it seems unpagan.
If you like the ENR, why not prefer Catholic feudalism to Protestant
republicanism? From the ENR standpoint the Catholics may have the vice
of believing in a single ultimate reality, but they at least take
seriously things like priests, sacraments and saints that are
intermediate between that reality and the individual. They also have
fewer unitarian tendencies than Protestants. So if you think that
monotheism tends to totalitarianism the Catholics ought to worry you
less than the Protestants, and if you don't like the unitary society you
should like feudalism more than republicanism.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 7 16:40:50 EST 1993
Article: 192 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: CR vs CR
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar6.063202.13914@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1993 18:27:09 GMT
Lines: 23
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>Questions: is "counter-revolution" the same as "reaction" as defined by
>Moeller, and why/why not? Is monarchy as practiced in Europe before 1789
>really an 'eternal value' and if so, why? Finally, is it even really
>possible or desireable to return to a pre-1789 state of politics, and
>how is this to be brought about?
My own view is that "counter-revolution" is the end of Liberty, Equality
and Fraternity as the supreme political values. Once that happens other
concerns (like virtue and transcendence) will be better able to make
their way in the political world. It is too early to say just how that
will happen.
The pre-1789 state of affairs cannot possibly be restored, but one or
another aspect of it may serve as a symbol to organize thought and
effort. What people think of as their political goals are usually
better understood as symbols. There's nothing wrong with that -- you
have to have something in mind when you think and act, and it's helpful
if that thing is concrete.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 7 16:40:57 EST 1993
Article: 5335 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar3.202805.10307@Princeton.EDU> <1993Mar6.024505.24916@Princeton.EDU>
Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1993 17:11:38 GMT
Lines: 68
Bob Mahoney writes:
>> > I don't think she's trying to argue that it's our *right* to
>> >have sex; rather, that it's our right to be *able* to have sex without
>> >taking on the responsibility for another life that might result.
>
> I suppose we can emend my above statement to "to have [mutually
>consentual] sex..." I don't think anyone has the right to rape someone
>else.
I just don't understand why anyone would think such a right exists. To
an unsympathetic person such as myself, the argument seems to be "I want
very much to do X, so I have a right to do X without obligations that I
don't want to to take on." But if that type of argument worked then
there *would* be a right to rape. Very likely Thomson has something
different in mind, but I don't know what it is.
>[A]ccording to [Thomson], we may engage in sex without ever inviting the
>fetus in. Any time we have sex without desiring to get pregnant,
>particularly when we go to any trouble to avoid impregnation, we are
>explicity not inviting any fetus to the use of our bodies. In such a
>case, we have no obligation to any fetus which develops.
But the use of the woman's body by the fetus is a natural and foreseeable
result of sexual intercourse, and in general we accept that we have some
sort of responsibility with respect to situations that arise as a
natural and foreseeable result of our conduct. That's true even if the
situation is rather unlikely. If I take you for a 2-week cruise in my
boat and you have an attack of appendicitis it seems to me I have an
obligation to cut the trip short and get you to a hospital. I didn't
intend the attack, I had no special reason to think it would happen, and
I didn't invite you on the boat so that you could use my boat as your
ambulance with me as your ambulance crew. Nonetheless, acute illness is
a natural and foreseeable thing that happens to people, and I had
voluntarily put you in a situation in which the only way your illness
could be dealt with is by me doing something I didn't necessarily want
to do, so it seems to me the responsibility is mine. That conclusion
would not change even if I insisted everyone have a physical examination
before leaving and took a well-stocked medicine chest along to keep
illness or injury from disrupting the cruise.
> The woman who hangs on to your Rembrandt etchings [placed in her
>care] has voluntarily taken on responsibility for them. Thomson's whole
>point is that someone who engages in sex without wishing to become
>pregnant has not taken on the such responsibility, and, as such, is not
>responsible for the consequences.
Is the distinction so clear? The woman borrows my etchings and leaves
them lying around in her apartment with the windows open and also
engages in sex. After a month she finds (1) the etchings have been
stolen and (2) she's pregnant. She didn't intend either result, and
both results were unlikely in the short run. She even took some
precautions (contraception and locking her doors) to keep the result
from occurring. Nonetheless, each result was a reasonably foreseeable
consequence of what she was doing and I don't see why she should not in
both cases be responsible.
>As far as who owns the fetus, egads -- I don't think I want to start
>*that* debate over here...
My point was that an assumption of Thomson's burglary story seems to be
that the woman's relation to the fetus is rather like her relation to
her VCR. She has no obligations regarding the preservation of her VCR
so it seems silly to say she's done something wrong if she fails to take
precautions to preserve it.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Wed Mar 10 19:31:07 EST 1993
Article: 5386 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: abortion + stuff
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar8.153113.22046@yang.earlham.edu>
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1993 12:33:19 GMT
Lines: 21
sarahb@yang.earlham.edu writes:
>This raises my question as to when the fetus can be considered a child.
>In my view, it is when the fetus could also be a viable infant, with a
>soul.
A lot of people think whether the fetus has a soul has nothing to do
with viability. They say the fetus has a soul when it starts to move,
or when the brain starts to function in certain ways. Why do you think
viability is the key?
>I think that, if you take precautions, then you are not inviting. Also,
>if you do not take any, you *are* inviting, whether you want it or not,
>simply by taking the risk.
One problem is that sometimes people take precautions but they know the
precautions don't give them 100% protection and that they are taking a
risk. If that's so, when do you think they should be responsible?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Wed Mar 10 19:31:08 EST 1993
Article: 5387 of talk.philosophy.misc
Xref: panix alt.atheism:42779 talk.philosophy.misc:5387
Newsgroups: alt.atheism,talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Reason to be good
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar4.235429.3407@gallant.apple.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1993 12:35:06 GMT
Lines: 36
mikel@apple.com (mikel evins) writes:
>In article Jim Kalb, jk@panix.com writes:
>> If someone believes and feels something is good he doesn't just feel
>> that he likes it. In addition, he believes and feels that he should
>> like it and other people should like it too. In other words, goodness
>> is something that (if it exists at all) exists for other people as well
>> as oneself.
>I wonder if, by this definition, there is nothing I consider good.
>I suppose it depends upon what you mean by 'should'. If I can take
>it that 'other people should like this' means that 'it is to my
>liking that other people like this,' then there are things that I
The example someone gave that I was dealing with was of someone who
believed and felt that something is good. My response was that his use
of the words "believes" and "good" showed that he was making a
judgement intended to be valid for other people as well as himself.
(Otherwise he could have simply said "I like it" or "yum".)
Your point seems to be that there might be someone who simply liked or
disliked things and had no notion (even implicitly) of some general
system that applied to both him and others for determining which things
he should do or not do. I agree that if someone like that used "should"
he would be using it in an idiosyncratic way, and I would add that the
same is true for the word "good".
I would also add that I've never met anyone like that and am not sure
what such a person would be like. (That's assuming that "person" is the
right term to use for someone without a trace of moral rationality.)
I should mention that because of a flaky newsreader I didn't see all of
your post but only as much as someone else quoted.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Wed Mar 10 19:31:10 EST 1993
Article: 5388 of talk.philosophy.misc
Xref: panix talk.philosophy.misc:5388 misc.legal:34765
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,misc.legal
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar6.024505.24916@Princeton.EDU> <1993Mar9.020906.10127@Princeton.EDU>
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1993 12:37:24 GMT
Lines: 17
Bob Mahoney writes:
>I can't imagine anyone considering it involuntary manslaughter if we
>take the boat out to sea and I die of appendicitis (wish it had been
>someone else...). It would be a mean thing of you to do, perhaps, but I
>don't think I could hold you personally responsible for my death. After
>all, it *really* isn't your fault. Let's not test this empirically,
>though...
You're a more easy-going kind of guy than I am. I think "depraved
indifference to human life" satisfies the legal definition of murder,
and that's what I would be inclined to call it if you got appendicitis
while a guest on my boat and I just let you die rather than turn around
and take you to a hospital. Any criminal lawyers around?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 14 03:49:46 EST 1993
Article: 203 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Puritanism and the Revolution
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1mhcqtINN92v@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <1993Feb26.190043.20992@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Mar4.173351.8350@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Mar9.214055.17574@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1993 08:35:07 GMT
Lines: 11
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>I'm sorry; I did not make myself clear. I was assuming, for the sake of
>argument - assuming that I was a reactionary who wanted to go back to
>some earlier period/ideal of Western Civilization - I was assuming that
>the question was what kind of "counter-revolution" I would prefer.
My intended question was what kind of society you want for the future.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 14 15:14:09 EST 1993
Article: 204 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Repeated Postings
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1993 08:39:24 GMT
Lines: 7
Several days ago I posted several articles from a site that is not my
usual site and that is being upgraded and so may not be reliable. So
far as I can tell, those articles have not appeared anyplace else since
then so I am reposting from my usual site.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 14 15:14:12 EST 1993
Article: 205 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Pagans, Prots and Republicans (was Puritanism and the Revolution)
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1mhcqtINN92v@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <1993Feb26.190043.20992@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Mar4.173351.8350@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Mar9.224042.18655@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1993 08:43:18 GMT
Lines: 85
I don't understand what the ENR means when it talks about "paganism".
Here are some questions and comments that no doubt demonstrate my need
for enlightenment:
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>In fact, a direct relation with the Divine was the actual intent of
many
>pagan cults and sects . . .
The Divine or a particular divinity? And which particular divinities do
the members of the ENR favor?
>If what you said were true, than you would have to argue that ancient
>Sparta, Athens, Rome, and the many Celtic and Germanic tribes which
>practiced certain forms of democracy or republicanism would somehow be
>"unpagan."
I suppose my point was that if by "republicanism" you mean a systematic
approach to government that locates ultimate authority in a particular
body of people acting through particular institutions and procedures,
then you're most likely to find it in a society in which people like
important things to form a system with clear and consistent rules and
some sort of overall justification. It seems to me that such people are
much more likely to be monotheists than pagans, especially if they live
after monotheism has been clearly articulated so that it has become one
of the intellectual possibilities.
