Our evolving

a merely-adaptive sense of self formation vs. a progressive interest

2010-12-27T23:26:00.001-08:00

I’m amazed at the pervasiveness of the adaptive mind in the “human” professions (education, health care, human sciences, etc.), because I’m wanting progressive inspiration for my progressive interests.

But I shouldn’t be amazed: So much of the world is not “up to par,” as they say. There’s so much suffering, thus so much remedial value to spreading healthy normalcy to all humanity. What is education for or health care for (thus the psychology that advances professions), if one isn’t giving high, high value to well-adapted lives, thus conceiving “well-being” accordingly? Nonetheless, this causes the human sciences (including positive psychology) to be prevalently oriented by desire to maximize adaptability, rather than thinking more progressively.

For children, we want to do what we can to at least provide a baseline of “protective factors for psychosocial resilience” (ref.1: 126) which includes wanting for one’s child:

• easy temperament in infancy [thanks to good pre-natal and post-natal care]; adaptable personality later in development
• talents valued by self and society
• self regulation skills for self control of attention, arousal, and impulses
• general appealingness or attractiveness to others
• a positive outlook on life
• problem-solving skills
• positive self perceptions or self efficacy
• a sense of meaning in life

At best, that’s complemented by a range of aspects belonging to good families and close relationships; aspects of community and relationships with organizations (ibid). I do have realism about general conditions of normal good.

But one’s conception of development doesn’t have to be timid. Orientation to actualizing general normalcy is a lower valuing of “adaptation” than orientation to actualizing human potential. Pursuing the latter maximizes accomplishment of the former; pursuing the former does not educe promise of higher valuing. With all due regard for the lack of baseline humanity (rights, public health, decent quality of life, etc.) throughout much of the world, we are regularly inspired by the salience of high aspiration in developing areas. I’m carrying that admiration further in terms of interest in the horizons of excellence, albeit in my especially-interested way (which I do not pretend to evaluatively generalize). Progressive ambition has always been integral to humanistic ventures. But the human professions are not especially humanistic. They have a prevailing orientation to baseline adaptation (its about social costs, I guess) which denies the professions an ambitious conception of their calling (or “vision,” as they say). I’m not, in the near term, speaking directly to that lack by going my own way with highly aspirational (and often very conceptual) prospecting. But what goes up will come down.

Progressive prudence is very different from adaptive prudence. I deeply feel that adaptive resiliance is best conceived relative to aspirational self-efficacy. My sense of pragmatism is, heuristically speaking, a weave of idealism and realism. But pragmatism can be ambitious or timid. I consider the adaptationist horizon of the human professions to be opportunistically constrained (due at least to a budgetary legacy that has shaped professions’ conception). There’s easily an ethos of homeostasis in functionalist society that’s quietistic and, ultimately, unhumanistic. The classical ethos in philosophy of flourishing has always been “dangerous” to vested interests, if only because it asks for too much human development. It’s “unrealistic” to ask others to give primacy to their potential. It’s exhausting.

You can presume that all I want to do is ultimately for an advancement of humanistic union, though only in terms of what especially interests this one humanist, which is ultimately philosophical.

This discussion was separated from the end of the introductory paragraphs of “enowning development.”

aspects of a critique of the “positive” psychology of self efficacy

2010-12-27T23:11:00.000-08:00

M.A. Cohn and B.L. Fredrickson,“Positive emotions” (ref.3), whom I’ve discussed recently (A, B, C) are modest in their terms, relative to how teachers and counselors might be expected to understand their short-term opportunities. Building “personal resources” results from “increases in daily positive emotion” (18) because reliably-recurrent good feelings lead to enjoyable “broaden-and-build” (generative) processes or developmental activities, thereby (I add) self-nurturing talents, self-cultivating interest, and honing one’s own skills (but how such recursive efficacy works remains mysterious in their research summary). C&F attend to a behavioral process happening that seems magically lacking life-centered minds or individuational enactivity: desire, aspiration, purpose, and identity (though all that is easily implied by them—just not focal, which all that should be for a theory of learning, which they claim to be conceptualizing).

I do find a sense of life-centered enactivity in C&F’s rather behaviorist conception, but their spiral-cyclical learning model, which is heavily “biased” by their interest in “emotion,” must be understood as a supplement to thinking that is oriented by identity-developmental capability formation or individuation, belonging to one’s aspirational interest in self fulfillment.

They might readily agree, though they seem a little comical to me (not their intent, surely): They proffer the “resource-building effects” of “hav[ing] emotion inductions that are [durable, i.e.,] reliable and continue to work over time [...by] visualizing one’s best possible self...[for a] practice [of persons] using their signature strengths” (op. cit., 20). This is implicitly about self-evincing motivation in light of realized self efficacy, but other psychologists’ modeling seems more constitutive for self-directed learning.

C&F passingly mention the professional efficacy of cognitive-behavioral (C-B) processes (ibid.) for instilling generative feeling about newly challenging situations. But C-B psychology is essentially behaviorist, taking a rather black-box stance toward the character of goal-specified change. Perfect for short-term workshops (and cost-effective short-term therapies), C-B psychology easily seems (in institutional settings) to lack a guiding approach to long-term enowning of positive changes, I would argue. The short-term-oriented knowledge-behavior-rehabituation loop in C -B psychology lacks a standardly-educational sense of capability formation that is integrated with broad-based, long-term developmental aims.

I think there’s great promise in positive psychology for giving C-B practices a better foundation, thus better promise (more long-term cost-effectiveness!). But that’s a big topic.

Developmental understanding of given efficacies is vital to understanding those efficacies as such, i.e., as belonging to purposive identities. However, empirical psychology (with its legacy of behaviorism) has tended (and continues) to describe, rather than developmentally explain—or rather: to synchronically explain (thanks to easily-accesible measurability), rather than diachronically explain, which is the non-quantifiable province of clinical work. Optimism about one’s self efficacy is a practiced, life-historical part of oneself (not a “personal resource”).

I could elaborate this point easily relative to a researcher, James E. Maddux, on “self-efficacy” who offers a synoptic of “social cognitive theory’s four basic premises,” which intends to explicate how “understanding human cognition, action, motivation, and emotion...assumes that we are active shapers of...our environments,” but lacks—in an article on self efficacy!—any allusion to a person’s values, purposes, intentions, identity, or development of capabilities. Maddux’s environmentalist approach to self efficacy, as part of a handbook on positive psychology, continues the behaviorist legacy (ref.1: 336-7). He goes to some length to explain the development of a child’s “self-efficacy” in terms of social-operant conditioning. Self efficacy is explicated as a set of beliefs that have behaviorally and responsively arisen, somehow working into motivation, rather than as an efficacious identification with one’s capabilities. Like C&F, this is like relating to a resource base rather than identifying with one’s capability and appropriating capability into one’s values, purposes, and identity.

I could easily appropriate his discussion into my developmental view (I can get there from here, so to speak), but such an educational psychological approach doesn’t follow from a social-operant perspective (one can’t get here from there). “[B]eliefs about what I am capable of doing” presume the enowned actuality of what one is capable of doing. Indeed, “[e]fficacy beliefs in a given domain will contribute to my self-esteem only in direct proportion to the importance I place on that domain.” But this is a matter of the importance I really place on actual capabilities, i.e., the nexus of motivaing (or appealing) importances in one’s capability formation and one’s life. Maddux tends to cognitivistically split off belief from the character of motivation.

This discussion was the basis for part of “enowning development.”

“...a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed...”

2010-11-08T00:28:00.000-08:00

Thursday, 10.28 / Saturday, 10.30

Obama evidently fits into a small set of intellectual American presidents, and is the first to fit into the intellectual lineage (outside of politics) of American pragmatism. Reading Obama evidently shows a comprehensively-progressive political engagement with deliberative democratic thought which (I anticipate) connects well with the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas which is a development of American pragmatism for his approach to philosophy, so influential for me.

Indeed, the U.S. Constitution was a pragmatic conception before any overt conception of pragmatism; so, too, our history of jurisprudence. So, pragmatism is intrinsic to the American political idea of constitutional patriotism.

As our evolving history is premised on ideas of progress, The Real American Dream led to a cultural progressivism that has become inherent to the politics of American pragmatism.

That history concords with progressivist trends of the middle and late 20th century whose planetary thinking might be validly characterized now (I would argue) as a Green Humanism.

I’m working to better understand the real humanity of such a progressivism. In particular (as one person trying to do what he can in available time), I want to exemplify how the generativity of our evolving through creative and empathic human development can have a philosophically tenable conceptuality.

11.8 — 12:27 am

Continuing the above line of thought in more detail, here’s what I posted to the Habermas group yesterday (minus introductory context there and m-dashes that went through the Yahoo! system as glyphical garbage) with some revision and an ending not earlier posted.

* * *
According to Kloppenberg, Obama ’s critical years of development at Harvard took place at a time of especially-progressive ferment in legal theory concordant with Hilary Putnam’s (Harvard) and Richard Bernstein’s (New School, NYC) pragmatic interest in Habermas (beyond the fact that “...many of Bernstein’s books...appeared regularly in the footnotes of law review articles and books...at just the time when Obama was studying law at Harvard…” [134]).

