Recently I've been going through some of my older posts and I came upon what I consider to be the first of the modern me, if you will, entitled Sarah Palin Makes Me Sick. Recently Palin made a huge deal over criticism that she was engaging in excessively violent rhetoric that could be having some effect on radical conservatives who resort to violence. In addressing these accusations, Paling accused the left wing of trying to suppress her views, and said that impassioned political debate made this country great. I agree with her in principle on the last part, but I believe you can separate impassioned from vitriolic and dangerous. Furthermore, I have an even deeper problem with the first part, specifically that criticizing her methods are the same thing as trying to suppress her views. As I have said and continue to say, I am a firm believer in the dialectical process, a process that requires conflicting opinions in order to move forward. However, as I have also said, the path taken to achieve a goal matters just as much as the goal itself. If Sarah Palin holds an opinion that runs contrary to mine I do not fault her for it, but I can still take issue with the means she uses to voice her opinions. This is not to be confused with a desire to suppress her opinion, merely a desire to bring civility to a still impassioned political dialogue.
In fact, I find more undertones of suppression in her response than in the calls for her to scale back her rhetoric. I believe that most of those calls came from people who held the same reasoning as I, and in response Palin tried to complete quash such accusations. Now perhaps these accusations against Palin are not entirely founded, perhaps there is room to redefine acceptable political rhetoric. The beauty of the dialectical process is that the synthesis is never identical to either the thesis or antithesis, it is the result of both. Through a dialectical process we can weed out the parts of either position that are faulty, but it requires a participation in this process.
What Sarah Palin was doing was avoiding participation in this process. Recently John Boehner, when asked about compromising with the minority Democrats in the house, responded by saying he doesn't know the meaning of the word. I don't doubt him, but someone should really mention to him that it might be a worthwhile word to learn, even if it is three grueling syllables long. Anyways, this attitude that Boehner was exhibiting is the same that Palin was. Participating in a dialectical process concerning political rhetoric will mean that her position will not be completely maintained in the synthesis, there is an undertone of compromise for both sides in the dialectical process. To her this is unacceptable, there can be no compromise, her opinion must prevail completely over every other.
I could go on with examples of this mentality within the Republican Party. One more is that of Republican governor Scott Walker. He continues to say that his insistence on removing the right of unions to bargain for collective rights is that he needs to trim the budget, yet unions and Democrats have been very vocal in their willingness to agree to his proposed cuts. Cuts are not enough for Walker if they come with compromise, his agenda must prevail wholesale. Simply put, this dynamic is not conducive to a functional democratic process. The dialectical process is a law of progress, it is how change has always and will always work. Even in their refusal to participate in it, Republicans like Palin do so nonetheless. It is literally impossible to not participate in it, however, by trying their best to not participate in it these people do ensure a more tumultuous dynamic to change.
I have recently been reading On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, and I find it a brilliant work. In it, Mill discusses the voicing and suppression of opinion, and he argues that even if an opinion were known to be completely erroneous it is still wrong to suppress it. In doing so, he says, we lose an opportunity at arguing against the opinion in question and rediscovering exactly why that opinion is wrong. We can probably move forward on the assumption that Palin and others feel that their opinions are unquestionably right, what they lack is the understanding that their conclusions do not preclude them from engaging in the dialectical process nonetheless. By refusing to compromise at all they are losing what might be gained from incorporating other opinions into theirs, or at the very least what might be gained from debunking those opinions which run counter to theirs. They are becoming, in a word, dogmatic, something I will discuss in detail very shortly.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
The Process of Change: Part Two
Sometimes I seem like a combative person, and that bothers a lot of people sometimes. When they argue with me they can't get anywhere, even when agreement is reached I am compelled to go on arguing. I do not see this as a particularly bad thing, though. This is how progress is made, how consensus is reached, as Hegel said thesis and antithesis coming together to generate synthesis. I have realized recently that sometimes arguing with the people who annoy me the most can be one of the most rewarding things to do. However, there are other times when it just seems pointless, when I get angry and the act of further discussion would only serve to increase my anger. I had a moment like that today, I was arguing with a libertarian and something about his argument really got to me. When I thought about it, I realized why.
