Well, he does do a good job explaining the classics and their relevance to “modernity.”

But then I spent the winter, spring and summer — while moving, being unemployed and getting a new job — reacquainting myself with anthropology, including some postmodern thought, brief familiarity with folks like Foucault, and Richard Rorty’s ironism (I still like his peculiarly American, pragmatic version of continental postmodernism), and … well let’s just say, once you start seeing “Western Culture” as just one more possibility within the realm of human existence, just one version of humanity’s attempt to negotiate existence together… you start to think, “huh, a lot of this Western Philosophy, the discourse of the Western world trying to make sense of itself, is pretty parochial. It’s pretty self-referential and kinda irrelevant.”

This week, to take a break between getting CompTIA A+ certified, and then starting to pretend I’m preparing for a graduate education, I decided it might be fun to listen to Rick Roderick’s “Self Under Siege – Philosophy in the 20th Century” audio lecture (also on the previous link), in which he’ll cover Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, and presumably (hopefully) some others like DeLeuze and Baudrillard.

To be fair to him, I haven’t even finished the first lecture yet, but my goodness. I keep finding myself annoyed with him and finding his take, his views, irrelevant. Granted he’s speaking in the early 1990s, and the problems in America, while much the same today, were pretty different, and interpreted pretty differently.

But, so far, it seems he’s clearly coming from a place where he wants to defend the traditions of his discipline. He seems caught in the trap of concerning himself with peculiarly parochial Western questions regarding religion and “the self.” He even name-checks Rorty in the first lecture, as having written a paper with the attitude of, “Those old questions of philosophy haven’t been answered in 2,500 years, so who cares?” And he feels really upset by this.

I happen to agree with Rorty. Maybe the old questions of Western philosophy are just the wrong questions to be asking. Maybe they’re just concerned with ancient cosmologies of the world that aren’t really important anymore. Except I must remind myself, he was a Texan in the late 20th century, and even today, these questions are still so important to so many people because they’re brought up conventionally. These traditions are still very much alive in society, and of course the foundations of contemporary statehood and economics… and that, I think, is part of the problems.

Fundamentally, it seems Roderick wants to address the crisis of meaning to the Self in the modern world. He is suggesting in the start that, once upon a time, folks had “worldviews” (I would say cultural cosmologies) in which they could place themselves and then drive meaning. He is explaining how the classic texts of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche drew suspicion on these worldviews, and how nowadays people find themselves adrift.

I look forward to hearing the rest of his narrative and views, but I can say right now, I think that’s false. I think people are perfectly capable, and always have been, of creating their own meaning. It’s difficult, at first — I think Western culture has certainly had a tradition of “mother/father/authority figure” as the source of one’s cosmology and place in the world, and is still struggling to adjust out of that.

But I don’t think it’s a problem. I think it’s an advancement. That old stuff doesn’t need to matter anymore. We can deal with each other and create our own meanings. We all are born needing some help, some welcoming into this world and maturing, but we don’t need to be told who we are and what it means to be alive, other than, “Welcome! Here we are, let’s make the best of it!”

(This may also be part of the real major crisis of the contemporary world: the actual globalization going on is empowering non-Western cultures, and the Western world feels afraid of finding its traditions as irrelevant as it once saw those of other peoples.)

As a final note, what really bugs me about Roderick is this constant facade of folksiness, which isn’t really a facade, but is irritating because his dialog is constantly with old philosophers, and modern philosophers, and hypotheticals in everyone’s head. A number of examples he puts forward, and ideas about living in the world, seem very much a projection, and not about the real lived experience of everyday people, hence why the “folksiness” bugs me, because it implies he’s connected to everyday people. But again, he lived in Texas, so mayhap he was.

It’s just, I crave empiricism. “Stop being in your cave looking at shadows and come out here in the world with us.” Rex on Savage Minds recently said of anthropology, “It is surely one of the most unique things about our discipline that we are committed to the idea that being human with other humans is a far more sophisticated way of learning about them than any other sort of method that works from the outside in.” Indeed. In fact, of all disciplines, philosophy seems to me to peculiarly attempt to work “from the outside out.” (Or from the inside in?) Philosophers, go be human with other humans, and write about that. Become anthropologists. We could use your brains.