Koppleberg briefly discusses key conceptual features of Bernstein’s pragmatism (133-4), which “drew together ideas from the traditions of hermeneutics and existential phenomenology, the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the critical theory of Habermas, whose Deweyan dimensions Bernstein was among the first Americans to emphasize.” Koppleberg claims that “Bernstein has advanced the version of pragmatism that seems to me closest to the ideas advanced in Obama’s books—although Obama is hardly as systematic in the presentation of the philosophy—[such that] I want to outline the five dimensions of Bernstein’s pragmatism” as “echoing” throughout Obama’s books: “fallibilism.... the inescapably sociocultural character of individual experience.... the participation of individual interpreters in a community of inquiry or discourse.... [Jamesian/Deweyan] sensitivity to radical contingency.... [and] a pluralistic philosophy for a pluralistic universe.” This might be read as partisan overreading of Obama’s political practice, except that the point of Koppleberg’s book is that Obama is overtly thinking in light of a coherent and deliberate pragmatic philosophy that is integral to how he works.  

 The highly esteemed Harvard theorist of Constitutional law, Lawrence Tribe, is said, according to Koppleberg, to “credit Obama [as student] for helping him [i.e., Tribe] to see...the interpretation of...the United States Constitution...as a conversation, an interpretive process that never ends” (133). That seems a bit exaggerated (Tribe is well-known for his animus for Original Intent jurisprudence and his support for the Obama presidency), but the comment goes to the point of Obama’s seriousness of intellectual engagement, which Koppelberg’s book is explicating in much detail.  

Koppleberg actually claims that Obama, as an undergraduate, read Habermas, among others, in Obama’s overt search for a political philosophy (17, 104). An apparent keynote of Koppleberg’s expository strategy toward Obama’s legal education is to tie the discursive ferment of legal controversy at Harvard to Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Rawls, and Bernstein, all of whom were at that time especially interested in Habermas while Obama was at Harvard Law. “Perhaps not surprisingly, given Putnam’s position as a member of the Harvard Department of Philosophy, he has been more frequently cited by Harvard Law School faculty members than have the other contemporary philosophical pragmatists. In ‘A Reconsideration of Deweyan Pragmatism,’ Putnam’s stirring contribution to Pragmatism in Law and Society, the volume derived from the 1990 Harvard Law School conference on pragmatism, he invoked both Dewey and James—and tied their insights to those of Habermas—to make the case for a ‘radical’ democracy that is pragmatist rather than foundationalist, participatory rather than elitist, and ‘more hard-headed and realistic’ than the romantic ideas [of much Deweyan work...,] precisely the model laid out in Obama’s ‘Why Organize’ to justify the continuing effort to empower the disempowered” (136-7).

There’s a rising tide in the U.S. of animus toward gilded age capitalism, being put in terms that the general public can appreciate: signaled by Robert Reich, Aftershock (2010) and Paul Pierson and J.S. Hacker, Winner-Take-All Politics (2010)—Pierson is Chair of the Poli. Sci. Dept. at UC, Berkeley—as well as signaled by the usual suspects in the progressive press.

Disappointed progressives (many of whom were living a fantasy politics of good faith, a parallel universe against the fantasy politics of bad faith that leads Republicanism) sooth themselves by recalling how the Republican mid-term sweep of 1994 set the stage for Clinton’s re-election in 1996. But this deserves more than soothing note. The Democratic mid-term losses were overtly anticipated at the beginning of the Obama administration (I could argue in detail). I’m glad to be on record now as claiming that the Republicans are going to implode through obstructionism (and their lack of realistic/pragmatic ideas); the economy is going to be recovering well by mid-2012; the G20 will have smoothed out recovery from the global recession; and Obama will be riding high in the polls.  

Quite obviously in early 2009, Obama was going to be strapped with Bush’s mess. But all trendspotters at the time envisioned that the recession would be quite gone by 2011, and that appears to be increasingly the case. To my mind, the progressivism of 2008 has not been betrayed. But progressivism needs to—as one says these days—“man up” to the mechanics of change in a very organized storm.

A sad reality of democracy in complex society is that most of the public will not have the time to understand what’s actually going on; so competitions of fantasy politics prevail in elections, and populism of the moment can speak poorly for democracy. But a close reading of the Obama administration over the past 20 months shows a progressive realism with Chicago street smarts (having no innocence about political machines).  

Progressives basically have 6 or so months to get their acts together, because the 2012 election season begins September, 2011. And American progressives need the constructive solidarity of progressives outside the U.S., not prevailing expressions of disillusioned fantasy politics.

Pierson and Hacker are basically writing a historical story with Winner-Take-All Politics (discussed by Bob Herbert’s NY Times column last week), but the upshot (their “Conclusion”—all of which is available online via Amazon.com’s “Look Inside” feature) is that progressive organization needs to become as efficient as organized capital (which Republicanism serves). The better organized case wins. The nature of the game is organization: who understands the real organization of the world most efficaciously, at whatever level, and targets their resources most effectively (which is no simple reality of having the most money, proven by recent California elections). 

If a truly Habermasian advisor was close to Obama, would Obama be performing as he does? I would argue yes. And I challenge Habermasians to come up with a better politics than the Obama administration has.

By the way, Obama wrote an Op-Ed article, “Exporting Our Way to Stability,” for Friday’s NY Times, basically (it seems to me) bolstering an anti-protectionist stance for the upcoming G-20 meeting, which I intend to discuss.

a note on sustainability

2010-02-12T21:20:00.000-08:00

This week’s Science is a special issue on “Food Security,” i.e.: how to feed 9 billion people (the estimated upper limit of Earth’s carrying capacity).

Deciding to not have children, or to adopt instead, is like voting: One vote has to be part of a mass preference, for one’s vote to seem important. But one vote is all one has.

Anyway, population growth is out of control, particularly among the poor and illiterate. December 28, I took an eccentric perspective on having children, but it was soberly motivated, as overpopulation and global warming are very related—and so, too, sustainability apart from global warming.

The solutions to sustainability are now obvious. The keynote for population control is education, which develops with economic development. As general quality of life increases, rate of population growth decreases.

for a higher quality of political commons

2010-01-23T12:17:00.000-08:00

Tursday’s U.S. Supreme Court majority decision favoring unlimited corporate freedom to fund political marketing is depressing.

Following a short Saturday news update here, my Friday comments are merely a first appreciation of the dangerous Court decision. I’ll add to this posting in coming days, which I’ll note in “life world” daynotes; and eventually, this posting will be re-thought as a Webpage titled “for a higher qualiity of political commons,” and this posting will become merely a link to that. In the meantime, a changed date above for the posting, due to substantial revision of the posting, does not change the permalink.

Saturday, 1/23

(AP)….At the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the head of its office that monitors democratic practices—an international human rights organization—says that the ruling…“threatens to further marginalize candidates without strong financial backing or extensive personal resources.”

Saturday, 1/23
“Obama says court ruling a blow to democracy”

(Reuters)….The Supreme Court ruling dealt a powerful blow to efforts to rein in corporate influence and could even allow foreign corporations to “get into the act,” Obama said.

“It will make it more difficult to pass common-sense laws to promote energy independence because even foreign entities would be allowed to mix in our elections,” Obama said.

Friday, 1/22 — 7:20 pm

It’s not a constitutional issue that so much of the public (the time-crunched, less-educated, and passive-consumerist citizen) is so susceptible to high volume emotion-laden rhetoric in political marketing, such that interest groups with unlimited access to corporate treasuries can dominate media space. Of course, it’s not the fault of tribal capital directly that so much of the public is gullible to emotion-laden appeals. It’s due to a lack of sophistication in enough of the public that intensive political marketing can swing elections. The U.S. Supreme Court majority says that’s constitutional. I disagree: Corporations are not political persons (the Bill of Rights is about political persons); and money, like fuel, is not speech.

In any case, if a corporation has no limit on its freedom to fund a saturation of a market with a candidate-favoring message (or any political position), then that marketing power (drawing on stock-funded and product-funded treasuries) can be used, through lobbyists’ threats to buy a different candidate, to control politicians whose work affects a corporation’s profits. David Brooks, NY Times, on the PBS News Hour today, notes that corporations with strong lobbying resources could use their limitless clout to compel new regulatory hurdles that put smaller-scale competitors out of business. Also, corporately-favored candidates can see marketing agencies limitlessly used to shadow-coordinate their campaigns with interest group campaigns favoring the candidate without seeming to have coordination between the politician and the interest group.

The more highly educated (or sophisticated) that a voter becomes, the less that marketing can invalidly prevail in an election; and the less that the threat of marketing can be used to control politicians. But that’s a very long road requiring widely better public education (via media, as well as school-acquired cognitive sophistication), looking decades ahead.

The corporate party that celebrates unlimited corporate access to the political market has also been the party that, for over a decade, acts cooly toward funding educational excellence for the developing voter. Tribal capital doesn’t need an educated consumer, just a receptive one, and education doesn’t tend to promote unquestioning acceptance. Reducing citizenship to consumerism and politics to marketing is a no-brainer for tribal capital. “Let no child be left behind to want shopping” (but include an adequate margin in the price of desired products, to cover advertising cost that creates desire for the product, i.e., the consumer also buys the desire that is satisfied by the desired product). Make politics the same!: “Isn’t opinion formation just like shopping?” Who needs substance when candidate charisma or voter fears can make choice a no-brainer?

My reveries on the meaning of life are far from such a context of life. But concern for the quality of life at the individual level is relevant to the citizen point in a pointillism of community life, cultural life, and political life. My Project (blogs and Website altogether) is too elaborate to capsulate easily, but my interest in artistic themes presumes the value of a healthy market of ideas in healthy public life. I’ve done much to stand for progressive political values. I don’t leave that behind by loving conceptual prospects.

I hope for a world more generally oriented to genuine meaningfulness. I hope that our quality of lives minimizes passive entertainment and the effectiveness of emotion-based marketing.