As to the ancient societies you mention, their democracy or
republicanism seems to have been rather unsystematic or even incidental.
I don't know enough about their constitutional development to discuss
the matter properly. However, my impression is that in Sparta they did
have kings (two of them) and other unrepresentative institutions, and in
any event the Spartiates were quite a small part of the society as a
whole. In Athens the development of democracy seems to have been
associated with a decline in faith in the traditional gods among many
people (think of the Sophists) and incipient monotheism among
philosophers (think of Plato, Aristotle or the Stoics). The constitution
of the Roman Republic had very strong aristocratic or oligarchic
elements as well as some popular elements. Did the German or Celtic
tribes have much in the way of organized government? I thought what
they mostly had was particular war leaders and their retainers and
hangers on.
Is the kind of republicanism that actually existed in those societies
the sort of thing you had in mind? If so, how could it be recreated?
One problem with "paganism" as a goal of a radical revolutionary
movement is that such movements seem to require some sort of overall
theory of general applicability, and that kind of theory does seem
unpagan to me.
>I am not sure, in any case, that paganism necessarily means that there
>are lots of quite distinct ultimate realities. That would be going
>rather beyond the actual beliefs and practices of historical paganism.
I would think that if monotheism says that there is an _ens realissimum_
then if paganism is going to respond it has to say that there are
multiple _entia realissima_. I'm not sure historical paganism ever
seriously encountered monotheism and avoided becoming monotheistic
itself (for example, by treating Zeus as incomparably superior to all
other gods), and I would attribute that failure to an unwillingness to
accept multiple supreme beings. So I think it likely that you will have
to go beyond historical paganism to find a paganism that can deal with
monotheism.
>Mr. Walker remarks that "reductionism" is a key concept in ENR thought,
>which accounts for why the ENR sees an exclusivist Paganism as being
>essentially different from an exclusivist Christianity. Hopefully he
>will elaborate on this point further.
Anti-reductionism sounds like opposition to claims that all statements
about anything whatever can in principle be reduced to statements about
one supreme being (whether that supreme being is God or the quark).
Possibly Hinduism is reductionist in this sense, although I don't know
enough about it to say. Christianity avoids reductionism by saying that
God created the world as something that is not God and is real.
Is the idea of exclusivist paganism that one nation will worship Zeus,
and another will worship Baal, and everyone will agree that those are
two different gods that are both real? What then? Will the two gods
demonstrate their reality by doing battle with each other? What will
happen to the worshippers of Zeus in the land of Baal?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 14 15:14:14 EST 1993
Article: 206 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: CR vs CR
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar6.063202.13914@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, <1993Mar9.225548.18954@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1993 08:45:25 GMT
Lines: 30
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>I would say (echoing Moeller) that the point is not to fight against
the
>Revolution, but to win it. I too oppose what most people mean by
>Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, but I do not think it possible to
>simply try to negate an established value - rather, one must surpass,
or
>subvert, it.
What's wrong with the "good cop, bad cop" approach? Let's say that
established value X after serious trial for a long time turns out to be
destructive, at least if it's taken as the measure of all things. One
likely result will be redoubled support for X by many of the most
articulate people. The thing to do is to have a group of crazies say
"crush X" and another group say "X is good, and when properly understood
X is ~X". The tension in the public mind created by the clash of
ideological supporters and opponents of X can then be relieved through
rejection of all extremists and acceptance of the compromise view.
>>The pre-1789 state of affairs cannot possibly be restored, but one or
>>another aspect of it may serve as a symbol to organize thought and
>>effort.
>Fine; but what distinguishes this from revolution?
After 200 years a counterrevolution is a revolution.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 14 15:14:16 EST 1993
Article: 207 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Traditions old and new
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1993 08:48:37 GMT
Lines: 74
The current discussions with Mr. Deane about counterrevolution and
reaction led me to rummage around among various letters to myself and
proposed position papers for the Clinton administration to see if I had
anything to the point. I came up with the following, which seems
somewhat relevant:
Traditions New and Old
The fundamental problem of modern politics is how circumstances that
favor the good life can be created now that traditional ethnic ties and
religious guidance have been rejected.
The liberal solution to this question is to allow people free choice
among lifestyles. However, that solution cannot work because people can
not invent a good way of life for themselves individually any more than
they can design their own bicycles. The goodness of a way of life can
not be known unless it is tried, and one who is left to choose without
preconceptions from among all possible ways of life will, unless he is
very lucky, die before he finds a satisfactory one. If people must
choose before they have adequate personal experience of what they are
choosing, they will choose ignorantly and their freedom will serve
chiefly to facilitate manipulation of their choices by others for their
own ends. Commercial advertisers will persuade people that consumer
goods will give them the good life and political adventurers will
persuade them that they are being cheated unless the government solves
all their problems.
A way of life should enable people to realize under varied conditions
the goods that are most satisfying in the long run, and it can best do
that if it reflects the experience of a community over generations. To
reflect such extensive experience the community as a whole must stick
with it generation after generation. Such stability will exist only if
the way of life includes an element of authority. A misfortune of
modern times is that the essence of the dominant tradition, liberalism,
is the denial of the relevance of authority to lifestyle choices.
Accordingly, in America today the good life paradoxically requires the
rejection of the moral tradition that is currently dominant --
liberalism -- in favor of the authority of moral tradition in general.
This paradox of conservative revolution can be resolved through
recognition that the authority of tradition can not be unconditional.
Tradition is necessary, but its value results from the nature of human
knowledge as social, cumulative and objective. A tradition that denies
the social nature, the present imperfection, or the essential
objectivity of knowledge, including moral knowledge, and thus makes it
impossible to attain the moral knowledge necessary to a good life, is
not worthy of respect. Liberalism, which denies all three because it
denies all authority higher than the current views of each individual,
must therefore be rejected.
One might object that the decline in the authority of tradition results
from developments that cannot be reversed, and that calling for the
restoration of that authority does not restore it or even determine
which tradition is to be authoritative. Such objections misconceive
what is needed. Tradition is something that is accepted rather than
chosen, and people will accept it unless they believe they have reason
not to. At present, the tendencies summed up in liberalism provide such
a reason. If respect for tradition is natural, the rejection of those
tendencies will clear the way for its rebirth. That rebirth will not be
the restoration of an earlier state of affairs. However, acceptance of
the necessity of basing our actions on standards and habits developed
over time will permit such standards and habits to develop and to play
their natural role in governing action.
So the cure for the ills brought by the rejection of tradition is
acceptance of tradition. To accept tradition is not to choose a
particular tradition, and the traditions that will arise if tradition is
accepted will not necessarily be the same as the particular traditions
that were rejected. There are grounds to hope, though, that they will
capture once again the things that made the old traditions valuable.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 14 15:35:29 EST 1993
Article: 208 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Puritanism and the Revolution
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar9.214055.17574@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1993Mar11.025149.13040@news.cs.brandeis.edu>
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1993 20:18:22 GMT
Lines: 33
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>Tony Wakeford is a friend of Michael Walker's, and used to be involved
>in an organization called Iona, which was a cultural group allied to
The
>Scorpion. Though not part of the ENR, Mr. Wakerford certainly has been
>influenced by the ENR, so I think it not inappropriate to quote him:
[Quote deleted]
>So there you have it! A genuine neo-pagan, European, nationalist-type
>has his say about paganism and Christianity.
A couple of questions:
1. Why is the organization called "Iona"?
2. Does Mr. Walker have any other friends who are more skilled than Mr.
Wakeford at articulating theory? I have difficulty thinking of what a
coherent and reflective post-Christian paganism would look like, and Mr.
Wakeford didn't help me much.
>I will add, though, that ENR publications have been a forum for writers
>from Catholic, Protestant, pagan, atheist, agnostic, Islamic, and
Jewish
>backgrounds...so, though the ENR itself advocates paganism, this should
>be understood in a very pluralistic sense.
It appears from this that paganism is not central to their position. If
not, why do they say they advocate it?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 14 15:35:40 EST 1993
Article: 5414 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: abortion + stuff
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar8.153113.22046@yang.earlham.edu> <1993Mar11.065057.9045@reed.edu>
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1993 20:21:59 GMT
Lines: 57
sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>When a discussion on abortion takes place with an eye toward legal
>policies, the idea of the soul isn't very useful, since it is religious
>and we, properly, do not make laws based on religious beliefs. Whatever
>it is we have in mind when we say "soul" has to be more analytically
>described, so that its presence can be more surely determined.
I would understand what you say here if it weren't for the "since"
clause in the first sentence. People support or oppose laws based on
their understanding of what the world is like. You seem to believe that
in considering legal matters people should exclude any religious
component of that understanding. Why? And how do people go about
thinking about things without reference to a fundamental part of their
understanding of the world?
>It is backward and arrogant to think that membership in a particular
>biological species (e.g., homo sapiens) is morally important by itself
[
>. . . ] The question simply is: how can you tell whether something has
>rights? To just shout out "if it's a human person" is personally
>embarassing to the better informed members of ours species (such as
>myself) [ . . . ] There is a heirarchy of being, and as you go up it,
>more and more rights emerge. A human beiong goes up that heirarchy
>steadily as it develops, and so it makes sense that its rights, and the
>wrongness of killing it, increase as it develops too.
It seems to me:
1. Abstractly considered, species membership may not be morally
critical, and such abstract considerations may have practical
consequences from time to time. For example, if a baby is born without
the parts of the brain needed for anything beyond respiration and
similar functions, and is troublesome to keep alive, it may be OK to let
him die even though he is a member of the human species.
2. Nonetheless, man is a social animal and as such we have special
obligations to fellow members of the communities we belong to (for
example, family, nation or all humanity) that we do not have to beings
that are otherwise morally equivalent but are not members of our
community.