Mind you, it’s good to study that old stuff, for historical reasons, to inform understanding of how the world got to be the way it is. But it’s also time to step off the “train of history” and start making our world on our own.

Also, clearly the ethics of things like contemporary anarchism have roots in some philosophical musings on how to live and treat other people, and I think that’s a good thing, and am being slightly hyperbolic in this post.

You Just Don’t Get It

John Stuart Mill says this

…the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this mode; nor is it in the nature of human intellectual to become wise in any other manner. (On Liberty)

“Oh, that’s no fun,” I thought.

Isn’t it more fun to go with our first inclination? And stick to it. Especially when people disagree. When people don’t like our ideas, I have a suggestion. Shout:

You just don’t get it!

And then shout at them until they do…get it.

[...]

I was watching the Sky coverage of Israeli boarding of the flotilla. An interview of protesters in the street in London and some guy grabbed the camera to announce, “Sky has real problems and if you are watching this, you are probably a wanker.” There was something about the finality with which he said it that struck me. He knew that Sky viewers “just didn’t get it.”

[...]

American politics descended into “you just don’t get it” some time ago. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone rub their chin and say, “hmm, I hadn’t thought of that. That’s interesting.” God knows, I never say it. I’m too busy shouting, “You just don’t get it.”

There are two possibilities here, anthropologically speaking.

First, we have lost our Millian gift for a thoughtful examination of the issues. We are in love with the theater of being totally right all the time. We are addicted to emotional outrage. We don’t care there are deeper issues. When it comes to politics, we are all now divas. Give us the big gesture. Give us the sweeping condemnation. Or leave us out of it. Politics might once have been a game for sober souls. Now its for emotional show offs.

Second, the cultural world has widened. If we were to do a geographic mapping of the ideological space, we would discover that it has expanded. So much so that it is now vastly larger than it was in the Mill’s England. In this case, the outrage is entirely justified. We live in a larger world, where the differences really are more different. When the world of politics expanded, its tensility would not hold. Ground opened up. The consensus tore.

Probably both are true. And if they are both true, what then? How do we put Humpty Dumpty back together again?

Something akin to this has been on my mind for some time. Particularly the sort of paradox involved in feeling this way about the world: being exasperated that all of the people caught up in “you just don’t get it” absolutist theatricality… they just don’t get it.

Perhaps it’s the oldest problem of humanity: how do you transfer a willingness to listen to others to those who are unwilling to listen? Brings to mind the “empathy gun” of the Hitchhiker’s movie…

DWB was operating three medical centers in Haiti, providing some of the only accessible care in Port-au-Prince for poor pregnant women, new mothers, and infant children. All three of the medical centers were destroyed in the earthquake, yet DWB “has already treated more than 1,000 people on the ground in Haiti following Tuesday’s earthquake, but the needs are huge. An inflatable hospital with operating theatres is expected to arrive in the next 24 hours.” They really need support.

Also, from an interview with David Graeber:

I think though the world is starting to call our bluff — the radical academics, that is. More and more one has to choose between working for NGOs, or government, or marketing, or for departments that are run like corporations and openly trying to bust their unions — or, alternately, actually connecting in some way with real social movements that do not want us to simply impose ourselves as their vanguard. I think in a way that’s a good thing. Most of those people posing as wild postmodern radicals in the ’80s and ’90s were actually classic liberals: that is, interested in increasing personal freedoms and minority rights without actually challenging institutions like the state or capitalism. That’s fine. Who am I to tell people what they should think? But it does annoy me when people like that claim to be the super-radicals. Increasingly such people are starting to admit that, well, yes, actually, they are pretty much liberals. For me that’s refreshing. It’s like, finally we can start to have a real conversation.

Sounds about right to me. Richard Rorty argued that the classic liberal institutions are the best solutions we have (so far) to the problems of humanity, basically, and argued for liberals to feel patriotic about them, to own them, warts and all, to keep hammering away at piecemeal solutions towards ever greater equality, fraternity and liberty. To some extent, I’ve always felt he had a point.