Reading requires intiative, interest—and time. I hope for more lives’ valuing of quality time. Let’s do more with each other than sharing passive leisure.

I hope for consumer education in the form of increased critical discernment of marketing tactics, that causes withdrawal from unhealthy aspects of our economies. I hope for more democratic controls on elections. I hope for more political education in the form of capability to recognize fallacious reasoning in political marketing. I hope for more citizen use of available non-partisan resources online directed at assessing fairness in campaign advertising.

I hope for more intelligence on the commons, putting more of the market of ideas in voters’ lives. I hope for more appreciation of life as lifelong learning and democracies as learning societies.

Saturday, 1/23 — 6:02 am PST

(Reuters) ….Obama said he had instructed his administration to work immediately with Congress to develop a forceful, bipartisan response to the ruling.

“We have begun that work, and it will be a priority for us until we repair the damage that has been done,” he said.

4 reasons to have children and 1 reason for philosophy

2009-12-28T15:34:00.000-08:00

• paleoanthropological: They happen. You adjust. This, I suppose, more or less covers most of the humanity that is causing global warming. The original “miracle of the child” was that one had no idea why they came when they did. Sanctification of this mystery reflects the evolution of an intelligent species, which is very good for children, which is very good for the tribe (maximizing life, thus reproductivity, thus hands for labor and homemaking, and war, etc.), which was probably the original motivation of religion: public health for survivalist flourishing (not an especially human aspiration, but aggregate intelligence gains advantages over otherwise dominating species, such as bacteria). If the child is a gift from God, one doesn’t have to take responsibility for planned parenthood. This is very good for unfocused lives. It also tends to suppose that children grow adequately on their own, if fed and protected. This is also “good” for unfocused lives, through the eyes of political estates, which have tended to not look favorably on broad literacy. For much of humanity, today is not much different from what Europeans call medieval. The poor and illiterate reproduce and cope because that’s what happens in life, generation after generation. One’s parents did it. It’s what there is to do.

• economic: The family aims for laboring hands and old age care. Rather than maximizing population by way of letting better public health welcome whatever results, children are deliberately sought for the sake of neighborhood prosperity. This is why the Catholic Church sanctifies a maximized intent to make children. This is the engine of the premodern economy, and the modern market thrives on the reproductive economy. The economics of reproduction mesh with the paleoanthropological legacy that has progressed to our complexly reproductive economy.

In the economic venture, owning one’s prosperity is considered virtuous. Godforbid one should desire to adopt a living child that is not “truly” one’s own, as the need of existing children for good homes is less important than owning one’s own and increasing the population. But most important is that the child be one’s property by nature (or God).

• pets: One needs someone to love “me” the way I want to be loved, to assuage loneliness, yet someone that also talks well (eventually), which dogs and cats don’t do (or at least, don’t do well enough). Commonly, people with the leisure to find a purpose in life (living beyond survivalism) will decide to have children because they need something to do with their free time. In this case, it’s important that the child grow up to satisfy the parent, especially the parent’s own unfulfilled dreams (or lack of purpose), which they intend to live out through their children. The child should be grateful for what the parent provides and love the parent for what they have been given. Quid pro quo is unstated, but manifold ways of withdrawing “love” keep the implicit message rather clear. This reason for kids is very, very common in modern society. Obesity helps one keep in mind how much one is loved.

• gardening: Here, my favorite (truly), one wants to see the being flourish in its ownmost way. The parent wants to enable high individuation, however it turns out. The parent loves to see the child flower in order to surprise and leave, well launched. And then the parent is happy to go into gardening something else. I will call this concerted parenthood, not because I’m especially attached to sociologist Annette Lareau (though I am), but because she exemplifies a good bridge between (a) macro concerns for human development or the health of nations and (b) the individual point in the pointillism of a good society that is educed, evinced, cultivated, and appreciated for its own sake. I would emphasize a beauty of the well-growing child because, firstly, it’s important for my sense of humanity, but also because a well-growing life includes a sense of reproduction that belongs to it, though I’m going to be brief. As brevity breeds obscurity, I’ll probably seem eccentrically conceptualist, but that would be a philosopher’s bias, for the sake of conceptual adventuring.

I came into philosophy very much a “Sixties” idealist, which I sought to live as an urgent “praxis” that took many years to clarify, but which grew through devotion to educational excellence and reform, advancing an idealistic notion of fighting poverty through community-based human development. But chances for educational research didn’t satisfy my first love, which tends to become (or return into being) wholly philosophical. Yet, I can’t shake a sense of responsibility toward our perpetual project of gardening the good of humanity, broadly understood. What I want to do philosophically feels intimately engaged with such importance, which I want to understand as well as I can (maybe exemplifying something useful along the way), but feeling ultimately drawn by an appeal of purely philosophical work (which carries a providence of solitudinous happiness). It’s elating, in its sense of love, desire, and high sense of potential entwining. Fulfilling happiness can be conceptual for me as literary art is for others. But it’s growing relative to a specific community of influences who unwittingly lead me into evolving a horizon that is wholly ours. The neatest thing would be that they are brought to see how much (and how glad I am) that it’s all done relative to those who keep me grounded and laughing about my own pretentiousness.

an episode of the Copenhagen Climate Conference

2009-12-16T19:48:00.000-08:00

This was written many hours before “Icarus swims” below (written in the evening), so the “7:48” timestamp just allows for that sequentiality of one day’s postings on the general page of the blog.

The profoundly important Copenhagen Climate Conference is today stalled apparently because anticipated costs of mediating disputes over “border adjustments” in world trade could have profound consequences for developing nations’ relation to developed nations.

That’s not obvious, since the overt issues are about actual numbers (timing and extent of emissions cuts) and governing norms (e.g., intranational transparency rules). But there is also need for the final, 2010 treaty, to be legally binding internationally. How can international bindingness be enforced? Through border adjustments.

So, though the instrument of border adjustments may sound arcane, the machinery of trade is a keystone of the interface between environmental futures and regional developments. The jetstream of our global order critically (thus, so conflictually) includes the interface of [1] norms governing the World Trade Organization (re: development) and [2] norms that are to undo global warming (re: environmental engineering).

12/22 — 6:37 am

That’s about one short episode, of course. It’s emblematic of the vast topic of environmental engineering that I’ve been tracking with news articles (archived) for over a decade. (Imagine trying to deal with such an archive. But I will, someday.)

Icarus swims

2009-12-16T19:47:00.000-08:00

Human rights, parenting, ecopolitics—how does it all fit together?—you don’t much wonder. (Who has the time? And Why?)

The conditions of humanistic flourishing are manifold, to say the least. The nature of human futurity is vastly elusive—but a discursive luxury, you might think.

The ultimate singularity of planetary life “with” the increasing hyperintegration of humanity is a brute fact in a vacuum, astronauts so dramatize. Either a cohering of it all emerges (since life requires enough homeostasis), with humanity coping with The Given (as the Earth goes its own way). Or the cohering must be engineered—and not quietistically (i.e., not conservatively)—for the sake of broadening our flourishing and for sustaining the irreplaceable regions of Earth’s Givingness that are still flourishing, such as rainforests.

I believe that the whole scale of our planetary existence, down to (up to? into) the ostensible, lived level, can be made coherent, purposefully and constructively—can be explicated progressively and practically (or pragmatically—realistically and idealistically).

In service to that, discursive inquiry is worthwhile, just as the university is more than an administrated network of professional schools. We belong to a living well of intelligent life—evolving, historical, and exemplified in leading lives—through which prospects for constructive humanistic union, for richly flourishing widely—“evolving” in an active sense (evolving ourselves, democratically governing our evolution)—are kept realistically alive and properly ambitious.

Anticipating discursive inquiry into Our Singularity (in much detail, by the way—no romanticist garden of rhetorical well-formedness), I live a sense of holism that’s delightful to me—inspiring, thus durably motivating, an elating pleasure of mind—a veritable eros of our evolving. Our Gaic, hyperintegrating singularity is a thrilling wonder. Wanting to make time for detailing and advancing my sense of this, our Perpetual Project, feels like the ecstatic kid I commonly was and, so, remain.

a preface on ecopolitics

2009-12-12T19:24:00.001-08:00

That image doesn’t really fit the following, but I just so want to use it for something.

The Copenhagen Climate Talks go on, marginal to most lives (except governments, leading capital, and activists). Anyone would agree that it’s important, but the complexity escapes us?

It escapes me, I think. I don’t believe the following captures it. Nonetheless...

Just as the G20 are implementing constraints on global capital (constraints on recursive or exponential finance capitalism) while commodity markets in recession are desperate for capital stimulation, the Copenhagen Talks are about further constraining the global economy for the sake of future generations, but to the detriment of developing nations’s near-term welfare. Globally controlling productivity when developing nations feel a right to do what developed nations have done for a century without controls, while then not adequately compensating the developing nations for self-motivated sacrifice in the wake of a century of exploitation by developed nations, altogether seems to be a new brand of global imperialism. I don’t believe there’s any imperialism involved, but warranting that belief won’t happen here.

No doubt, though, controlling climate for the long term involves blowback in the short term for prospects of developing nations. Globally-networked governmental economies of constraint are going to be allowed to design the rate and structure of economic evolution to the designed detriment of the capitalist energy economy (good), but also to the undesigned detriment of nations longing for the license that developed nations can now afford to forego, all for the sake of everyone’s unborn—but with some unborn to be far more charmed at birth than most everyone else.