3. It can be wrong to destroy things that don't have rights. For
example, neither _The Night Watch_ nor the population of whooping cranes
has rights, but it would be wrong of me to destroy them even if I owned
both.
4. The place that a thing holds in the hierarchy of being should be
determined by reference to what that thing is when in its
fully-developed and normal state, at least if the thing will attain that
state in the normal course of events. So it is wrong to kill a man who
is lying blind drunk on the floor even though at the moment he doesn't
have any of the capacities that would usually lead us to think (in your
language) that he has rights, and similarly for a newborn or a foetus.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 14 20:47:41 EST 1993
Article: 209 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: How come some cultures are better than others?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1993 00:16:44 GMT
Lines: 106
The prolonged and stormy applause that greeted the last several things I
posted seems to call for another article. This one is about the social
conditions for the development of human excellence.
Excellence
Human excellence is achieved through the development of the good
qualities people have. These are of several kinds. There are moral
virtues, such as honesty, courage, industry, self-control and justice,
and intellectual virtues, such as prudence or the love of truth and
beauty. There are what I would call natural virtues, such as physical
beauty or strength, emotional responsiveness or stability, and
intellectual creativity or power. Some add theological virtues, such as
faith, hope and charity.
The relation among the different sorts of virtue is disputed. Some
think that the natural virtues are primary and other qualities are
virtues to the extent they promote them. Others would make the
intellectual, moral or theological virtues primary. Some think that the
various forms of virtue tend to promote each other; others that certain
virtues (for example, the natural and the theological virtues) tend to
conflict; still others that different forms of virtue succeed each other
as a society evolves.
My own view is that varying forms of excellence go together more often
than not, and some settings are particularly favorable to excellence as
such. The Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean, for example, excelled
in nearly everything at one time or another. I will not attempt to
justify that view, but for the sake of simplicity in what follows I will
nonetheless treat the intellectual virtues as the test of excellence.
With that in mind, the examples of Athens, Florence and Elizabethan
England suggest that excellence is most likely to develop in association
with a moderate-sized and reasonably cohesive social class that combines
serious responsibilities with leisure and a reasonably secure financial
and social position. For this reason, excellence is more often found
associated with a landed aristocracy than in a pure democracy or
despotism, in each of which few people have serious responsibilities and
independence, or in a pure commercial oligarchy, in which people have
responsibility but not security or leisure. Excellence is also favored
if the privileged class has an active social and political life with a
degree of openness to whatever good can be found in other classes or
abroad. The peak of excellence has thus been attained in small but
expanding commercial societies still largely dominated by landowners
residing much of the year in town.
While such societies were certainly not egalitarian, excellence and its
benefits were not restricted to the class that fostered it. A class
whose circumstances permit independent and self-confident judgment and
whose members are in a position to give concrete support to what they
think good is likely to promote excellence wherever it may appear.
Moreover, all of society benefited from the excellence so created,
whether through the generally higher standard of thought and feeling,
the more intelligent administration of public affairs, or such public
arts as architecture, drama and ceremony.
As a result of modern conditions -- mass democracy, bureaucracy and the
free market -- it is now very difficult for a class of the necessary
sort to exist. No social position is secure today, and the ability of
the market to supply distractions and to convert time into money has all
but eliminated leisure. Moreover, democracy, bureaucracy and the market
radically reduce the responsibilities of each particular man by
providing objective means of decision that only faintly reflect the
preferences of anyone in particular. Thus, there is no well-defined
class situated to foster excellence in America today, and accordingly
there is less excellence than there has been at many other times and
places. If someone is not satisfied just to get by he may want to rise
in the world, but he is not likely to pursue excellence as such.
The primary responsibility for fostering excellence in intellectual and
artistic achievement has fallen to the universities, but they are unable
to carry it. It was intended that teaching schedules and tenure give
faculty the leisure and independence required for that function.
However, academic discourse tends to become ingrown and divorced from
fundamental issues because faculty members lack concrete social
responsibilities. In addition, academics who feel they lack the social
position to which their intellectual distinction entitles them often
treat intellectual life as a vehicle for frustrated personal ambition
and discharge in institutional and intellectual politics the love of
maneuver, victory and domination that is often useful in dealing with
practical problems but is compatible only in sublimated form with the
pursuit of the beautiful and true.
What excellence we achieve is therefore likely to depend on those
people, not constituting a well-defined class, who have inward leisure,
independence and responsibility. It is not clear where such people are
going to come from today. In imperial Rome and China, other centralized
societies of continental size, there were serious philosophies of life
-- stoicism in Rome and Confucianism/Taoism in China -- that encouraged
the development of the needed inward qualities among people with
intellectual interests. In America nothing of the sort exists, although
there are self-help systems intended to promote similar states of mind.
These are not taken seriously, though, because a philosophy can't be
edifying unless it is thought to be true, and people don't believe that
such systems reflect the way the world fundamentally is. Thus virtue
and human excellence remain matters of chance in America today.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Mon Mar 15 17:19:57 EST 1993
Article: 216 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Bride of the Son of Symbolic Speech
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar11.062306.16258@news.cs.brandeis.edu> <1nofudINNr0b@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1993 18:18:20 GMT
Lines: 56
monaghan@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (N.O. Monaghan) writes:
>If [an artist] wishes to produce art for the satisfaction of others in
>order that they purchase it, then he must compromise his art until it
>is of a form that he is able and willing to produce and the buyer
>willing to buy.
If "compromise" suggests lowering of standards, it's not necessarily the
right word. In the long run, the production of good art requires an
audience that responds to the art. Art is produced when the artist can
make his private vision into an object in which that vision can be
recognized by others. That can happen only if the work conforms in some
manner to standards not of the artist's own making that he shares with
an audience.
If the artist has an exceptionally strong feeling for the possibilities
of the tradition within which he is working, the audience with whom he
shares standards can sometimes be the audience that the artist hopes to
bring into being through his work. Such cases are necessarily
exceptions. The basic situation is one in which the artist is aware of
an audience by whom he intends and expects to be understood.
(Philosophical speculations as to the impossibility of strictly private
languages are no doubt relevant to this issue.)
>Perhaps the question should be asked what art (if any) should a
>government fund. I think that in most Western countries, that public
>buildings and other works could be better designed - there are indeed
>too many 'monstrous carbuncles' to use the words of Prince Charles of
>England that exist as both public and private buildings.
What the government does it should do well, and in particular it should
not symbolize itself through despiriting public buildings.
The question raised by the "Piss Christ" situation, though, is what new
non-public art the government should support. At present, I would say
none. A patron of the arts should know what he's doing so that when the
artist is producing his art the audience he has in mind will be one he
can respect. The United States federal government in 1993 (I am
speaking of the situation in my own country) doesn't know what it's
doing in this area, so I think the biggest contribution it can make is
to stay out. I don't want our artistic life to be a matter of figuring
out how to get NEA grants and then pyramiding them into corporate
funding.
Another point -- artistic quality depends in the long run on shared
standards, but the standards must be standards that are lived and felt
rather than the ones that are formally articulated. So a patron of the
arts should be someone who actually likes what he supports and who
supports it for that reason, rather than a functionary who supports
things because he can explain and justify his support in accordance with
some formal criteria. That has been the problem with academic art in
the past, and that's the problem with NEA and corporate-funded art
today. The less of it the better is what I say.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Mon Mar 15 17:19:59 EST 1993
Article: 217 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Bride of the Son of Symbolic Speech
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1993 18:24:45 GMT
Lines: 42
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>The only intent [of the 1st Am.] was to prevent the Federal Govt. from
>passing laws which would outlaw certain words, or prevent certain people
>from speaking/writing, or prevent certain arguments from being made, for
>political purposes.
The intent was probably more modest, because the phrase "freedom of the
press" had a recognized legal meaning at the time. According to
Blackstone, it meant that you could publish anything you wanted without
the prior approval of the government. After publication you could be
jugged, of course.
One point you allude to but don't make much of is that the 1st Am. by
its terms and evident intention applied only to the Federal govt. I
believe it was first applied to the states in the 20's or 30's, and
before that time there weren't many judicial decisions under it.
>[T]he 1st am. deals with words, with actual language. Expanding freedom
>of the press to include TV and radio does not undermine this conception;
>expanding free speech to include "symbolic acts" does.
TV deals with visual images as well as words. Also, printed visual
images (the ones in _Hustler_, for example) are much more important
today than they were in the late 18th c. even though they existed and
were produced by means of printing presses at that time. Do you think
visual images are covered by the 1st Am.? If not, then the video
portion of TV and maybe maps and diagrams in books aren't covered. If
so, why not "Piss Christ" or Annie Sprinkle?
>I think the changing meaning of the Constitution is good illustration of
>my belief that it is not possible to "conserve" anything with words,
>written constitutions, creeds, or dogma set in stone. Something more is
>needed.
Perhaps for this reason, my own reaction to discussions of
Constitutional law is that they're disingenuous and boring. The things
people say aren't to the point. (Myself and the other participants in
the current discussion excepted, of course.)
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 21 18:45:47 EST 1993
Article: 218 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Taxonomy, Etiology and Prognosis of Liberalism
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1993 19:16:19 GMT
Lines: 138
I am told the newsreader at my site will shortly be fixed, and have
decided to celebrate by posting yet another microessay. This one is
related to the "end of history" thread. As usual, I concentrate on the
situation in my own country because it is what I know best.
A Political Taxonomy
By "Liberalism" I mean the belief that freedom and equality are the
highest political goals. Almost all political argument in America has
been argument among the several forms of Liberalism that correspond to
ambiguities and inconsistencies in these goals.
The argument has been mostly concerned with economic matters.
Old-fashioned Liberals, or "conservatives", have emphasized freedom from
interference in such matters. They have construed equality as equal
freedom of economic action, understood by old-line conservatives as the
abolition of privilege and by neo-conservatives as government promotion
of equality of opportunity. In addition, their emphasis on private
action has led them to expect people to be responsible in their personal
lives, for example by adhering to patterns of behavior in sexual matters
that lead to stable and self-supporting families.