However, I also always felt he was a bit short-sighted in that argument, and it somewhat contradicted his argument that people must always be trying to imagine better solutions, and that future generations would imagine better solutions than “ours.” Well, if that’s the case, those who try to imagine those and bring them into being also have a strong case to make.

Particularly, I personally am increasingly questioning the focus of so many on persistently petitioning authorities to give us political solutions at a time when grassroots, practical solutions are essential to our survival. This feeling is echoed in this post at eleven o’clock alchemy, where you’ll also find the excellent “Why I broke up with the anarchist community”

“Practical, community-based direct action, not magical solutions granted from on high, will get us closer to where we need to be.”

I feel ever more enamored with “people solving their problems and getting on with life.” I realized today that my entire job involves basically “problem solving” and “routine work” (getting on with life). It just so happens that neither interests me or is personally important. But I’m great at problem solving my own problems, and mostly great at doing the routine work that has personal relevance! How can I structure my life so that I am doing less and less work that is important to other people, and more and more that is important to me? This is the personal question.

For the extra-personal, I’ll return to Graeber: “There have to be buildings to make laws in, and someone has to clean them, and paper and transport and funky wigs…”

OK, I just wanted to quote the part about the wigs. But I do feel the passage I took that from, which touches on the processes of human living and how we create the world, relates to what I was talking about “people solving problems and getting on with life.”

[p. 16] RR: …the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the loss of public confidence in the presidency and the government all conspired to move the student radicals into non-majoritarian politics. In other words, the Marxist claim that the system isn’t reformable came together with the widespread post-Watergate feeling that the American government is hopelessly corrupt. This made it very difficult for leftists to think of themselves as American patriots, hoping to achieve their country [Rorty-speak for America as representing hope and potential for enacting progressive ideals, basically]. But unless the left wraps itself in the flag, it hasn’t got a chance of practicing a majoritarian politics. Before the ‘60s wrapping yourself in the flag when you did leftist politics was as natural as breathing. But that became unnatural after the ‘60s.

Q: This is the certainly the sort of thing with which many readers will take issue—this exhortation to patriotism.

RR: One of them already has, [saying] basically, “Who needs patriotism if you have moral principles?” My response is that moral principles are terrific in Ethics 101, but not as spurs to political action.

I wish we could just replace ‘patriotism’ with something like ‘humanism’ or ‘globalism.’

[p. 20] Q: …what do you say to people who would argue that what Rorty is asking us to do is to repress a Marxist tradition.

RR: How about not repressing it, but taking it fairly lightly? You can argue that if it had not been for Marx, Engels and their friends, we wouldn’t have gotten the welfare state. You can argue analogously that had it not been for Luther and Calvin we would still be buying indulgences. Both claims are probably true, but do you really want to bother about whether you’re maintaining a Lutheran or a Calvinist tradition?

Q: So you see it as a ladder we have climbed so that it may be discarded afterwards?

RR: It’s a ladder that is covered with filth because of the marks of the governments that have called themselves Marxists. You have two reasons for forgetting it. First, it’s become a distraction. Second, it’s acquired a bad name.

Indeed. I’m ready to get off the “train of history.”

[p. 36] Q: …your writing seems directed toward those who are, relatively speaking, powerful. …the concern is with how the powerful should act toward the less powerful. In contrast, a lot of leftist cultural studies work seems to write from the other side of the equation — writing in solidarity with the less powerful. …it seems to result in a different kind of politics. [...] Is it possible to write with that kind of solidarity, or does it seem like a false kind of solidarity?

RR: Roosevelt said early in his first administration that, “If I were working for an hourly wage, I would join a labor union.” This was a very important moment in the history of the labor movement. Was he speaking from the side of the less powerful? No. I could say to the janitors at the University of Virginia, for God’s sake join a union. Would that be speaking from their side? No. But it’s good advice anyway, even if it can be viewed as condescending.