It’s all marginal to the scale of most lives in developed nations. We worry about how to get through another month’s budget, how to balance our sense of need (what’s invalid, what’s really necessary, what’s most important, what’s the best prioritization) with our sense of commitment to community, nation, and abstract narratives about planetary legacies.

In 1978, Theodore Roszak, already famous for The Making of A Counter Culture, published Person/Planet, which initiated (I believe) the domain of “ecopsychology,” which is inquiry into the interface of deep ecology and humanistic psychology, as a matter of human self-understanding. But it’s also the matter of scale in political action: how the continuum of “think globally, act locally” goes. The butterfly effect is just too abstract without strong leadership, widely distributed across levels of life and clearly aligned with the hyperintegration that humanity has become.

We are each a living well of emergent evolution, development, and self understanding. Some of us are shallow, some not. Yet, for each person, there is some depth of engagement, both unwitting (inheritance, natural and culture) and deliberate (legacies we’ve made or endorsed)—engagement with the The Deep we inevitably face on Earth: an elusive continuum of mind, life, culture, evolution, and planet—planet granting and bearing our evolution, evolution granting and bearing manifold cultures, cultures granting and bearing manifold lives, and lives granting and bearing manifold minds having too little time (or ability) to understand where we so complexly are.

We yield to summary understandings (e.g., forming voter opinions from proximal common sense available through a few newspaper articles or chats with friends), as if something essential, thus reliable for action orientation, is easily available by which one’s preferences and decisions can be regarded as reliable, good, and right. Otherwise, we accept our cluelessness and yield to the power that seems to know—until it implodes.

Most all of what goes on in powerful organizations is never known and only becomes more known as it becomes unbearably dominant or implodes. Then it suffers the market of attention (but that’s only ephemeral—part of doing business). Power regains its privacy after crisis periods are pacified and the tip of power’s iceberg is no longer remembered as the tip of anything hidden. What’s below the radar of market-constituted news returns to being left to its discretionary estate that is supposed to be nobody’s business but its own.

perpetual project

2009-12-10T08:10:00.000-08:00

With “deep gratitude and great humility,” President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for the sake of “our highest aspirations.” He endeavors to recount a story of our inhumanity and avarice that must lose their war against our humanity and generosity. The real substance of Our Perpetual Project is intangible: ideas bearing values that work as ideals.

“Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. ‘Let us focus,’ he said, ‘...on a gradual evolution in human institutions.’ A gradual evolution of human institutions. What might this evolution look like? What might these practical steps be?”

“Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. ....And....the continued expansion of our moral imagination...[W]e do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place....[F]undamental faith in human progress...must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey....what’s best about humanity....our sense of possibility....our moral compass....Let us reach for the world that ought to be—that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”

“hyperintegration”

2009-11-23T14:10:00.000-08:00

Tom Friedman’s typically large-minded view of the world is on good display in Sunday’s New York Times, “Advice from Grandma,” on importances of social imagination for national well-being in a global economic environment and the importance of governmental facilitation of this, which I categorize as a matter of comparative advantage through knowledge-intensiveness.

Friedman is concerned about the “sub-optimal” responsiveness of American democracy, relative to well-known aspects of political life that he lists. What interests me, though, is his allusions (common for him) to the basic, long-term importance of creativity applied to the planetary scale, i.e., “a hyperintegrated world.”

Friedman’s main idea, though implicit, is that intra-national, citizen-based leadership is the basis for international competitiveness, thus for the health of the nation engaged planetarily. Our “biggest problems — education, debt, financial regulation, health care, energy and environment”—require “good governance, which can harness creativity”—government which facilitates, attracts, and channels capability that begins with the people who make the society.

What your citizens imagine now matters more than ever because they can act on their own imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before — as individuals. In such a world, societies that can nurture people with the ability to imagine and spin off new ideas will thrive.

What are the conditions of that creativity which leads to innovation? What are the precursors in child development, education, and organizational development?

We are faced with nothing less than engineering our evolution, and that begins with individual development, no matter how complexly coordinated and organized capabilities must be to deliver on complexly distributed problems and opportunities.

Philosophy of the good society is no less than the implicit philosophy of education facilitating social development and, as a matter of innovation, social evolution. But that implicit philosophy of education results from all of the kinds of capability, all the kinds of human aspects, all epistemic domains, all modes of meaningfulness. Not to dissolve issues of systematically effective innovation into a nebulous holism, issues of conceptuality in our domains of knowledge have constitutive importance. We gain something by just keeping in mind what the important concepts and conceptual issues are.

Interest in this is not a matter of misplaced concreteness or displacement of attention away from practical importances. The integrity of progressive practice has its place in theory, just as the intent of theory is to support practices. But this implies that there is a place for theory among domains—a place for interdomainal theory and interdomainal (or interdisciplinary) theory.

A “hyperintegrated world” calls for hyperintegrated understanding. I wouldn’t (and don’t) presume that I have special facility for contributing to that. But maybe I do. In any case, an aggregate contribution to understanding begins with the engagement of individuals endeavoring to contribute to an advance of understanding. One does what one can. I hope to be useful.

But I also intend to enjoy myself doing it, which remains a matter of going my own way with things. Indulge me.

practicing the "Idea of Human Development"

2009-09-13T15:44:00.000-07:00

Habermas notes in his “Author’s Preface” to Europe: The Faltering Project that “The final essay...[which] deals with the structuring infuence that a normative theory of the public sphere can have on the design of empirical research...is particularly close to my heart.”

Normative theory is different from “Critical Theory.” McCarthy, in his new book, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development is involved with Critical Theory.

Published more or less simultaneously with McCarthy’s book, also by Cambridge UP, is a complementary approach to the idea of human development that is directly relevant to normative theory and its empirical correlates: Successful Societes: how institutions and culture affect health. This book is at least symbolic of the real world of human development research and organizations (especially NGOs) exemplified globally by the IMF and various agencies of the UN who live with the pressing need to act consequentially and are, I would argue, not instances of (or prey to) the ideological pathology that circulates marginally in citizen politics (and the news market) that McCarthy apparently historizes. (I’ve just read the PDF portions of his “Introduction” that are available on the publisher site. In the following, I don’t mean to imply that normal development thinking doesn’t deserve critique. But critique of vastly constructive work is a different matter than critique of pathology.)

My enthusiasm for theorizing notions of well-being, dependent on a conception of health and prevailing interest in well-growing life, are reflected by Successful Societies’s normative-empirical pursuit of the cultural economics of health. This is part of a legacy, it seems to me, of transformed thinking in the social sciences, away from purely materialist notions of social reproduction to rich notions of cultural development.

Part of that evolution of thinking, directed to a general audience, was Harrison and Huntington’s Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (2000), which has its philosophical correlate in contemporary theories of practical rationality. Seeing that kind of work in a context of normative theory, rather than critique of ideology, is an instance of my “switching tables” metaphor of social change (end of the previous posting), which involves a switch of conceptual stance, in light of searching out, detailing, and integrating appealing options to development rather than focusing on alienation from the given or critique of pathology.

McCarthy sees Culture Matters as an instance of the social-scientization of neoracial conceptions of social development (p. 10). But, I wager, the academic field of human development (in the sense applicable to UN work which Successful Societies addresses) does not see Culture Matters that way. The conception of cultural economics in a normative idea of human development—geared toward development against destructive marginality (rather than deconstruction of what’s destructive)—is not about historizing pathology. There is such an immense wealth of resources and work applicable to the universal value of human development. Not to dismiss the importance of critique of ideology, it’s vitally important to not forget the primary importance of facilitating development and having critique directly support that primary value. The calling for normative theory is facilitative and integrative.

Successful Societies would be an exemplary venue for dwelling with what is close to Habermas’ heart (though his essay is concerned with media studies). Successful Societies, generally speaking, addresses the question: Why are some types of societies more successful than others at promoting individual and collective well-being? This is a venture in searching out, detailing, and integrating what works.

Normal philosophical work on “practical reason” is overtly interested in that kind of question, it seems to me. Inquiries into “the good” become inquiries in theory of value, which become theories of action. Contemporary philosophy of action seems to me to be about contributing to the development of normative theory.

Close to my heart is the potential fruitfulness of new ways of interdisciplinary thinking and research, which gels with Habermas’ sense of philosophy as facilitator, with his interest in normative theory, and with the overt interdisciplinarity of Successful Societies.

Let me weave together parts of others’ praise quoted at Amazon.com about Successful Societies, as a matter of exemplifying what the calling of normative theory is:

“This work of ‘collaborative public intellectuals’ is a model of outstanding interdisciplinary cooperation and does an outstanding job crossing borders: disciplines, countries, time periods, types of evidence, and modes of reasoning. Successful Societies establishes robust connections among fields that have been examined largely in isolation from one another and shows scholars how—and why—to weave together cultural, institutional and socio-structural analysis. The integrative book links people from anthropology, sociology, and history to epidemiology, medical sociology, and political science. Deploying an enormous range of empirical data, the inspiration of thinkers from Amartya Sen to Pierre Bourdieu, and a newly humanized understanding of societal success, the volume is also an urgently needed normative manifesto for the indispensability of egalitarian and inclusive ‘social imaginaries’ in tandem with institutional foundations for democratic participation.”

Having that kind of example of normative interest in mind, I want to discuss some points in McCarthy's “Introduction” to his book (from the 10 pages I have available to me; the book is on order). This will provide a sense of my waning interest in Critical Theory relative to, in this case, a very active interest in human development itself. At worst, the following will show retrospectively what presumptions of mine about McCarthy's project had to be abandoned, in view of later fair reading (I’ll keep this posting as is, as a matter of humility or self-effacing candor, whatever). In any case, the following provides further context for my own conceptual prospecting.