We were discussing population dynamics and I was talking about how development can destroy natural ecosystems, and how focusing on urban development instead can help in the area of over-development. Come to think of it, I'm not so sure we were arguing, I think we were agreeing. He responded, it seemed, fairly positively to this notion, which one might think would be a positive for me. Not so much so. It is coming to be quite a large part of my personal philosophy that the path taken to reach any particular goal is just as important as the goal itself. Not more important, mind you; if we take a benevolent path to a malicious goal it is worse than taking a faulty path towards a benevolent goal. However, arriving at a destination without an understanding of the journey is a fruitless endeavor. I believe this is what Dr. King was talking about in his World House speech, that our level of technological development has far outpaced our level of cultural development.
Anyways, this is what bothered me. They we were, two individuals agreeing in principle, and I felt nothing but animosity towards him. It was because of the way he looked at the issue that I felt this way. To him, the justification for urban development lay not in the tangible benefits such as conservation but in the prospect of development opportunities for large investors. Why does he care? Because development is typically regulated in cities, and as a libertarian that's against his agenda. This is not what I want to focus on, though. What I would like to do is analyze his position critically.
Many conservatives of all stripes hold Adam Smith's works up as defining truths of the world, but how true are they really? In this discussion, I was presenting a set of views focused on a goal, preserving nature. This individual looked at my argument, analyzed it, processed it in his own way, and re-posited it to be in line with his views. Now it was not an issue of ecology, it was an issue of economy. You might even say that ecology was an unintended consequence of economy here, as increasing certain individuals' investment opportunities could, and I say could purposefully, lead to an ecological benefit. This is my problem, the argument to me was about saving the environment while the issue to him was about making profits.
This is my problem with Adam Smith. No matter how many beneficial unintended consequences there are, they will always be unintended. Consequentially, the reverse of that also holds true in typical capitalist thought. Conservation does not increase profits, conservation can actually hinder profits, therefore it will neither be an intended consequence of capitalist thought. At best, conservation might happen as a freak result of the act of generating profits. However, more often than not conservation will be actively suppressed because of its tendency to hinder the pursuit of profits. Even if we disregard that last part, conservation without a drive for conservation is empty, a destination without an understanding of the journey. We arrive at the same destination, but all our journey has taught us is that we need to continue to pursue profits. now we embark once more on another journey, this time to a different destination, and because it is easier for us to actively hinder conservation efforts than take a different path we take the easy road. After all, that is what we were doing before, only the last time the road of conservation simply happened to be the less arduous path.
Because we have not learned from our journey, because the beneficial things we did were unintended, now we will turn around and take a path that causes harmful unintended consequences, such as drilling for oil in the ocean. You may say it is not "us" doing this but rather certain individuals, but it is us as a society. This path we have taken is ingrained in our collective unconscious, and now when those individuals come to Congress and ask to abolish environmental regulations we say sure, and why? Because we have simply accepted the universality of unintended consequences. The fact that unintended good occurs as the result of selfish action is not a justification for the free market, it is a condemnation of it. To do good as a result of happenstance, while better than doing no good at all, is still not as beneficial as doing good for the intended purpose of doing good.
We were discussing population dynamics and I was talking about how development can destroy natural ecosystems, and how focusing on urban development instead can help in the area of over-development. Come to think of it, I'm not so sure we were arguing, I think we were agreeing. He responded, it seemed, fairly positively to this notion, which one might think would be a positive for me. Not so much so. It is coming to be quite a large part of my personal philosophy that the path taken to reach any particular goal is just as important as the goal itself. Not more important, mind you; if we take a benevolent path to a malicious goal it is worse than taking a faulty path towards a benevolent goal. However, arriving at a destination without an understanding of the journey is a fruitless endeavor. I believe this is what Dr. King was talking about in his World House speech, that our level of technological development has far outpaced our level of cultural development.
Anyways, this is what bothered me. They we were, two individuals agreeing in principle, and I felt nothing but animosity towards him. It was because of the way he looked at the issue that I felt this way. To him, the justification for urban development lay not in the tangible benefits such as conservation but in the prospect of development opportunities for large investors. Why does he care? Because development is typically regulated in cities, and as a libertarian that's against his agenda. This is not what I want to focus on, though. What I would like to do is analyze his position critically.