Consistent with their beliefs, old-line conservatives have favored a
government that in domestic affairs mostly limits itself to suppressing
force and fraud and enforcing property rights, which are understood as
pre-political. To some extent they have also wanted government to
promote responsible personal behavior. Neo-conservatives have tended to
agree, although they have also wanted the government to facilitate
individual achievement in various ways and to provide a social safety
net. In addition, neo-conservatives have often tended to accept the
existing size of government as a given.
Modern Liberals, usually called simply "liberals", have emphasized
equality. They have construed freedom both positively, as freedom for
everyone to enjoy all goods capable of being redistributed by the
government, and negatively, as freedom from obligations owed to
particular persons or imposing unequal burdens. Such goals are
open-ended and can not be achieved without extensive government
involvement in all aspects of social life. Accordingly, liberals have
favored a government that continually remakes society in accordance with
evolving conceptions of social justice. In addition, they have
progressively expanded the range of the goods that they want made
equally available to all. In the past these have been mostly economic
goods, but recently less tangible goods such as social participation and
respect have been added.
Of course, nothing human occurs in a pure form, and there are further
variations of Liberalism. Traditionalist conservatives with affinities
to the non-Liberal right have wanted government support for religious
values. Traditionalist liberals have believed that some freedoms -- for
example, free speech and government by consent -- should override
equality when there is a conflict. Moderate conservatives have accepted
established liberal gains, such as labor, welfare and civil rights
legislation, and moderate liberals have accepted (at least for the
present) social institutions that in principal are inegalitarian but
seem difficult to do without, such as private property and the family.
Finally, the numerous people who want prosperity above all have been
conservatives if they believe in free markets or identify with the rich,
liberals if they believe in economic planning or identify with the poor,
and moderates if they simply want political and social stability so that
everyone can get on with business. However, such people have generally
not identified themselves as such because in America people who think
anything more important than equality or freedom have been reluctant to
say so openly.
What does it all Mean?
The habit of arranging all these political views on a spectrum from
right to left and other aspects of the way politics is discussed shows
that events have always been expected to move in a single direction.
The left has always been thought the party of progress and the right the
party of resistance to the manifest current of events, with the liberal
views of yesterday becoming the conservative views of today. Politics
in the West has followed a seemingly inevitable development from loyalty
through independence to equality.
This development has corresponded to changes in the understanding of
society: in the Middle Ages society was viewed as part of the natural
order that God created; the American and French Revolutions demanded
that society justify itself to each member; in modern times society has
been viewed as an absolute, and the idea of equality before God has been
brought down to earth to become the idea of social equality. These
developments have often been viewed from the standpoint of economic
materialism as an expression of the evolution of feudalism into
capitalism and then into socialism. From a religious standpoint they
can also be viewed as an expression of the rejection of the Christian
God, followed by the deification first of the individual and then of
humanity collectively.
>From the latter perspective, developments since the French Revolution
have demonstrated that it makes no sense to deify anything other than
God. The deification of each individual makes government -- especially
reforming government -- impractical and is soon abandoned. On the other
hand, the deification of humanity collectively leads to limitless
tyranny. If Man is divine there can be no appeal to anything higher, but
the actions of humanity, even deified humanity, are no more than the
actions of particular men. It follows that if human society is divine
then the men who hold legitimate social authority, especially those who
determine legitimacy, must themselves be divine. Accordingly, the
logical goal of Western political development has been a state with no
limitations on its power other than subordination to an ideological
elite claiming absolute status because it determines what is legitimate.
This goal has been embodied quite variously -- in America, through the
development of what is called constitutional law -- and it has been
realized most perfectly in communist regimes. As a result, for those
who opposed what appeared to be the plain direction of history
anticommunism has always been fundamental, and for those on the left
there has always seemed something necessary in communism and something
repellent -- even sick -- in anticommunism.
The recent rejection by communist countries of the goal they embodied
has destroyed this received understanding of history. As a result, it
has become hard for many people to imagine future political developments
because their faith that events will follow a rational line of
development has been lost. Without communism as the goal of history
there is no left, without the left there is no right, and without left
and right what had been understood as the historical drama of the
triumph of liberty and equality disappears.
Since in America communism has played a larger explicit role in the
outlook of the right than in that of the left, the immediate result of
the end of communism has been to weaken the right. The left can take no
comfort from that circumstance, however. Since the end of communism
means the end of the privileged position of the left in political
discussion, it also has the effect of making legitimate what lay behind
the anticommunism of the right. All the ideas that political and social
progress had outmoded, from economic freedom to loyalty and faith, are
increasingly being seriously considered by mainstream thinkers. To the
extent these ideas seem to promise a better way of life than
state-compelled egalitarianism, the end of communism may mean not the
end of the right but its victory.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 21 19:47:14 EST 1993
Article: 221 of alt.revolution.counter
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: What's with those egalitarians, anyway?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1993 00:04:33 GMT
In the following I attribute motives to people with whom I disagree, the
egalitarians. I present it as part of my continuing campaign to fill
cyberspace with reactionary tracts. (Has anyone noticed how
unbelievably capacious cyberspace is?)
Why Egalitarianism?
Fairness, defined as equal treatment of equals, is a formal requirement
of a complete and rational moral system. Treating as axiomatic the
equality in worth of all human beings is not. The latter view leads to
egalitarianism, defined as the claim that everyone should be treated
equally in all parts of social life.
As an initial matter, it is not clear why anyone would be an
egalitarian, since it is a view that seems inconsistent with other
aspects of morality. For example, egalitarianism suggests that moral
character does not matter because the virtuous and the vicious are to be
treated equally. In addition, equality sometimes conflicts with
substantive goods, and to treat it as the supreme good is to treat such
substantive goods as of little value.
A person might be inclined to egalitarianism who believed that judgments
of value are purely subjective. If substantive goods are not good
intrinsically, but are good only to the extent they are accepted as such
-- that is, if there are no goods but only preferences -- the only
objective moral standards are formal ones such as fairness. But it is
not clear why fairness matters much if there are no important
substantive standards; if substantive goods are not intrinsically
valuable and no one has any particular right to them, it is not obvious
why their equal distribution should be very important.
However, equality is likely to matter very much to one who does not
accept the objective validity of any substantive good. Such a person
will view any claim by others to superiority as unjustified because he
will not recognize the real superiority of any qualities they possess.
He will want to deal with such claims as mere acts of aggression
disguised by some self-serving ideology. However, since man is social,
in the absence of other authority he will feel as authoritative whatever
claims are generally accepted by other people. Since he is not
conscious of having intrinsic value himself and thus tends to view both
himself and others as valueless, he will feel that social acceptance of
claims by other people to superiority would cause him to have less than
no value -- a thing with no right to exist. Social acquiescence in such
claims will seem to him the ultimate evil, and equality -- the rejection
of such claims -- the highest good.
It's worth noting, however, that such a person may be drawn to claiming
superiority for himself because obtaining social acceptance of such a
claim is the only manner in which he can avoid being nothing. The
easiest way for him to reconcile the necessity and the wrongness of
claiming superiority (both from his standpoint as an egalitarian) is to
join an elite consisting of those who define and enforce egalitarianism,
or a group that claims to be such by right. Many of those associated
with (for example) radical political parties and elite American law
schools pursue such a strategy. In order to establish its members'
importance, such an elite will be tempted to claim infinite superiority
to the rest of humanity, since its members believe that men are
nullities and the proportion between something and nothing is infinite.
In the absence of authoritative substantive values, infinite superiority
can most clearly be asserted by the unlimited negation of others -- that
is, by slavery, torture and murder. It is for this reason that a
governments established in the name of abstract equality tends toward a
tyranny that exceeds brutality. The more idealistic the tyrants, the
more destructive the tyranny will be; idealism is dissatisfaction with
the limitations of existence, and in the absence of authoritative values
it readily turns into the simple desire to destroy whatever exists.
Another reason many people support egalitarianism is that they view it
as the key to human liberation and fulfillment. If goods are merely
preferences, the things that prevent fulfillment are technical
limitations, social restraints and lack of material resources, rather
than ignorance of the good or failure to pursue it. Modern science is
progressively increasing material resources and eliminating technical
barriers to the satisfaction of preferences. By making material
resources equally available to all and abolishing social restraints that
are unequally shared, egalitarianism would abolish exploitation -- the
unequal sharing of the burdens and benefits of social life -- and, with
the progress of natural science, free humanity from servitude. In
addition, egalitarianism would liberate each view of the good from the
hegemony of other views, and thus bring about the utmost richness and
diversity in the manifestations of the human spirit.
However, the difficulties raised by egalitarianism are not eliminated by
presenting it as a principle of liberation. The freedom brought about
by egalitarianism is likely to exist more in theory than in reality,
because liberation requires a ruling elite which is duty-bound to
control all aspects of society to prevent exploitation, and so to force
men to be free. Also, liberation, like equality, soon requires the
sacrifice of substantive goods. Moreover, the value of liberation
depends on the value of what is liberated. The diversity liberated
among the people at large by egalitarianism is a diversity without
significance because each view of the good is treated as a private
preference with no objective content and is allowed to have no effect
that is not purely private. In addition, if what is liberated is mere
arbitrary preferences, it is hard to see why the elite would not
liberate itself first and foremost by giving its own arbitrary
preferences social validity -- that is, by becoming tyrants. In the
absence of objective values liberation requires one to flout social
values as vigorously as possible to liberate himself from their
authority, which he cannot help but feel but which from the standpoint
of moral subjectivism is based on nothing and is thus unworthy of the
obedience of a free man. Accordingly, those in authority are likely to
be led by their own desire for liberation to engage in atrocious acts.
Meanwhile, before the elite consolidates its power and imposes
liberation on everyone, the principle of liberation will undermine
societies that permit its propagation, since in all existing societies
social benefits and burdens are shared unevenly.