McCarthy notes in his “Introduction”:

McC: “Sharpening our understanding of [triumphalist] uses of developmental thinking in the past will put us in a better position to recognize and resist its continuing operation in....[among other contexts] social science and social policy....(2)

G: Fine. But I’m easily frustrated by the failure of the critical interest to be attuned to the constructive work it should be facilitating, not primarily focusing on historizing the marginality of the destructive other.

McC: “Ideologies of race and empire may seem now to belong irretrievably to the past...” (ibid).

G: I think it’s important to recognize that focusing on progressive practice does not imply that the world is beyond destructive ideologies. But bypassing them in terms of constructive development is an alternative to expending scarce resources confronting them. Analogously, nation building is the solution to the appeal of extremism, not critique of the domination that implies some political rationale for extremism. The New Left didn’t dwindle away due to effective critique of capitalism or effective critique of the New Left’s naïve sense of evolving (as verb) institutions. It dwindled away because other options were more appealing. The Soviet Union fell apart because European success was more appealing to its public. Fostering development is more promising than critique of domination that doesn’t directly serve a normative venture in good development.

McC: “..this work...is meant to be a contribution to the critical history of the present” (ibid).

G: But critical history should (a) be seen as a supplement to identified work in constructive, good human development (which is to beg the question of “the good” as primary notion for social theory); and (2) work, as critique, to make good constructiveness prevail.

I’m very involved in taking very seriously an interest in developing a notion of social evolution whose conception of evolution avoids the issues that are integral to McCarthy’s topic; so, I don’t merely dismiss what he’s apparently doing (let alone critique of ideology generally). I have no interest in a triumphalist sense of history in my universalistic interest in human development. I appreciate, I think, the ugliness of social darwinism (which has nothing to do with Darwin, by the way). But that appreciation is lived in terms of work that avoids those problems, rather than focusing on critique of them. These aren’t just complementary stances. Critique is only as good as the constructive alternatives it envisions or supports.

McC: “[Contrasted with historical neocolonialism,] the preferred means of advancing geoeconomic and geopolitical interests today are less overtly violent, often indirect exercises of power and influence by strong states and transnational corporations over weaker states, whose sovereignty is nominally respected” (4).

G: I think it’s useless to say that “the preferred means of...advancing interest...is often,” etc., because what’s important is the sense in which this is not the case for evolving societies and to identify how this not-the-case works to the benefit of human development. Anyone who follows the news regularly knows that critique of hegemonic tendenices is normal conversation in the public sphere, but it’s part of a prevailing interest in problem-solving and facilitation of development that seeks to trump and bypass hegmonic tendencies. Therefore, I hope that McCarthy’s prevailing interest is constructive.

McC: “The striking imbalances of representation in such bodies as the IMF and World Bank – not to mention the G-7 – is an obvious illustration” (ibid).

G: That’s not an obvious illustration of anything constructive. Imbalances of representation are part of the normal discourse of the IMF and World Bank itself! And there are identifiable efforts to right those imbalances that may deserve critique of what’s being done, but deserve critique of what’s being done. (Part of the problem is that developing nations have nationalist views of economics, which are antedated by the international character of real economics.) It seems to me that the G-8 is quite overtly understood in policy circles relative to the G-20 (which is meeting in Pittsburgh later this month; it will be useful to see what that’s actually about, relative to interest in constructive activity). McCarthy is begging the question of what world he’s referring to.

McC: “...the present requirements of global justice include not only establishing relations of non-domination and fair terms of exchange but also, and interdependently, repairing the harmful effects of past injustice” (ibid).

G: So, get into details of those “relations,” relative to a WTO regime that works, a Russia and China that don’t try to make the Security Council irrelevant, a global regime of financial regulation that nationalist interests will abide by, etc. This along with a focus on the real dynamics of regional development and human development is what will “repair the harmful effects of past injustice.”

Next, McCarthy introduces the notion of racializing (which is the conceptuality of social racism).

McC: “Dividing the human species into natural kinds has a long and variegated history” (5).

G: But what’s more important is the extent to which that history is now irrelevant to the real work of human development. What reader of philosophy fails to hear echo in “natural kinds” decades of attention to what this can and cannot mean? Who, to McCarthy’s mind, relative to the human sciences that are informed by contemporary evolutionary discourse, has any relevance to McCathy’s historization of pathology? (He cites some studies later in his “Introduction,” but—to my mind—as a matter of overgeneralizing, which I’ll return to below.) For one thing, “Darwin’s idea of naturally selected and transmitted racial traits” (5) is not part of that history of racialism; a gross misconception of Darwin's sense of evolution was part of that history.

Accordingly, McCarthy rightly notes that “though biological essentialism was characteristic of the modern idea of race, the ‘modern synthesis’ in evolutionary biology finally ended the debate by calling into question the very idea that ‘race’ was a useful scientific concept” (5). So, what is called for is better appreciation of that synthesis relative to contemporary human sciences; how it relates to a viable anthropology; and how that feeds into human development studies and organizational work validly. McCarthy notes that the “mental and moral group differences that is characteristic of the modern idea of race under discussion here” doesn’t pertain to contemporary science (5, ftn. 8). But, to his mind, in effect, a pertaining discourse on race, as somehow relevant to contemporary human sciences, gives warrant (if not urgency) to his apparently-historicist story.

McC: “When Aristotle and his medieval followers talked of things being such-and-such ‘by nature,’ the idea of nature in question was articulated primarily in terms of ‘formal’ and ‘final’ causes rather than in terms of the ‘material’ and ‘efficient’ causes that came to dominate in modern science” (5).

G: But contemporary science isn’t “modern science,” in McCarthy's sense. Indeed, the “conceptual and teleological approach to natural kinds” that McCarthy notes of the Aristotelians is quite concordant with contemporary biological thinking (e.g., materials from the Cambridge Series on Philosophy and Biology that I could cite; also, articles from the journal Biology and Philosophy). On the one hand, McCarthy grants that he’s attending to a bygone conception of science (granting the integrity of contemporary evolutionary biology). On the other hand, he depends on an importance of “modern science” that allegedly implicates current work. But American notions of social science are getting displaced by richer notions of human science.

Also, there is the neo-Aristotelian vein in public policy thinking (e.g., Amartya Sen, Nussbaum, the vast literature associated with them, and the quality-of-life, welfarist economics that is normal for public policy) that is backed by work in cognitive science on capabilities and by philosophical work on practical action that focuses on conceptual issues of “well-being” (and even flourishing). This work dissolves the appeal of antedated science.

But these promising trends in thought are apparently to be bypassed by McCarthy, for the sake of a historiographical juggarnaut of extant domination, a veritable telos of crisis without apparent avenue for dissolution (which is typical of Critical Theory):

McC: “And just as the shift to neoimperialism required modes of domination and exploitation that were compatible with the nominal independence and equality of all nations, the shift to neoracism required modes that were compatible with the formal freedom and equality of all individuals” (7).

To my mind, “The Romantic emphasis on the unique spirit, mentality, and character of each people earlier in the [nineteenth] century,” that McCarthy notes, contributed to a sense of shared humanity in progressive movements within democracies that, don’t forget, won the war against racism that was so much a part of the 20th century. The question is: How do we make that last? But McCarthy’s story is one where that spirit “tended to get displaced by, or combined with, a naturalistic emphasis on common ancestry and shared ‘blood’”(8) that did not prevail, is not ascendent in this century though continuing marginally), and is countered by the ever-increasing communicative transparency of our planetary metropolis and our common ground of humanistic interests (e.g., a reliabily healthy economy) on a very shared planet.

But I digress (an idiom I take from the loveable and incisively smart Gail Collins, columnist for The New York Times). Back to McCarthy...

McC: “By the end of the [nineteenth] century, with the near-total triumph of scientific racism in its post-Darwinian forms, race theory was applied...” (ibid).

G: But there was nothing Darwinian about race concepts in the first place, so the positing of post-Darwinian forms is just rhetoric that occludes gaining appreciation of real biology.

McCarthy is apparently entering into a historization of pathology that is valuable inasmuch as that’s useful for diagnostics in Cultural Studies. But it’s important to not mistake the understanding of past pathology for the contemporary challenges of human development in global society. Cultural Studies is best served by understanding good human development. Detailing the historicality of pathology in the 20th century is marginal to that. But, again, I don’t intend to imply that diagnostic critique of ideological pathology is not an important supplement to advancing “The Idea of Human Development.” No doubt, ...

McC: “...some variants of contemporary neoracism construct ‘race’ in ways similar to some constructions of ‘ethnicity’” (8, ftn. 15).

G: But that is countered by better understanding valid senses of ethnicity, in terms of “culturally transmitted customs, traditions, language, [and] religion” (ibid.), not by detailing a pathology of construction. In other words, neoracialist constructions of ‘ethnicity’ are not about ethnicity at all! Attending to the “logic” of pathology is just that. It has no theoretical merit other than to understand pathology. There is no Force of History backing racist illiteracy, and there is no Neoimperialism dominating world society.

Inasmuch as “this type of culturally, genealogically, and somatically constructed identity/difference has tended to become salient in situations of domination, resistance, and conflict,” it expresses a failure to promote valid understanding of ethnicity. So, the problem for human development is how to promote valid understanding of ethnicity, not historicization of pathology. The challenge for human development is educational and developmental. That can dissolve what critique willfully battles. (One could respond that education must include critique. Sure, but in supplement to building understanding that dissolves interest in that which critique has to otherwise confront.)