Many conservatives of all stripes hold Adam Smith's works up as defining truths of the world, but how true are they really? In this discussion, I was presenting a set of views focused on a goal, preserving nature. This individual looked at my argument, analyzed it, processed it in his own way, and re-posited it to be in line with his views. Now it was not an issue of ecology, it was an issue of economy. You might even say that ecology was an unintended consequence of economy here, as increasing certain individuals' investment opportunities could, and I say could purposefully, lead to an ecological benefit. This is my problem, the argument to me was about saving the environment while the issue to him was about making profits.
This is my problem with Adam Smith. No matter how many beneficial unintended consequences there are, they will always be unintended. Consequentially, the reverse of that also holds true in typical capitalist thought. Conservation does not increase profits, conservation can actually hinder profits, therefore it will neither be an intended consequence of capitalist thought. At best, conservation might happen as a freak result of the act of generating profits. However, more often than not conservation will be actively suppressed because of its tendency to hinder the pursuit of profits. Even if we disregard that last part, conservation without a drive for conservation is empty, a destination without an understanding of the journey. We arrive at the same destination, but all our journey has taught us is that we need to continue to pursue profits. now we embark once more on another journey, this time to a different destination, and because it is easier for us to actively hinder conservation efforts than take a different path we take the easy road. After all, that is what we were doing before, only the last time the road of conservation simply happened to be the less arduous path.
Because we have not learned from our journey, because the beneficial things we did were unintended, now we will turn around and take a path that causes harmful unintended consequences, such as drilling for oil in the ocean. You may say it is not "us" doing this but rather certain individuals, but it is us as a society. This path we have taken is ingrained in our collective unconscious, and now when those individuals come to Congress and ask to abolish environmental regulations we say sure, and why? Because we have simply accepted the universality of unintended consequences. The fact that unintended good occurs as the result of selfish action is not a justification for the free market, it is a condemnation of it. To do good as a result of happenstance, while better than doing no good at all, is still not as beneficial as doing good for the intended purpose of doing good.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Process of Change Part One
I recently received a book on various Western philosophers that I'm finding quite interesting. It's not very in-depth, it contains a blurb on each philosopher, but it definitely is useful for getting better acquainted with a wide range of philosophers. Some of the philosophies that are laid out are quite interesting, although some of these people are just full of shit (Saint Thomas Aquinas, I'm looking at you). One of the more interesting, though, is this idea of the collective unconscious espoused by Jung and Hegel. I actually invoked this idea in a paper concerning Karl Marx. Since Marx, in his 1848 manuscripts, seems to indicate that what he refers to as crude communism is a necessary step between capitalism and pure communism, the question thus posed was concerning whether or not Marx's theories were deterministic; whether these regrettable stages between capitalism and pure communism could be averted, or their consequences at least mitigated. My answer was that yes, in fact, they could be in a sense. Because the world has already witnessed the crude stage of communism in the form of the Soviet Union, not every society had to pass through this crude phase in order to arrive at a more functional one. Thinking a bit more deeply into the matter, I begin to wonder if this is true.
I do not doubt that it could be true, we do have the capability of tapping into this collective unconscious via study of history. Whether or not we will take advantage of such an opportunity, however, is a different question entirely. It takes little observation of history before one realizes that a people as a whole very rarely learn from their past. In Europe the secularist congratulates himself on his own triumph of overcoming petty religious disputes. The secularist remembers the violence perpetuated in his country because of religion decades and even centuries ago, and it is for this reason that he is a secularist. However, the European secularist fails to realize his own follies, fails to realize that religious infighting exists under the guise of secularism. The American citizen is overjoyed by the passing of his country into a post-racial phase (for the third or fourth time), and yet in his bliss he is ignorant of many of the details of how this civil rights movement unfolded. Soren Kierkegaard wrote in the early nineteenth century that, "Each age has its depravity. Ours is...a dissolute pantheistic contempt for individual man." I do not doubt whether that was true of his age, although it could be true simply of the environment that Kierkegaard was in. One of the primary failings of existentialism is that one examines one's own place in the universe failing to take into account how many other individuals occupy their own unique space with its own unique properties. However, if that was true of Kierkegaard's time I feel that the reverse is true of ours. We have taken individuality and turned it into a cult, drawn it out to its extreme conclusions.