This whole idea of solidarity with the oppressed on the part of the bourgeois intellectual strikes me as one of the many phony problems that we inherited from Marxism. John Stuart Mill didn’t worry about whether he was solid with the women or the workers—he just gave his views. The Marxist trope of “Jones is just a bourgeois intellectual” never did anybody any good. It isn’t something anybody should spend their time worrying about.

Q: …you make an unabashed defense of top-down initiatives. But what about the idea that all knowledges are partial, imminent knowledges, and that the things you think should be done are in part a product of where you’re speaking from?

RR: …Everybody’s always taken this for granted. The first thing you say when you hear a political speech is something like “well, that’s what it looks like to him.” But I can’t see that Foucault or anybody else has given us new insight into the tediously familiar fact that your views are usually a product of your circumstances.

Q: How can one acknowledge this point in one’s writing and still say something useful, though?

RR: Why bother? Why not let my audience acknowledge it for me? Everybody knows that I’m an overpaid, privileged humanities professor. They knew it before they read my stuff. Why should I bother with self-flagellation?

I think there’s something useful to dropping “cultural” judgements of “bourgeois”/privileged, middle-class type folk. The important thing should be, are they aware of their various privilege (class, feminist, etc.), do they honor the values of liberty, equality and fraternity, or are they blind? Who cares of rich folk buy expensive wines and enjoy elitist movies, or whatever it is that bothers you about them, so long as they’re socially aware and supporting helpful policies, that sort of thing?

That said, shouldn’t one’s views correspond somewhat to one’s actions? Meaning, if you purport to hold egalitarian, fraternistic values, you shouldn’t do things that work against them. Not it’s always easy to make the right choices.

Also, it seems a little like jumping the gun to declare everyone is “tediously familiar” with the idea that your views are a product of your circumstances. It often seems to me that 30-51% of Americans believe their views are very much obvious, normal and expected, and if you don’t share them there’s something wrong with you.

But I also feel there’s something to his suggestion that you just speak your views and don’t waste too much time worrying about where they come from. If you think they’re good and useful, it’s almost a matter of respect to treat others as capable of understanding them, and just explain what seems to be misunderstood.

[p. 39] Q: There’s a tension between different sides of the left concerning what we should do in the age of global capitalism: do you keep borders open, or do you close them?

RR: Right. Do you save the working classes of the advanced old democracies by protectionism, or do you give up protectionism for the sake of the Third World? Do you try to keep the standard of living in the old democracies up in order to prevent a right-wing populist, fascist movement in the USA, or do you try to re-distribute the wealth across national borders? You probably can’t do both. I wish I knew how to resolve the dilemma, but I don’t.

When I was a kid, I knew just what I would do in foreign and domestic policy if I were President. Nowadays I don’t. I think this is a fairly widespread phenomenon. Forty years ago, you could believe that the U.S., through the U.N., could export democracy, squeeze the evil empire to death, create industrialization, and promote a rising standard of living throughout the world. I don’t believe that anymore. It can’t be done. How do you save the Asian economies without giving all the money to American and Japanese banks? I have no idea. Or consider Mexico. We in effect ruined the Mexican middle class by paying off American banks. There ought to be a way to avoid this, but I don’t know what it is.

Well, if you read other Rorty and his love of the enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity, of ironists who are aware of how contingent their selves are, and have a sense of sympathy for their fellow humans… If you read his marriage of post-modernism with enlightenment values, and believe in those values and that ironism yourself, it seems to me there’s a clear solution.

The only pragmatic, and moral, solution, is to open borders, reduce barriers, and do your best to grapple with right-wing populist movements. You have to trust your ideals. You have to trust that if you help the rest of the world attain some of that freedom and equality, and education and democracy, that they will in turn help you and others as needed.

Rorty strikes me as someone worth listening to, who, however, is situated in an America where the left has lost its faith in “America” as a force for those enlightenment values. He’s tried to argue some of that faith back, at a time when it seems it’s starting to be better to argue for global efforts rather than many nation-specific efforts. But I suppose there’s reason for both, still – for reform and progress within nations, as well as between, and outside of them.