McC: “My reasons for accentuating the ‘racism’ component will become evident [further on].”

G: OK. But the proper challenge is that such accentuating should contribute to better understanding for constructions of good human development. Inasmuch as diagnosis of pathology doesn’t supplement better understanding of human development, then it’s unproductive for the Idea.

My fear is that giving importance to “contexts of contemporary neoracism” (9) just serves neoracism, giving it historical “merit,” unless such diagnoses are directly correlated with real efforts to advance good human development.

One could retort that such diagnoses aren’t meant to stand alone, apart from other educational endeavors. So, the question is: How do such diagnoses fit with what prevailing educational endeavors? No degree of reconstructing the history of “heavily segregated housing patterns that gave rise to ethnoracial urban ghettos” is going to contribute to understanding how to avoid that in the future. It seems to uselessly assert, in effect: “Just don’t let that happen again.” How?

McCarthy seems too interested in historicizing marginality (e.g., “campaign posters” [9, ftn. 16] that is “only one example” of some presumed mass of signs that marginality is gonna get you.).

And, as a matter of balance (for understanding extremism), let’s not forget the relationship that disgusting anti-Muslim sentiment (ftn. 17) has to disgusting “Muslim” sentiment toward modernity (including the confusion of valid holy striving with war mongering and dying to gain purity in heaven that is made into an aura of “jihad”).

McC: “The point of applying the term ‘neoracist’ to these and other recent discourses is to emphasize their logical and functional similarities to the classical paradigm” (10).

G: I suspect that this is a bogus project: linking contemporary marginality with a Force of History (“the classical paradigm”). The historization gives diffuse, confused, and illiterate pathologies a structural integrity they don’t have and don’t deserve.

McC: “Real or ascribed somatic markers are taken as signs of deeper differences” (ibid).

G: Why?

McC: “Stereotypical representations combining phenotypic features with cultural and behavioral traits are used to include and exclude” (ibid).

G: But that’s no matter of “deeper differences”; that’s just a functional coherence of pathology at the surface level, which one would expect of shallow, animal prejudice.

McC: “And the negative stereotyping of ‘others’ functions to explain and legitimate ongoing racial stratification” (ibid).

G: Legitmate? By whom? The IMF? No. European governments? I doubt it. (I see no effort to legitimate racial stratification by U.S. government). Is McCarthy endeavoring to justify a historicization of marginality that’s posited?

McC: “Raced bodies signifying differences in culture and psychology; racially inflected structures of inequality; and racialized grammars of difference serving as ideological justifications thereof seem grounds enough to continue to speak of racism after the demise of its relatively short-lived scientific version” (10).

G: I think there are better grounds for putting one’s energy into speaking more about real bodies signifying integrities among validly different cultures and psychologies; giving more “substance” of humanity to thin notions of formal equality; and enriching narratives of human coherence relative to shared human interests, etc.

McC: “To be more precise, ....what is referred to as ‘neoracism’ or ‘cultural racism’ does, in fact, come in social-scientific versions.”

G: Marginally. That’s dissolved by doing good science and teaching good science. I would bet that hints of cultural racism are altogether missing in the real work of influential public policy formation, the design of appropriate development programs, cost-effective implementations, dealing with real politics, and doing useful evaluations of development programs. That’s not to say that there aren’t “ethnic myths” circulating and people “whitewashing race” (10, ftn. 18). But bad faith is countered by good work, better than by battling bad faith on its own ground.

So, I do not find plausible that there is a “general pattern of ethnoracial thinking in social science and social policy” (10). Such a claim, couched in terms of buzz phrases (10) from decades I lived through, too, Tom (we’ve corresponded a little over the years), do nothing to contribute to better understanding the reality of poverty in terms of prospects for human development in terms of real programs and the normative theoretical backing such programs can have (relating to health care, education, regional economic development, etc.).

McC: “The links [in the “general pattern”] were forged historically in various systems of racial oppression, adaptation to which by those oppressed gave rise to “cultural pathologies” of various sorts” (ibid).

G: Such a notion of pathology being “forged” to become a general pattern in our complexly diffuse societies is not made credible by McCarthy’s entrance into his topic. I know the arguments for systematically distorted communication that are supposed to be engineered by domination. But I found that critique of fascism increasingly invalid as the 20th century muddled toward the end of the Cold War. I see McCarthy writing to the past.

McC: According to the views I am characterizing as neoracist ideologies, such oppressive systems have long since been dismantled;...(ibid).

G: Well, godforbid I would be an instance of neoracism for not finding his entrance into his topic to indicate a general pattern.

In any case, practicing the idea of human development is about other things.

McCarthy may have done definitive work in critical explication of racialist thinking relative to the 20th century. The emeritus philosopher, leading voice for Critical Theory in the U.S., and dear friend of Jürgen Habermas is surely exemplary of his time and the New Left legacy in academic philosophy. I honor that, even as I differentiate the constructive interest in human development from his critical project. I don’t mean to dismiss his project. He may be doing a great service for Cultural Studies' understanding of the historicality of racialism.

But I don't find credible the rhetoric of neoimperialist domination, etc., that’s supposed to give urgency to his project for a 21st century audience, beyond being a study in the historicality of racialism that may be valuable in its own right for Cultural Studies or critical anthropology, etc. I hope that his book has as much interest in the Idea of Human Development itself as he apparently has in polemic.

My polemic echoes too many years of leftism in the 20th century.

a healthy market is a fair market

2009-08-28T15:48:00.000-07:00

Jürgen Habermas is residing on Long Island this autumn, hosting a seminar on political theology. I haven’t intended to get into Habermasian exchanges soon, let alone another round of exchanges on religion. But the domain is relevant to prospects for health care legislation in the U.S., so I forwarded to the Habermas group the link to an article in today’s New York Times that is pertinent, and I provided some commentay. But text turns up lousy at the Yahoo! Groups site (turns up better in the emails distributed) and isn’t revisable. So, here’s my commentary, subject to improvement.

“Some Roman Catholic Bishops Assail Health Plan” reports that some Catholic bishops are urging parishoners to call their members of Congress to object to Obama-led health care reform, due to the likely provision that constitutionally-permitted “Choice” toward family planning and abortion would be supported by health care legislation.

“The bishops’ backlash reflects a struggle within the church over how heavily to weigh opposition to abortion against concerns about social justice. ’It is the great tension in Catholic thought right now,’ said M. Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at Notre Dame.”

This news story appeals to my general interest in finding journalistic entrances into—excuse my prolix character—philosophical importances in institutional policies; in this case, not more runaround about the politicization of religion by the faithful, which is a citizen right (but which can’t be jurisprudentially recognized, given church-state separation).

President Obama (a Constitutional lawyer) appeals for prevalence of “moral convictions” among religious voters to warrant support for his legislation. But the entire organization of activities—from floor debates in Congress to pastoral letters—is designed (unwittingly or not) to not allow for dwelling with the character of moral convictions. On the one hand, a wager is proffered by Obama that the aggregate of moral convictions is such that its holding sway will favor his policy. On the other hand, questioning Catholic policy is not an official option—or it registers a schism in the Church that has to yield to Vatican policy.

The appeal to moral conviction, then, is the way that public dialogue promotes the schism, tacitly siding with liberal trends in the Church that support the Obama policy. The conservative Church would steer dialogue away from principled reflection through keeping focus on abortion rather than on the deliberative struggle with moral conviction that prevails in the lived event of choice (deciding whether or not to end a pregnancy), based on an individualized interplay of conscience, evaluation of one’s life situation, and policy toward “being” “human”. Many persons who are so focused on abortion are not able to carry this kind of reflection very far, and this suits the Church very well, as it’s premised on flock dependence on the shepherd (which has historically fought the dissemination of literacy that served Protestantism).

“In his conference call with religious voters last week, Mr. Obama denied that his plan would mean government financing for abortions, calling such assertions ’fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider to be a core ethical and moral obligation.’”

What is that core obligation? The Obama plan provides for citizen choice in health care plans, such that persons opposed to financing abortion may choose a plan that prohibits financing for abortion; so, the sway of the aggregate moral conviction is taken into the market. The core obligation is evidently to respect others’ right of access to a fair market.

“Liberal Catholic groups argued that most bishops still strongly supported the broader goals of the health care proposals. ’There are certainly some strident voices out there that want to see health care reform abandoned on the back of this issue,’ said Victoria Kovari, acting director of the liberal Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, ’but I don’t think that is where the bishops are.’”

So, an alliance for the common good would have prevail the broader goals of health care, which might be framed as so many ways of ensuring human rights of access to comprehensive health care, and, presumably, Obama would advocate ensuring/creating a fair market as a core obligation of government’s duty of care.

Liberalism is at least about keeping the broader human interest prevalent in public policy. Bishops who support this would, with Bishop Murphy of Rockville Centre, N.Y., “emphasiz[e] the priority the church place[s] on coverage for the poor, calling health care ’not a privilege but a right....It is a fundamental issue of human life and dignity.’”

So, the issues aren’t theological (as the conflict of interpretations belongs to theology itself and gains its motivations outside of theology in the first place). History has shown that theology can’t prevail in a fair market of ideas, so conservatism is about controlling access to the market, be it controlling literacy or controlling public options. The vaguely implied philosophical importances here aren’t about philosophical issues of theology, but very secular issues about the potential of open markets to affect cultural life.