Granted, it is hard to find anything wrong with individuality, even more so working within the context of a culture that glorifies it, but it is also easy to find fault with almost anything when it disregards its opposite. When individuality is glorified to a point where community is reviled then the task of finding fault with individuality becomes infinitely simpler. An African proverb says that it takes a village to raise a child, but how many villages today assist in this manner? It seems that everywhere we have become more and more isolated from those in physical proximity to us, to the point where mistrust is more familiar than trust, much less a trust that extends to such individuals being a major part of a child's life. Furthermore, take Emile Durkheim's study on suicide. Durkheim, after comparing suicide rates among different religious, ethnic, gender, and economic groups, and conducting qualitative analysis, concluded that where a group stressed individuality suicide rates were higher; where it stressed community suicide rates were lower.
We have lost this respect for community due to our worship of individuality. It is becoming pathological in some segments, to the point where even institutions such as public education are under attack. Perhaps, too, there is an element of alienation that Marx described as inherent to capitalism. While relevant to the larger picture, that holds little relevance here. The point that must be addressed is that the dialectical process on which all of society progresses has regressed. How did Kierkegaard's age come to despise the individual? Through the glorification of the community, everything done for the greater good, for industry. It is good that the dialectical process led to the reverence of the individual eventually, but in the process the reverence for the community was lost as well. This brings me back to the original point, will we ever truly progress in such a manner without losing that which is admirable about what we already have? I believe it is possible, but it will not be an easy endeavor.
I do not doubt that it could be true, we do have the capability of tapping into this collective unconscious via study of history. Whether or not we will take advantage of such an opportunity, however, is a different question entirely. It takes little observation of history before one realizes that a people as a whole very rarely learn from their past. In Europe the secularist congratulates himself on his own triumph of overcoming petty religious disputes. The secularist remembers the violence perpetuated in his country because of religion decades and even centuries ago, and it is for this reason that he is a secularist. However, the European secularist fails to realize his own follies, fails to realize that religious infighting exists under the guise of secularism. The American citizen is overjoyed by the passing of his country into a post-racial phase (for the third or fourth time), and yet in his bliss he is ignorant of many of the details of how this civil rights movement unfolded. Soren Kierkegaard wrote in the early nineteenth century that, "Each age has its depravity. Ours is...a dissolute pantheistic contempt for individual man." I do not doubt whether that was true of his age, although it could be true simply of the environment that Kierkegaard was in. One of the primary failings of existentialism is that one examines one's own place in the universe failing to take into account how many other individuals occupy their own unique space with its own unique properties. However, if that was true of Kierkegaard's time I feel that the reverse is true of ours. We have taken individuality and turned it into a cult, drawn it out to its extreme conclusions.
Granted, it is hard to find anything wrong with individuality, even more so working within the context of a culture that glorifies it, but it is also easy to find fault with almost anything when it disregards its opposite. When individuality is glorified to a point where community is reviled then the task of finding fault with individuality becomes infinitely simpler. An African proverb says that it takes a village to raise a child, but how many villages today assist in this manner? It seems that everywhere we have become more and more isolated from those in physical proximity to us, to the point where mistrust is more familiar than trust, much less a trust that extends to such individuals being a major part of a child's life. Furthermore, take Emile Durkheim's study on suicide. Durkheim, after comparing suicide rates among different religious, ethnic, gender, and economic groups, and conducting qualitative analysis, concluded that where a group stressed individuality suicide rates were higher; where it stressed community suicide rates were lower.
We have lost this respect for community due to our worship of individuality. It is becoming pathological in some segments, to the point where even institutions such as public education are under attack. Perhaps, too, there is an element of alienation that Marx described as inherent to capitalism. While relevant to the larger picture, that holds little relevance here. The point that must be addressed is that the dialectical process on which all of society progresses has regressed. How did Kierkegaard's age come to despise the individual? Through the glorification of the community, everything done for the greater good, for industry. It is good that the dialectical process led to the reverence of the individual eventually, but in the process the reverence for the community was lost as well. This brings me back to the original point, will we ever truly progress in such a manner without losing that which is admirable about what we already have? I believe it is possible, but it will not be an easy endeavor.
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