Other reasons for the social power of egalitarianism include the support
it gives to the right of government as such to rule, and in particular
to the right of a particular social class to absolute power. The
support that egalitarianism gets on this account is magnified because
the social class in question comprises the journalists, lawyers and
educators who are the most articulate members of society and are
therefore particularly well positioned to influence public attitudes.
Of course, part of the appeal of egalitarianism is that there is always
something to be said for each application of egalitarianism. Every
particular inequality, like every actual state of affairs, reflects an
element of chance and therefore (considered morally) of arbitrariness.
Closely examined, it can invariably be seen as unjust. Moreover,
inequalities seemingly lacking any moral justification may involve
suffering on one side and gross excess on the other. One will resist
rectifying such an inequality only if he benefits from it and is unjust
himself, or if he believes that rectifying it would undermine or destroy
some substantive good or result in treating unequals as equal in some
objectionable way. One who has no faith in merit or objective
substantive goods will naturally attribute opposition to egalitarianism
to self-interest.
In addition, most people in America today find it difficult publicly to
differ with egalitarianism because to do so violates strong social
conventions that people do not claim superiority for themselves or for
what they value, and that appeals for assistance from people who have
some sort of disadvantage are not flatly rejected. These conventions
are based in part on ordinary courtesy and desire for mutual respect, in
part on the requirements for social peace in a democratic society, and
in part on the conviction that all men are equally insignificant. They
will disappear only when Americans either become indifferent to each
other or convinced that there exist knowable moral standards other than
egalitarianism itself.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
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From: jimkalb@dorsai.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: R and Counter-R
Message-ID: <1993Mar12.113130.5451@dorsai.com>
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy +1.718.729.5018
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1993 11:31:30 GMT
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The current discussions with Mr. Deane about counterrevolution and
reaction led me to rummage around among various letters to myself and
proposed position papers for the Clinton administration to see if I had
anything to the point. I came up with the following, which seems
somewhat relevant:
Traditions New and Old
The fundamental problem of modern politics is how circumstances that
favor the good life can be created now that traditional ethnic ties and
religious guidance have been rejected.
The liberal solution to this question is to allow people free choice
among lifestyles. However, that solution cannot work because people can
not invent a good way of life for themselves individually any more than
they can design their own bicycles. The goodness of a way of life can
not be known unless it is tried, and one who is left to choose without
preconceptions from among all possible ways of life will, unless he is
very lucky, die before he finds a satisfactory one. If people must
choose before they have adequate personal experience of what they are
choosing, they will choose ignorantly and their freedom will serve
chiefly to facilitate manipulation of their choices by others for their
own ends. Commercial advertisers will persuade people that consumer
goods will give them the good life and political adventurers will
persuade them that they are being cheated unless the government solves
all their problems.
A way of life should enable people to realize under varied conditions
the goods that are most satisfying in the long run, and it can best do
that if it reflects the experience of a community over generations. To
reflect such extensive experience the community as a whole must stick
with it generation after generation. Such stability will exist only if
the way of life includes an element of authority. A misfortune of
modern times is that the essence of the dominant tradition, liberalism,
is the denial of the relevance of authority to lifestyle choices.
Accordingly, in America today the good life paradoxically requires the
rejection of the moral tradition that is currently dominant --
liberalism -- in favor of the authority of moral tradition in general.
This paradox of conservative revolution can be resolved through
recognition that the authority of tradition can not be unconditional.
Tradition is necessary, but its value results from the nature of human
knowledge as social, cumulative and objective. A tradition that denies
the social nature, the present imperfection, or the essential
objectivity of knowledge, including moral knowledge, and thus makes it
impossible to attain the moral knowledge necessary to a good life, is
not worthy of respect. Liberalism, which denies all three because it
denies all authority higher than the current views of each individual,
must therefore be rejected.
One might object that the decline in the authority of tradition results
from developments that cannot be reversed, and that calling for the
restoration of that authority does not restore it or even determine
which tradition is to be authoritative. Such objections misconceive
what is needed. Tradition is something that is accepted rather than
chosen, and people will accept it unless they believe they have reason
not to. At present, the tendencies summed up in liberalism provide such
a reason. If respect for tradition is natural, the rejection of those
tendencies will clear the way for its rebirth. That rebirth will not be
the restoration of an earlier state of affairs. However, acceptance of
the necessity of basing our actions on standards and habits developed
over time will permit such standards and habits to develop and to play
their natural role in governing action.
So the cure for the ills brought by the rejection of tradition is
acceptance of tradition. To accept tradition is not to choose a
particular tradition, and the traditions that will arise if tradition is
accepted will not necessarily be the same as the particular traditions
that were rejected. There are grounds to hope, though, that they will
capture once again the things that made the old traditions valuable.
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From: jimkalb@dorsai.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Republicans and Prots (was Puritanism and the R.)
Message-ID: <1993Mar12.113555.5586@dorsai.com>
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy +1.718.729.5018
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deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>I'm sorry; I did not make myself clear. I was assuming, for the sake of
>argument - assuming that I was a reactionary who wanted to go back to
>some earlier period/ideal of Western Civilization - I was assuming that
>the question was what kind of "counter-revolution" I would prefer.
My intended question was what kind of society you want for the future.
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From: jimkalb@dorsai.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Republicans and Pagans (was Puritanism and the R.)
Message-ID: <1993Mar12.114024.5780@dorsai.com>
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy +1.718.729.5018
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I don't understand what the ENR means when it talks about "paganism".
Here are some questions and comments that no doubt demonstrate my need
for enlightenment:
deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>In fact, a direct relation with the Divine was the actual intent of many
>pagan cults and sects . . .
The Divine or a particular divinity? And which particular divinities do
the members of the ENR favor?
>If what you said were true, than you would have to argue that ancient
>Sparta, Athens, Rome, and the many Celtic and Germanic tribes which
>practiced certain forms of democracy or republicanism would somehow be
>"unpagan."
I suppose my point was that if by "republicanism" you mean a systematic
approach to government that locates ultimate authority in a particular
body of people acting through particular institutions and procedures,
then you're most likely to find it in a society in which people like
important things to form a system with clear and consistent rules and
some sort of overall justification. It seems to me that such people are
much more likely to be monotheists than pagans, especially if they live
after monotheism has been clearly articulated so that it has become one
of the intellectual possibilities.
As to the ancient societies you mention, their democracy or
republicanism seems to have been rather unsystematic or even incidental.
I don't know enough about their constitutional development to discuss
the matter properly. However, my impression is that in Sparta they did
have kings (two of them) and other unrepresentative institutions, and in
any event the Spartiates were quite a small part of the society as a
whole. In Athens the development of democracy seems to have been
associated with a decline in faith in the traditional gods among many
people (think of the Sophists) and incipient monotheism among
philosophers (think of Plato, Aristotle or the Stoics). The constitution
of the Roman Republic had very strong aristocratic or oligarchic
elements as well as some popular elements. Did the German or Celtic
tribes have much in the way of organized government? I thought what
they mostly had was particular war leaders and their retainers and
hangers on.
Is the kind of republicanism that actually existed in those societies
the sort of thing you had in mind? If so, how could it be recreated?
One problem with "paganism" as a goal of a radical revolutionary
movement is that such movements seem to require some sort of overall
theory of general applicability, and that kind of theory does seem
unpagan to me.
>I am not sure, in any case, that paganism necessarily means that there
>are lots of quite distinct ultimate realities. That would be going
>rather beyond the actual beliefs and practices of historical paganism.
I would think that if monotheism says that there is an _ens realissimum_
then if paganism is going to respond it has to say that there are
multiple _entia realissima_. I'm not sure historical paganism ever
seriously encountered monotheism and avoided becoming monotheistic
itself (for example, by treating Zeus as incomparably superior to all
other gods), and I would attribute that failure to an unwillingness to
accept multiple supreme beings. So I think it likely that you will have
to go beyond historical paganism to find a paganism that can deal with
monotheism.
>Mr. Walker remarks that "reductionism" is a key concept in ENR thought,
>which accounts for why the ENR sees an exclusivist Paganism as being
>essentially different from an exclusivist Christianity. Hopefully he
>will elaborate on this point further.
Anti-reductionism sounds like opposition to claims that all statements
about anything whatever can in principle be reduced to statements about
one supreme being (whether that supreme being is God or the quark).
Possibly Hinduism is reductionist in this sense, although I don't know
enough about it to say. Christianity avoids reductionism by saying that
God created the world as something that is not God and is real.
Is the idea of exclusivist paganism that one nation will worship Zeus,
and another will worship Baal, and everyone will agree that those are
two different gods that are both real? What then? Will the two gods
demonstrate their reality by doing battle with each other? What will
happen to the worshippers of Zeus in the land of Baal?
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From: jimkalb@dorsai.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Grand Counterrevolutionary Strategy (was Puritanism and the R.)
Message-ID: <1993Mar12.114310.5968@dorsai.com>
Organization: The Dorsai Embassy +1.718.729.5018
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deane@binah.cc.brandeis.edu (David Matthew Deane) writes:
>I would say (echoing Moeller) that the point is not to fight against the
>Revolution, but to win it. I too oppose what most people mean by
>Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, but I do not think it possible to
>simply try to negate an established value - rather, one must surpass, or
>subvert, it.
What's wrong with the "good cop, bad cop" approach? Let's say that
established value X after serious trial for a long time turns out to be
destructive, at least if it's taken as the measure of all things. One
likely result will be redoubled support for X by many of the most
articulate people. The thing to do is to have a group of crazies say
"crush X" and another group say "X is good, and when properly understood
X is ~X". The tension in the public mind created by the clash of
ideological supporters and opponents of X can then be relieved through
rejection of all extremists and acceptance of the compromise view.
>>The pre-1789 state of affairs cannot possibly be restored, but one or
>>another aspect of it may serve as a symbol to organize thought and
>>effort.
>Fine; but what distinguishes this from revolution?
After 200 years a counterrevolution is a revolution.