So, I pose to professor Habermas: What is the real problem that urges a focus these days in the U.S. on political theology? Even in Iran, the intratheocratic struggles for power are not about theology, as all sides find theological justification. It’s “simply” about power to control the market of ideas (shown as well in the silliness about spies in Iran that has been recently reported: That’s all about threats arising from an enriched market of ideas).

What’s philosophically interesting is how the market of ideas works when it has its way. It causes increases in literacy, deliberativeness, diversity, and complexity of public understanding. We might better focus on how to promote that rather than finding critique of theology to be especially useful.

I have a fondness for what I call the school lunch room model of social change: Given lots of options for tables of others to sit with (as, say, a market of ideas), people are more likely to change tables (going for what’s more appealing) than to sit and argue about where they are (critique that depends on staying at a given table). The appeal of the market of ideas is incomparable to mere critique (which may succeed without guidance to better options, leaving one in a view from Nowhere), not to underestimate the importance of critique in a market of ideas. It’s the flourishing of the market of ideas that gives critique its telos.

I would argue that a “common good” of human flourishing is what makes rights appealing, and it’s the appeal of an argument, not the “force of the better argument” (Habermas) that makes an argument persuasively better.

searching for sustainability

2009-05-15T20:50:00.000-07:00

I've had Web pages I forgot I had, so part of recent work has been linking to and from them, after "discovering" them.

An amazing project in applied philosophy as progressive policy work is Bryan G. Norton's 2002 Searching for Sustainability, which I discussed briefly in 2003, prior to "the evolving project," but which is truly exemplary of what my project idealizes, as a matter of bridging abstraction and practicality progressively. It amazes me that I forgot it. It's dense, but Norton's endeavor is wonderful.

theory of communicative action, 2008

2008-10-25T18:26:00.000-07:00

The times are amazing. This season, are we witnessing the original emergence of a truly global "conversation" (among Euro-American and Euro-Asian ministries) on the governance of democratic economies? The recent globality of finance-capitalistic advents have relied on a notion of inherently (or natural, social-darwinist) self-corrective rationality, what Alan Greenspan calls "the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works" that fails with exotic financial instruments. (That "critical functioning" always was, since Bretton Woods, more regulatorily constrained than pure free marketers wanted to admit.) All leading and emerging economies now anticipate formation of a new Bretton-Woods-like balance between innovation and regulation through tighter interregional coordination of economic policies.

Dear professor Habermas' U.S. lectures this month on religious challenges to a secular self-understanding of modernity seem so 2004, though being probably (I haven't heard/read them) as philosophically pertinent to their topic as his published work has been. Reactionary nationalism that is partly fueled by religious reactionism is clearly relevant to the EU having failed to ratify a constitution, such that the EU might now deal more efficiently with its place in the global financial meltdown.

Habermasian notions of cosmopolitan politics are certainly important for practically understanding the world's need for governmental multilateralism across economies and across modes of each economy (financial vis-à-vis commodity economies). The complexities of national support for multilateralist leadership tax the lifeworlds of highly-stressed voters in recessional localities. The mechanics of the world involve a planetary metropolia—a netweave of leading regions that more-or-less antedate the nation state, while the typical citizen can barely manage the local time needed for a healthy family and neighborhood, let alone understanding her/his potential for global citizenship (which requires active, if not exemplary, support for educational time that is unavailable or unfunded).

Synchronic complexity of whatever sort is at least tacitly part of any valid hermeneutical lens for employing a treatise written 30 years ago, as was Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action (which I tried recently to briefly contextualize in Habermas' career; an authoritative outline of his work is also available online). The age of Theory of Communicative Action implies a diachronic condition of Habermasian communicative action (the career) that has built on TCA through succeeding decades, through equally-important work up to Between Facts and Norms (relative to TCA); and including philosophically-basic work beyond that, which implicates a notion of "Habermasian" thinking prior to TCA, building on a formal pragmatics of the mid-'70s whose nature was ontologically uncommitted, but whose discursive sense of inquiry has grown beyond that, even beyond his mid-'80s sense of discourse ethics (I would argue), in terms of recent responses to neurophilosophy. [Excuse the length of my sentence, but it seems fair to the situation of discursive diachrony.] There, I face my own issues of inquiry that may cause me to revise a new Habermasian essay rather than read for edification or critique.

But anyone's reading of a very diachronized text (so to speak) is a venture in one's self formation or a venture in the development of one's own thinking, since the diachronic career of context can't be readily considered in simply a reading of the text (though one might argue that the text deserves to stand on its own; but what is that?). So, one likely employs the text as projective other (one's own "Habermas" in the construal of discursive points accumulating in one's own way of reading) in a process of discursive learning that is about the midland of understanding between text and reader. You can't get more immanently hermeneutical than that: self reflection (not necessarily self-reflection) in the construction of meaningfulness (i.e., senses of large-scale context), which is not yet a matter of evaluating the text, as a matter of significances of whatever point or theme.

Anyway, who has time to display close reading, especially online? Interposting online (stance and response, then response to response) becomes some kind of conceptual jazz, jamming in words about compositions that may (with discursive inquiry) be rigorously conceived and systematically elusive to brief opinion, except as stimulants for exchanges basically unrelated to the motivating author.

No wonder, then, that a philosopher's work might only be honored by this medium that pretends to attend to the work, given our interminably time-crunched lives, especially as a place to note longer work (actual discursive inquiry) from elsewhere. Even taking a manageable quote and doing something worthwhile with it is at best exemplary of reading that must presume a lot of background for the reader, which may turn follow-up interaction into couples doing a performance together that turns other readers into audience, rather than really being other participants (and the couples cross-pollinate, and the posting threads get too confusing to continue). Better to be sitting in an actual symposium discussion section where you can stop someone to say you're confused. Better yet a seminar, which the online medium fails to approximate. A dramaturgical type of reading may become the frontstage of a possibly self-concealing diachrony of both the work's backstage career and the history of interacting readers, becoming traces of each other.

Anyway, a large-scale condition is at stake for me: The character of conceptual work, as such (the "nature" of conceptual work), is in question (apart from the hermeneutical condition of online interaction). We each have our own philosopher in reading any philosopher. Does the real text exist? (Derrida outstrips Gadamer.) Is any writer largely a nebulous venue for one's own self formation? (The other is enowned for the sake of the reader's own argumentative coherence.) How many Immanual Kants are there, by the way?

Anyway, what difference does careful conceptual formulation make in the hyper-evolving environment of our 24/7 news cycle and global-villaged information ecology? We always were strapped with our ephemerality of understanding, faced with contrary nature: The hopes of metaphysicalism (born so many millennia ago from imputed specificity of natural powers) that was supposed to provide reliable coordination of progress across generations—the hopes were dashed in the 20th century's emergent realization of our ultimately-open evolutionarity. (God didn't abandon humanity; rather, "God-given" freedom was always already anthropologically and historically relative.) Romances of structuralism dissolved in post-structuralist reconcilations about playing for keeps about irony and contingency and solidarities that pass way.

So, what is "theory"? One might wonder how to write a theory of communicative action for the second decade of another century of accelerating social evolution. Who could have imagined, in 1980, the Web.

McCain Campaigns for Obama

2008-10-23T18:24:00.000-07:00

In numerous appearances, John McCain claims that Obama seeks to "spread the wealth around" rather than not do so. Undecided voters at McCain rallys have been observed stroking their chins and muttering to each other: "Sounds good to me."

an American ethos
"I won't wish my opponent luck but I do wish him well," McCain said, at the 2008 Alfred E. Smith dinner in New York, October 16, 2008.

(Jim Young/Reuters)

Edward Cardinal Egan watches.

Tectonic shifts in The Estate

2008-09-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

Like every news junkie (I imagine), I'm fascinated by what's happening this month to Wall Street.

I don't think that the financial crisis is a fundamental (structural) economic event (though a severe credit crisis has a recessional—viscous—domino effect). It's a milestone for democratic capitalism—what I call the fairly free market. More fairness (public protection) is coming to the U.S. market.

It's not the case that "the free market" (such as it was, as Greenspanian dynamic of trust and "punishment" by market forces) is "for all intents and purposes...dead in America," quoting Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning (yesterday). Today, it's not that the Treasury proposal would "take away the free market and institute socialism in America" (Reuters) by broadly intervening or by, say, highly regulating capital reserve requirements on risk. There was no free market, strictly speaking; it's been heavily socialized for many decades, via the vastly complex parametric and regulatory regime that new financial instruments have escaped. To regulate out-of-control financial opacity in distributed risk is not to socialize "the market"—not even to socialize "the" financial market, which loosely netweaves itself with regional and interregional commodity markets.

The high road of Democrats

2008-09-04T16:40:00.000-07:00

Just ignore the Republicans (as much as possible)—bypass them—to focus on what local Americans need. Stay realistic. Stay idealist. That is: Be pragmatic.

The Republicans can "believe that real people are idiots," according to Judith Warner, NY Times, because many voters don't understand what's being done. "What the G.O.P. is selling," writes Paul Krugman, "is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you. Or to put it another way, the G.O.P. is still the party of Nixon."

"Sphere of Influence": Russian force vs. European appeal

2008-08-24T18:18:00.000-07:00

Russian force will ultimately lose the game of spheres to the European market. Ronald Steel (a professor of international relations at USC) advises more respect for Russian power—yeah, like respecting an angry animal—but more Cold War thinking, we don't need.

A Big Chill is the Bush league gift to McCain—but Russia is the real culprit

2008-08-16T18:33:00.000-07:00

Though the Bush league is willing to do whatever it takes to keep a hawkish Republican in the White House ("Summertime in Georgia"), Russia really does provide the Bush league election-year opportunity for a confrontation with NATO. "It isn’t just a question of spheres of influence; it’s about domination" (NY Times, 8/24).