[p. 46] RR: …I think of the intellectual left as dominated by the notion that we need a theoretical understanding of our historical situa-tion, a social theory which reveals the keys to the future development, and a strategy which integrates everything with everything. I just don’t see the point. I don’t see why there shouldn’t be sixteen initiatives, each of which in one way or another might relieve some suffering, and no overall theoretical integration.

Q: It might be that some of this thinking is that the left isn’t quite sure what those initiatives should be, and that while the theorizing may occasionally become a fetish, it can also be a way of stepping back to one remove from the situation in order to get a clearer view, so we can then see what the more specific initiatives should be.

RR: It never worked before. Why should it work now?

Q: But what about the Marxist insight of taking a step back from the economy and saying, the economy in a big way works this way, thus our specific local practices should be unionizing the workers and organizing them.

RR: It didn’t take Marx for that. Cobbet knew that, I’m not sure that the Roman plebes didn’t know that. I think the idea that Marx burst upon an astonished world with the thought that the rich were ripping off the poor is weird.

Q: But isn’t it more than just the rich ripping off the poor? It’s that it’s being done in a certain way, so to stop it, we’re going to have to address the certain way it’s happening.

RR: But he didn’t address it. He said that nothing could change without a total revolution… The rhetoric was entirely one of “No piecemeal solutions.” The left got hooked on this no piecemeal solutions idea… But most of the good has been done by piecemeal initiatives that came out of left field. Stonewall came out of left field. Selma came out of left field.

…Most of the good is done by opportunistic moral entrepreneurs… Later on the academic moralists and social theorists come along and tie everything up in a neat package. But this latter activity usually doesn’t lead to political results.

I’m not sure I agree completely with this, but I think I basically do. Most of the best things humans do seem to come from trying to solve specific, piecemeal problems. That said, I consistently feel that there’s “something correct” about criticisms of things like “capitalism” or “state power” that place these in models containing systemic faults. But, short of bloody, tragic revolution, there doesn’t seem to be a solution aside from gradual, piecemeal solving of specific human problems. Sometimes tweaking the existing society, sometimes perhaps creating a new one out of the shell of the old.

The sort of intellectual Rorty prefers, then, is one who makes herself familiar with as many vocabularies and language games as possible by acquainting herself with as many novels and ethnographies as she can get her hands on. In doing so, this intellectual becomes an “ironist” about her own vocabulary, recognizing it as a contingent product of the time and place in which she was born. Furthermore, Rorty asserts, in his desired post-metaphysical culture, “novels and ethnographies which sensitize one to the pain of those who do not speak our language must do the job which demonstrations of a common human nature were supposed to do.”

That is, the job of building human solidarity. Hence [...] one doesn’t refute [a] world-view; one offers a redescription of the world which makes their description look untenable. [...] the properly ironist intellectual, with her wide range of acquaintance, will have read too many novels and ethnographies to fall for a vocabulary which imagines itself to have some privileged relationship to Truth, and which ignores the pain of others.

[For lack of a better word, I'll adopt Rorty's "ironist" as a description of a sort of worldly outlook on life embracing such humanist values and goals as the old "liberté, égalité, fraternité."]

I sometimes think about the best ways for parents, or society, to nurture and sustain this sort of worldview in children/new members. There doesn’t seem to be any way short of constant dialog, and encouraging the sort of “widely read” person as an ideal.

I am thinking of this as I read Yes Means Yes and idly think of my nieces and nephews and how it sometimes seems everyone entering adolescence should be exposed to books like these, and frank talk, and perhaps be a bit more enlightened and empowered and free than we were given the opportunity to be.

Personally, I feel I spent a lot of time in life looking just for what felt best to me, and surrounding myself with that. This may tie in to general cultural beliefs that there is one Right way “out there somewhere” and that it’s good to look for that, rather than just seeking out a lot of different ways to become acquainted with them. It could also just be that most humans tend to stick to what’s comfortable unless pressured.

And I’m losing track of my thoughts now so I’ll just trail off and say “food for thought” or something and perhaps revisit notions of “nurturing an ironist appetite as opposed to Truth-seeking” at a later date.