From panix!jk Sun Mar 21 22:24:24 EST 1993
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: What will it be?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar15.200613.9932@news.vanderbilt.edu>
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1993 02:35:52 GMT
rickertj@athena.cas.vanderbilt.edu (John Rickert) writes:
> Anyway, the gist of this all is that we face the harrowing prospect
>of being in a revolution and a civil war simultaneously. Or am I just
>getting too alarmed by what I see?
I don't think you're alone in this. It's always seemed to me that part
of what's behind the PC movement is a feeling of impending doom --
unless everyone toes the line something awful will happen.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 21 22:24:54 EST 1993
Article: 4369 of panix.questions
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From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: setting up auto news d/l , how?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1993 02:38:31 GMT
dannyb@panix.com (Daniel Burstein) writes:
>What would be necessary for me to set up a system at my end to call
>panix, d/l all the updates to the newsgroups I read, and store them
>locally?
My low-tech solution to this is to add a line to my rn KILL file that
saves each message to a temporary file and marks it read. That file can
then be compressed and downloaded. One advantage of this solution is
that I can use nn first to look through the newsgroups first and only
retain for downloading the articles I might possibly be interested in.
I have a procomm script and some defined UNIX commands that automate the
process so all I have to do is press a couple of keys. Also, I have an
rc file for my local editor (microemacs) that makes it a lot easier to
read articles and compose followups. If you want, I can send them to
you.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 21 22:25:08 EST 1993
Article: 5491 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: abortion + stuff
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar11.065057.9045@reed.edu> <1993Mar15.222838.4674@reed.edu>
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1993 02:42:03 GMT
sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>People support or oppose laws based on
>>in considering legal matters people should exclude any religious
>>component of that understanding. Why?
>
>Because the laws you support or oppose apply to me.
The same is true of the laws I support or oppose based on other aspects
of my understanding of the world that you might also disagree with
(ethics, economics or whatever). What is special about religion?
>>2. Nonetheless, man is a social animal and as such we have special
>>obligations to fellow members of the communities we belong to (for
>>example, family, nation or all humanity) that we do not have to beings
>>that are otherwise morally equivalent but are not members of our
>>community.
>
>By "community" in the above, you appear to mean "species."
I do think there is a community that includes all (or nearly all)
members of the human species. That would not be true if man were a
solitary rather than a social animal, so I don't think the two words
mean the same thing. It's imaginable that someday the coneheads of
Alpha Centauri will become members of the community that now includes
only _homo sapiens_.
>You also appear to not distinguish between what we should do (say, for
>our "brothers") and what we should be compelled to do, by force if
>necessary. We are talking about laws.
I recognize the distinction, but don't see its relevance to the
discussion. In a proper case our obligations to other members of the
communities to which we belong can justly be enforced by law. I am
legally required to support the members of my immediate family and to
pay taxes for the common good of my national community. I am also
legally forbidden to kill a fellow human being, except in exceptional
circumstances. All that seems OK to me.
>> It can be wrong to destroy things that don't have rights. For
>>example, neither _The Night Watch_ nor the population of whooping cranes
>>has rights, but it would be wrong of me to destroy them even if I owned
>>both.
>[Y]ou cannot really own a population of whooping cranes.
Why couldn't the legal system provide that if you own the nesting place
you own the bird?
>> The place that a thing holds in the hierarchy of being should be
>>determined by reference to what that thing is when in its
>>fully-developed and normal state . . .
>(You could apply it to an entire species (say, whooping cranes) and
>conclude that while it may be OK to kill individual cranes (evolution
>does not act on individuals) it is wrong to kill an entire species
>because it's ontological status is still developing.)
I think that would extend the principle I proposed too far. It is
difficult to think (e.g.) of the modern horse as the fully-developed and
normal state of Eohippus.
>Temporariness has something to do with it.
Agreed. One might say that in order for state S to be the normal state
of thing T it is necessary that T's attaining S is forseeable and either
T has already been in S or T will attain S in the normal course of
events and a reasonably determinate amount of time. I suppose you could
also demand that state S be reasonably stable and not normally be
followed by a more highly developed state.
>A drunken man is still a person who makes decisions about his own life,
>perhaps with refence to his mood or idea of the future, and is in a
>process of having experiences.
Remember the poem:
"Not drunk is he who from the floor
Can rise alone and still drink more,
But drunk is he who prostrate lies
Without the power to drink or rise."
If he's drunk enough he's not making decisions or having experiences.
>An 8-month fetus may be dimly having some experiences, but a zygote does
>not. Neither has an identity.
The last statement seems purely conclusory.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Mon Mar 22 05:58:46 EST 1993
Article: 5492 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar1.081938.799@news.wesleyan.edu> <1993Mar17.142918.7624@zip.eecs.umich.edu>
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1993 03:27:21 GMT
carnes@quip.eecs.umich.edu (Richard Carnes) writes:
>A large proportion of pro-lifers hold the view that abortion is
>permissible in cases of rape (or incest, which is usually a form of
>rape). The rape exception, however, is difficult to understand except
>on the assumption that those who allow the exception believe that a
>woman should somehow, if possible, pay a price for having engaged in
>sex: the rape victim has already suffered enough and thus is permitted
>to have an abortion and forgo pregnancy. If one's opposition to
>abortion is based wholly on the belief that abortion is the murder of a
>child (as many people would claim), then it is hard to see how the
>expected suffering of a mother who would otherwise carry a rapist's
>child to term could justify the deliberate killing of the "child".
Someone who would permit abortion in the case of rape probably shouldn't
say that abortion is literally murder. Nonetheless, a pro-lifer who
accepts the rape exception but thinks abortion ought to be illegal
otherwise need not view pregnancy as punishment for sex. For example,
someone might believe both that the unborn child is sufficiently
valuable to be worthy of legal protection and that a person shouldn't be
legally compelled to carry a burdensome responsibility (like a baby)
unless she either consented to the responsibility or the situation that
gave rise to the responsibility was the somewhat forseeable result of
her voluntary act.
I don't see anything punitive about that view. An analogy might be to
one's responsibility to try to save a drowning man. If I had nothing to
do with the man falling into the water, then under English and American
common law I have no legal obligation to pull him out even if I could
easily do so. I would have such an obligation, though, if I took him
for a ride in my boat and he fell in. I would be held legally
responsible for the somewhat forseeable results of my conduct (giving
the man a boat ride) even though nobody thinks there was anything wrong
with what I did.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Mar 23 14:32:23 EST 1993
Article: 237 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: What Will it Be?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1993 14:42:51 GMT
Lines: 18
monaghan@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (N.O. Monaghan) writes:
>It is possible that now that communism, in the Soviet form that posed a
>threat to the best, is now, although not dead, but fighting a rearguard
>action, we will be more clearly be able to see the revolutionary forces
>within Western societies, who for many years have been attacking on a
>front different in form from that of the communists.
One thought that bothers me on occasion is that what we have known as
communism may have failed because it was utopian, in the sense that
society had not yet reached the point at which the Bolsheviks were
merely making explicit developments that had already taken place. If
the communists were indeed only "democrats in a hurry" their experience
may show only that that the slower route followed by leftists in the
West yields more enduring results.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Mar 23 14:32:30 EST 1993
Article: 5553 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: the existence of souls
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <00969E2C.FFA769EC@pomona.claremont.edu>
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1993 14:45:15 GMT
Lines: 16
In article <1993Mar20.121838.5058@cnsvax.uwec.edu>, nyeda@cnsvax.uwec.edu (David Nye) writes:
>A better reason not to believe in the existence of an immaterial soul is
>that it is unnecessarily complicated. Consciousness, self and soul all
>seem to me to be adequately explained as epiphenomena of the physical
>activity of the brain, following known physical laws.
One problem with this view is that it makes it hard to understand how we
can talk about consciousness. If consciousness is a pure epiphenomenon
that causes nothing to happen, then all speech acts in which the word
"consciousness" appears can be fully accounted for without reference to
consciousness. But if that's so, it's hard to see how any of them can
be statements about consciousness.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Tue Mar 23 14:32:31 EST 1993
Article: 5554 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: abortion + stuff
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar15.222838.4674@reed.edu> <1993Mar23.023045.1570@reed.edu>
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1993 14:49:10 GMT
Lines: 58
sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>If the majority supported a law allowing heretics to be burned alive,
>would the law be ethical?
I think it's OK for people's views on politics, economics, and
historical evolution to affect their political choices. Nonetheless, I
would not consider ethical an administrative decree requiring the local
office of the organs of state security to meet a large monthly quota for
the arrest and liquidation of anti-socialist wrecking elements.
I feel the same way about the law you suppose.
>Do you think separation of Church & State is a good idea?
Sure. I also think separation of Scholarship & State and Art & State is
a good idea. Politics is a different pursuit than the others, with
different principles and purposes, and if it becomes confused with other
pursuits both are corrupted. On the other hand, it's silly to think
that politics and those other things are unrelated when it's the same
world they all deal with.
>It is wrong to impose religious beliefs on people, therefore, religious
>beliefs cannot justify laws.
Why is it worse to impose religious beliefs than aesthetic beliefs?
(Zoning laws and a lot of other things the government does lend the
force of law to aesthetic choices.)
>What are some examples of things you ought to do, but which you should
>not be forced to do?
I ought to be generous. I ought to be loyal to my friends. When
discussing something I ought to be honest and I ought to set forth my
views as clearly and accurately as I can. (In certain cases I can be
forced to do some of these things. For example, if I am an expert
witness who is asked to discuss something as a witness in a judicial
proceding I can be prosecuted for perjury if I lie.)
>What is the principle by which you distinguish between those obligations
>which can be backed up by force and those which cannot?
The distinction seems mostly practical to me. Law is a blunt instrument
created and enforced by human beings. Its goals are never perfect, it
doesn't attain whatever goals it has perfectly, and it always has costs,
some of which are unexpected. One feature that can cause costs is that
it centralizes decisionmaking, which can be a waste since everyone has
some decisionmaking capacity that can be developed through exercise.
>Unless the embryo is drunk, it is probably in the normal, fully
>developed state for an embryo when it is aborted.
And someone who's blind drunk on the floor is in the normal state for
someone who's blind drunk on the floor. Why would it be wrong to kill
him if he's as incapable of thought and sensation as a geranium?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Wed Mar 24 05:40:21 EST 1993
Article: 5559 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar17.142918.7624@zip.eecs.umich.edu> <1omp27$12a@horus.ap.mchp.sni.de>
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1993 21:02:40 GMT
Lines: 40
frank@D012S658.uucp (Frank O'Dwyer) writes:
>You would not, however, be held legally responsible to the extent that
>you could forcibly required to donate blood or organs to the man, even
>if this was necessary to save his life.
Perfectly true. I expect that this legal rule would be different if
human biology were different. If it were common for people to put other
people in situations in which a blood donation from the actor was the
only way to save the life of the person acted upon, and each of us owed
his life to the fact that in the past an actor had done so, then I would
expect the law to provide that an actor who refused to make the donation
could be forced to do so.
>Secondly, while I personally believe that a z/e/f has moral worth, the
>equivalence you find between a z/e/f and an adult is far from
>universallly found.
I rather doubt that a newly fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of
(for example) me. All a person needs to be a pro-lifer to believe that
the zygote, embryo or foetus has moral worth, that a good justification
is needed for destroying it, and that such a justification is not
present in most pregnancies. He doesn't need to believe that the z., e.
or f. is the moral equal of the mother.
>Thirdly, the comparison of pregnancy to pulling a drowning man out of
>water is grossly inaccurate.
I agree. The comparison was not intended to elucidate the nature of
pregnancy generally, but only to show that (i) responsibility for
preserving something valuable that is at risk can follow from voluntary
involvement in the circumstances that resulted in the situation, and
(ii) such responsibility implies nothing as to the goodness or badness
of the conduct constituting that involvement. I was responding to a
previous poster who suggested that right-to-lifers who recognize an
exception for rape must be thinking of pregnancy as a punishment for
sex.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Wed Mar 24 13:56:59 EST 1993
Article: 5583 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: the existence of souls
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <00969E2C.FFA769EC@pomona.claremont.edu> <00969F50.9E0F1FAC@pomona.claremont.edu>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1993 17:08:42 GMT
Lines: 34
jlamport@pomona.claremont.edu writes:
>In article , jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>
>>If consciousness is a pure epiphenomenon
>>that causes nothing to happen, then all speech acts in which the word
>>"consciousness" appears can be fully accounted for without reference to
>>consciousness. But if that's so, it's hard to see how any of them can
>>be statements about consciousness.
>
>But you're assuming that language is _referential_, which is certainly
>an open question at the moment.
Maybe it would help if I restated my problem:
The original poster said consciousness is an epiphenomenon, which
appeared to mean (i) it results from brain processes, (ii) it is not the
same as brain processes, and (iii) it has no causal efficacy -- all the
apparent consequences of consciousness are really consequences of brain
processes. A problem I have with that view is that it seems to imply
that consciousness has no causal connection with statements about
consciousness.
nyeda@cnsvax.uwec.edu (David Nye) writes:
>Consciousness is the activity of the reticular activating system and
>associated areas in the limbic system and thalamus. When this system
>fails, we become unconscious.
Here you identify consciousness with a brain process. When you used the
word "epiphenomenon" I understood you to reject this view.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Thu Mar 25 05:55:29 EST 1993
Article: 5592 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: abortion + stuff
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar23.023045.1570@reed.edu> <1993Mar24.163725.27278@reed.edu>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1993 01:40:47 GMT
Lines: 46
sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>>>What are some examples of things you ought to do, but which you should
>>>not be forced to do?
>
>>I ought to be generous.
>
>But you ought not be forced to be generous, therefore, you oppose all
>welfare programs. Me too. (What is this, the Libertarian group?)
That's not what I meant. I have nothing against welfare programs as
such, although in the long run many of them no doubt make life worse for
people in general. My point was that no set of government programs will
do everything that could be done to promote the public good and it is a
mistake for government even to try to do so. So one of the things I
should do is voluntarily devote time, effort and money in support of
public goods that would otherwise not be realized.
>What is the Platonic form of law--of rules justly backed by *force*? I
>think the proper function of law is quite different from that of
>conscience.
Law consists of rules made in accordance with reason and promulgated by
the government for the public good, and enforced by sanctions. Since
the public good includes a public made up of good people, there can be
no sharp distinction between law and morality.
On the other hand, the limits on what can be achieved by force are
reached very soon in moral matters. So I agree that conscience covers
far more ground than law can. Most of morality has to do with the
overall orientation of a person's life, and any parent will tell you
that it's extremely difficult to determine the overall orientation of
another person's life even in the most favorable circumstances. (That
is, even if you live with the other person and the other person loves
you and you're stronger, smarter and more experienced than he is.)
>"Drunk" is a property of the object Man. "Fetus" is not a property of
>the object Fetus; it is what the object is.
The foetal stage is a stage in the life of a human being.
BTW, here you seem to attribute rights to the object Man as such without
regard to the properties of that object. Is that speciesism?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Thu Mar 25 16:29:07 EST 1993
Article: 5603 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Transporters and death = NO SOUL
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar20.121838.5058@cnsvax.uwec.edu> <1993Mar24.050612.390@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1993 12:37:28 GMT
Lines: 19
minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>In article nyikos@math.scarolina.edu (Peter Nyikos) writes:
>
>>For in a very meaningful, yea, the most meaningful sense,
>>I *am* the same person I was at the age of three, in spite of the
>>radical changes that have taken place in my body, my knowledge about
>>the world, etc.
>
>Hmm. I can't find *any* meaningful sense for this, so I suppose that
>you're right by default.
"I can remember experiences I had when I was three years old." Have I
just said something meaningless or misleading? Does the word "I" in
what I said refer to multiple persons? Are the experiences I remember
experiences someone else had?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Thu Mar 25 16:29:08 EST 1993
Article: 5609 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar17.142918.7624@zip.eecs.umich.edu> <1993Mar24.210134.24727@zip.eecs.umich.edu>
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1993 12:41:09 GMT
Lines: 41
carnes@quip.eecs.umich.edu (Richard Carnes) writes:
>[T]here are, I suspect, many who feel that a woman "owes" childbearing
>for having had consensual sex and gotten pregnant, apart from any rights
>the fetus may have.
That's not the same as feeling that that pregnancy is punishment for
consensual sex. Someone might think that sex is a good thing as part of
a system of things that includes love, marriage and having babies. Such
a person might feel that it's bad to engage in sexual intercourse
without accepting pregnancy as a natural consequence, and so view having
an abortion as (among other things) a violation of sexual morality, but
not feel that sex is bad.
>Note that one's view of the nature of the abortion issue differs
>depending on whether one allows any exception for rape. If you allow
>the exception, you conceive of the moral question as a matter of finding
>the right balance between the conflicting claims of the interests and
>rights (if any) of the fetus and the interests, rights, and
>responsibilities of the mother; the question is a matter of *weighing*
>competing choices against each other.
This need not be so. There could be a libertarian right-to-lifer who
believes (1) a z/e/f is morally equivalent to you or me and (2) no-one
can justly be compelled to do something for anyone else unless he has a
duty to do so resulting from his own voluntary act. If such a person
classified abortion as a refusal to carry the z/e/f rather than an act
of destroying the z/e/f, he would allow an exception for rape without
engaging in the balancing of interests.
>The ontology of a world composed of discrete, self-identical building
>blocks is inadequate not only to the phenomenon of pregnancy, as another
>poster has pointed out, but also to biological phenomena in general and
>(probably) to the physical world as revealed by quantum physics.
My impression is that Aristotle was both an ontologist and a biologist.
Is there anybody who knows something about philosophy who can advise us
whether he said anything relevant to these issues?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Fri Mar 26 13:19:13 EST 1993
Article: 5636 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: abortion + stuff
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar24.163725.27278@reed.edu> <1993Mar25.210746.15454@reed.edu>
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1993 12:59:36 GMT
Lines: 38
sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>What I meant originally by the phrase "which you should not be forced to
>do" was "which it is *unethical* to force you to do," as opposed to
>*impractical*
It would be unethical to force me to do something when the use of force
is not a reasonable part of a system of things (law, custom and so on)
that seems clearly beneficial. Practicality has an obvious bearing on
whether the use of force is reasonable or a system of things beneficial.
>>>What is the Platonic form of law--of rules justly backed by *force*?
>>Law consists of rules made in accordance with reason and promulgated by
>>the government for the public good, and enforced by sanctions.
>When you have an immoral law (say, heretics shall be burned), you have a
>sharp distinction between law and morality.
You're asking what to say about laws established by otherwise legitimate
authority that do not conform to what you call the Platonic form of law.
I suppose I'm inclined to say that they're not really laws.
>But [the foetal stage] is not a stage in the life of a person.
I passed through the foetal stage and I'm a person.
>The drunken stage is a stage in the life of a sentient being; cell
>division at one week is not.
_Ipse dixit_.
>Vulcans have equal rights.
Sounds OK to me.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sat Mar 27 10:00:40 EST 1993
Article: 242 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: So what's the plan?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1993 08:45:36 GMT
Lines: 67
Mr. Monaghan's call for a CR slogan, a recent exchange with Mr. Deane as
to the preferred form of future society, and occasional questions from
bystanders as to what counterrevolutionaries want has led me to make a
list of a few developments in public life that I would like to see in
the next few years.
Reacs probably prepare fewer such lists than other people. Unlike
liberals we don't believe that it would be a good thing to continue
existing lines of development, and unlike left-wing rads we don't expect
that a revolutionary party armed with guns and theory is going to be
able to put things right. So concrete proposals (other than opposition
to other people's proposals) aren't our long suit. Another CR might
come up with a very different list, but here's mine:
1. Decentralization in education: more school board autonomy, more
authority for principals, more reliance on local financing even if it
means less total funding, more private and church-related schools, more
homeschooling. The general trend is toward centralization, but many
parents are rebelling. I prefer decentralization because in a
decentralized system the people doing the work and the people affected
by how things turn out are the people making the decisions. It often
follows that the decisions are better in themselves because they better
reflect the real situation and they are carried out better because the
people carrying them out understand them and agree with them. In
addition, the alternative to decentralization is an educational system
designed and run by an elite of experts, and in America in 1993 I don't
think an elite exists that is capable of doing the job better than
parents and local communities can do it.
2. Decentralization in communications and cultural life. This might
happen through continued multiplication of TV channels and weakening of
the TV networks (I'm assuming TV can't be abolished altogether), an end
to Federal support for the arts and humanities, continued growth of
things like Usenet, and the self-destruction of the great universities
and other elite cultural institutions.
3. A livelier realization in education and cultural affairs that some
cultural productions are better than others and some so far outclass
others that to be ignorant of them is to that extent to have a defective
education.
4. Abandonment of at least some egalitarian measures. Possible
candidates for elimination include affirmative action, application of
anti-discrimination laws to small business and not-for-profit
institutions, and all laws against sex discrimination. Actually, I
would rather do away with all civil rights laws, but since it's better
to light one candle than to curse the darkness I would accept half
measures.
5. Reduction and reform in transfer payment programs: elimination of
farm subsidies, taxation of all cash transfer payments, deferral of
social security retirement age, quid pro quo for welfare. Again, I am
proposing only half measures. My objection to the welfare state is that
the institutions that people take seriously are the institutions that in
the end they rely on, and I would rather those institutions were
something other than the government.
6. A willingness to discuss lifestyle issues such as the relationship
between the sexes from the standpoint of what's needed for a tolerable
life for people in general rather than from the standpoint of the
autonomous individual at a single point in time.
My list is just a fragment, of course, but it's a start. Any
suggestions or comments?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sat Mar 27 10:00:48 EST 1993
Article: 5647 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: abortion + stuff
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar25.210746.15454@reed.edu> <1993Mar26.211436.27555@reed.edu>
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1993 08:36:58 GMT
Lines: 11
In <1993Mar26.211436.27555@reed.edu> sharvy@reed.edu (V Headshape) writes:
>When I talk about the
>life of a person, I am talking about an "inner" life, a hisory &
>becoming of thoughts, experiences, emotions, etc.
But you spoke of being blind drunk on the floor as a stage in the life
of a person.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sat Mar 27 16:16:16 EST 1993
Article: 5657 of talk.philosophy.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: ABORTION: WHEN Does Human Life BEGIN?
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References: <1993Mar17.142918.7624@zip.eecs.umich.edu> <1993Mar27.112011.9581@news.uiowa.edu>
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1993 15:34:05 GMT
Lines: 23
cdminter@icaen.uiowa.edu (Corey D Minter) writes:
>jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>
>>I would have such an obligation [to pull someone out] if I took him
>>for a ride in my boat and he fell in.
>
>Are you kidding? It comes down to negligence and responsibility, not
>just because it is your boat. The reason you could be held responsible
>for your boat is only if somehow you did something that was negligence.
I believe what I wrote is correct, although I I did not research the
point and can't cite anything. I hope to have the opportunity of
looking it up in the next few days.
Do you seriously believe it would be wrong to charge the operator of a
boat with a duty of care for his passengers that would require him to
pull them out if they fell in the water? He created and is in control
of a situation that is known to involve certain risks. Why not require
him to act if the risk is realized?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sat Mar 27 18:34:47 EST 1993
Article: 244 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Counterrevolutionary Praxis
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Sat, 27 Mar 1993 21:15:48 GMT
Lines: 38
After posting screen after screen of theorizing and a few lines about
developments in public affairs that I'd like to see, I might as well
toss out some ideas about what CRs can do individually.
1. The first thing is to get our own lives in order. (Very likely
other CRs are far ahead of me on this point.) A lot of our complaints
about the world are cultural complaints, which amount to complaints
about how other people live their lives. If we claim that people order
their lives too much by reference to their own material comfort and
social advancement, and that their lives would be better if ordered by
reference to better things, it's in our power to demonstrate the truth
of the claim. Even if the demonstration is ignored, a better life will
be ours.
2. If we get our lives in order maybe we'll cheer up. There's a lot of
moaning, groaning and grousing in conservative publications. I moan,
groan and grouse too on occasion, but if we've got a better
understanding of the most important things why shouldn't we be happier?
3. The CR movement isn't much as movements go. In some ways that's OK.
What CRs oppose are things like irreligion, and radical egalitarianism
and individualism, that aren't human nature and can't last, so maybe
even sporadic and disorganized opposition contributes to hastening their
end. In addition, it's easier to have a movement based on falsity than
one based on truth because falsity is distinct from the rest of the
world and so gives its adherents something of their very own to fight
for. On the other hand, when the time comes it will be important just
how individualism and egalitarianism are abandoned. There are very
major problems today, and the least we can do is try to be clear just
what the problems are in the hope that we can contribute to improving
matters or at least averting disaster. To do that requires study,
thought and discussion, and that's where this newsgroup can make a
contribution.
Comments? Other views?
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Sun Mar 28 15:10:53 EST 1993
Article: 245 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Back to the _Untergang des Abendlandes_
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1993 18:36:21 GMT
Lines: 71
Enough of the pep talks and free advice I've been giving lately! I've
decided that grandiose prophecies of doom are more my style. Here's
another:
A free and democratic state that is also multicultural is an ideal that
will be impossible to realize. In a free and democratic state the
people willingly cooperate for public goals. Such cooperation requires
a feeling of reciprocal obligation and substantial agreement on
appropriate means and ends. That kind of like-mindedness requires a
shared way of life with respect to matters affected by public affairs.
Accordingly, such a state requires far more cultural cohesion than a
despotism.
History confirms this view. In antiquity, governments with
constitutionally limited and distributed powers existed only in states
that were small and ethnically and religiously cohesive. Extensive
multi-ethnic states were despotisms. In the middle ages and the early
modern period, the states of Christendom were constitutional and were
part of a single religiously-unified civilization. In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, with the decline of the dream of religious
unity, royal absolutism arose. In the 19th century constitutional rule
was founded on nationalism and a bourgeoise way of life based on
moneymaking.
Throughout, constitutional government was found only in states where the
politically significant classes were held together by a common way of
life. It is thus no accident that in America the decline of free and
democratic government through representative institutions has gone hand
in hand with egalitarian movements that have destroyed the authority of
the traditional American way of life.
In the 20th century the modern liberal state has arisen, based in theory
on the promise of equal rights, prosperity and security, in which
ethnicity and religion are thought to be politically irrelevant. Such
states have not been despotic, and there has been a common way of life
on which they have been based -- that of the consumer society, in which
the alternation of work and consumption constitutes the whole value of
life, and the highest ideal is to secure satisfying work and consumption
for everyone. Anything thought to transcend in value the mundane
alternation of work and consumption is a threat to that way of life, and
therefore to the liberal state. The primary function in the liberal
state of what are called openness and multiculturalism is to avert that
threat by destroying the importance of the distinctions of value
embodied in the ethnic and religious traditions that once provided a
concrete way to live not based purely on egalitarian hedonism, and
therefore an avenue to the transcendent.
Accordingly, openness and multiculturalism are not unrestricted. One
who accepts modern liberalism can not be open to the possibility that
loyalty or devotion are virtues, or that some tastes and ways of life
are better than others. Such relativism leads to obvious difficulties
since liberalism itself demands loyalty from its adherents and claims to
be better than other approaches to life. These difficulties are dealt
with by dogmatism or other forms of the refusal to think -- liberals
characteristically refuse to think not only about the transcendent, but
even about the most obvious features of life, such as human inequality
and human evil.
A way of life that ignores as much as liberalism does may last for a
while if times are prosperous, but prosperity does not last forever. If
times turn bad or the contradictions of liberalism become unbearable, it
will be rejected. What replaces it will be determined by the general
level of the culture to which liberalism has given rise. My fear is
that the longer liberalism has managed to maintain itself the lower that
level will be.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
From panix!jk Mon Mar 29 07:53:27 EST 1993
Article: 249 of alt.revolution.counter
Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter
Path: panix!jk
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Re: Counterrevolutionary practice
Message-ID:
Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences
References:
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1993 12:52:29 GMT
Lines: 34
drw@euler.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley) writes:
>I've been reading a bit about the "Westernizers" vs. "Slavophiles"
>debate going on in Russia these days, and it seems like the Slavophiles
>are quite counterrevolutionary, in the sense it is used in this
>newsgroup. Russia may be a place where CR theory can be put into
>practice.
Possibly. Does anyone know any good sources for finding out what
intelligent Westernizers and intelligent Slavophiles are saying these
days? I seem to recall that Solzhenitsyn is said to have some
Slavophile sympathies. Has he been heard from lately?
One problem with the situation in Russia is that when things are chaotic
simpleminded and ruthless people are at an advantage. That's one reason
CRs really don't like revolution even though it's necessary on occasion,
like radical brain surgery. A possible line of development in Russia
and elsewhere is: rule by the left => personal and social chaos =>
brutality => brutal reaction against chaos and the left. As they say in
Eastern Europe, it's easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to
reverse the procedure.
>Indeed, it seems that from generation to generation, [sexual]
>tendencies and acts vary little. What changes, rather, is around them
>the breadth of the zone of silence and the depth of the layers of
>lies. -- Marguerite Yourcenar, 1963
The French are fond of well-turned paradoxes that affront the
established order from a position of cool superiority. It's the way
they assert themselves. But why anyone should repeat this in 1993 as if
it were true escapes me.
--
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
"Rem tene; verba sequentur." (Cato)
Do let me know if you have comments of any kind.
Back to my archive of posts.