Summertime in Georgia

2008-08-14T18:14:00.000-07:00

Clearly, Georgian president Saakashvili is a pawn in The Geopolitical Game, where, in part, Bush league interest in NATO expansion provokes conflict that bolsters John McCain’s hardball image against Barak Obama’s soft-power approach to foreign affairs. The more dangerous the world feels, the better for Republicans. But global warming remains the ultimate arbiter.

August 29
Need a vacation spot that will be the envy of your neighbors?

"...Elionora Bedoyeva, South Ossetia’s minister for youth affairs and tourism, was preparing to once again pitch the region as an eco-tourism destination.....[Y]oung Ossetian men have been carrying out military operations in the mountains for years, she said, and would make wonderful guides" (NY Times, 8/29).

geoengineering as primary philosophical venue

2008-08-12T20:14:00.000-07:00

In case you've gotten dissociative about global warming (crisis fatigue), consider the prospect that common dissociativeness throughout consumerist society increasingly entails need for radical measures taken by powers romancing planetary-scale technologies that would allegedly Save our children from tragic suffering, but could devastate the Earth further.

"[If]the planet came to depend on chemicals in space or orbiting mirrors or regular oceanic infusions of iron, system failure could mean catastrophic — and immediate — climate change," writes Cornelia Dean in today's New York Times.

Senses of cosmopoly may be compelled by global warming to look increasingly like endeavors of environmental engineering at planetary scale.

But it's not that ethics is basically biopolitical, but that biopolitics is fundamentally geoethical (thus, too, ethical theory that is appropriate to the human condition)—as the locus of the Conversation of humanity should need to be starkly singular (but without hegemonic sway), and we are charged by nature to now engineer our own evolution out of the chaos of our hyperpluralist sphere of communications.

How do we, first of all, bring to the public a "grand debate over first principles" that ordinarily never gets out of the public policy institute, such that the resulting public discourse compellingly (democratically) guides "a political establishment with guaranteed indefinite stability," whatever that might be?

Might a geoethics be the new "First Philosophy"? That doesn't seem very thought-provoking, since a crisis-fatigued reader is likely quite aware that talk of "global ethics" and person-planet synergies, whatever, is already part of what's tiring. More conceptual conversation is not what we need.

But, you know, I have in mind something unobvious

Religiously-motivated programs and broadly-public goods

2008-07-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

The Obama campaign sees a proper place for religious organizations in the sphere of public funding, but any stance would be controversial. Today, I’ve tried to provide a way of steering between competing camps—between evangelical motives and separation of church and state—relative to recent discussion of Senator Obama’s interest by The New York Times.

That might be regarded as a street-level version of my June 22 discussion of Habermas' recent lecture, noted earlier. But I really am moving further away from Habermasian views of his ever-important topics that make his evolving project so distinctive, though apart from mine.

living with "the evolving project"

2008-07-01T17:44:00.000-07:00

Originally, the evolving project represented engagement in a post-Habermasian sense of philosophy that had been developing for many years (and continues). Habermas' great influence wasn't, isn't orienting my development, but remains an engaging textual partner.

Meanwhile, that continuing development has yielded philosophical discussions via Webpage that express episodes—lasting Moments, it seems—of mediating ongoing development (journaling Moments in a journey), but not pretending to represent (or conceptually capture) what I'm basically doing. What comprehensive conceptuality I've achieved (transitorily satisfactory, but feeling an evolutionarity) belongs to explicit work unrepresented online.

Generally, my development never was primarily Habermasian; so, claiming "post-Habermasian" engagement with Habermas' work isn't primarily a matter of distancing myself from his discursive axis (his great example of intellectual individuation), rather getting explicit about a philosophical sense of Appropriation that led me to his work in the first place. Habermas' inestimable influence on my appreciation of sociocentric thinking was never primordially sociocentric, as his thinking is (a point emphasized by him in his recent biographical comments, "Public Space and Political Public Sphere – The Biographical Roots of Two Motifs in my Thought," Between Naturalism and Religion, Polity, 2008).

Engagement with Habermasian senses of issues will continue as "the evolving project," but material posted 2004-2007 is becoming more precursory than expressive of ongoing engagements. But "the evolving project" will gain new discussions, inasmuch as Habermas' work remains engaging (which fellow Habermasians easily cause), and earlier discussions are incipient stages of topics which remain central to me for post-Habermasian work (i.e., work that remains relative to Habermas' career). My ever-genealogical self-interest will keep my Habermas-relative work conscientious about its continuity with "the evolving project." In fact, all 2004-2007 discussions have been dissected into all their themes, for further development. So, the project will develop; it'll gain new foci, a transformation of identity as assemblage of foci, if not as a concerted direction (simulating some telos of evolving).

"Post-secularity" as just modern humanism

2008-06-22T16:11:00.000-07:00

A shareable (learnable) sense of ever-developing humanity can resolve conflict between religionists and non-religionists, in terms of a humanistic appreciation for cultural diversity?

re: "A Featured Spot for Rove Raises at Least One Eyebrow"

2008-06-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

I write letters to columnists frequently, but don't bother to note that here. (I also don't bother to note that I continue, irregularly, to post to the Obama campaign.) But here's one of several I sent today, in this case to Peter Steinfels of The New York Times:

Dear Mr. Steinfels,

The logic of your column today is unassailable (and very entertaining—though the reality implied is anything but). The narrativity highlights for me an interest I increasingly feel, which pertains to a surrealist disposition in the high journalist voice—call it a philosophical import of the highly raised eyebrow (so entertaining in Gail Collins' columns, so overtly surreal in Mareen Dowd's columns). It's something, I think, that must become the fate of the seasoned journalist who doesn't quit the world to do gardening in some backcountry. Though journalism is always in a mode of raised eyebrow, the reality cramps the eyes, as the hand must still write objectively.

After witnessing so much "suffering caused by war, hunger," etc.—and so much duplicity—the journalist goes on writing anyway (thank goodness), about The Way It Looks, objectively speaking, in the economy of what can be witnessed. All the world's a theater where Derridean quote marks are annuled, as all words are already always traces protected by the fair game that we must nevertheless hold sacred.

I often think that success in educational reform undermines Republicanism, so "No Child Left Behind" is really about keeping "the assault on reason" properly governed. No wonder China is such a great investment opportunity. "But I digress" (Gail Collins might say).

Indeed, "creating a 'culture of life' is a multidimensional task." Task? If you take all of the standardly-hot-button issues as somehow belonging together (Choice, same-sex rights, evolution, etc.), the Somehow (the "etc"-ness of it all) is an epochal challenge to self understanding. Religion arose amid the insatiable need for population growth, a matter of public health at heart vested in a moral compass that illiterate society could understand. The legacy of population maximization is deeply enmeshed with the conception of morality as such. The Pope must say what the Church is all about. The Bible is what it is. And that's the way it goes.

July 7: Mr. Steinfels replies:

I'm not sure that I understand 100 percent of your note and I'm not sure that I agree 100 percent with what I do understand, but your're onto something about those of us who have been reporting and opinionating for a good while. My copy editor (copy editors, as you probably know, write the headlines) deserves credit for the one raised eyebrow. I think he was telling me that his wasn't raised!

Best wishes.

The Dalai Lama looks at his glasses before an interview

2008-05-22T15:31:00.000-07:00

My header is part of the actual caption of this Reuters photo from today.

Actually, the Dalai Lama is already in the interview, doing a visual assertion.

Campaign '08

2008-03-05T14:33:00.000-08:00

Too many blogs, too little time. But I'll try to contribute some decent ideas to the campaign, beginning with my support for Barak Obama, which I will continue weekly (?), if not daily.

But a burgeoning administration can only be one planetary voice in any evolving "democratic union" (which requires of itself a primacy of communicative process that is globally attuned), an element, for me at least, in an evolving humanistic interest that I'm beginning to explore in some new discursive ways.

Way down the road, it may all seem to work together as a realistic philosophical idealism—true pragmatism—an endless campaign for self-designing evolution, in the truly human interest.

The linguistic turn is over.

2008-02-23T13:22:00.000-08:00

Skimming the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article supplement to "Relativism," on "The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis," it seems that Chris Swoyer is undecided about the ultimate merit of "the" hypothesis (though maybe he’s just being pedagogically useful). I've long thought that cognitive science antedates the linguistic turn in philosophy, and this is greatly corroborated by The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, whose whole dramatically corroborates the upshot of its chapter on linguistic relativity that (it seems to me) the Hypothesis isn't very philosophically interesting any longer.

It seems to me that cognitive linguistics registers a profound turn for anthropological thinking, in light of cognitive science (more specifically: in light of evolutionary cognitive neuroscience [ECS]), such that the heart of the future of philosophy is now relative to that kind of discursive formation (i.e., philosophy primarily in light of ECS, rather than philosophy primarily in light of, say, physics), beyond "the really hard problem" (i.e., accounting for consciousness) that Owen Flanagan recently recounts, to a locus of the so-called "question of Being" (we never outgrow The Question!) now in our conceptuality of evolution as such.

So, I hope that the SEP (already, indeed, in Chris' estimation, "the best...philosophical encyclopedia in the world") will grow to greatly register the evolutionary turn in philosophy (in light of the great biological turn in leading science). These are exciting times, against those who wonder whether there is any future for philosophy at all.

[The above is an email sent to Chris that I’ve only revised to no longer be directly addressing him.]

indigestion caused by scientific beauty

2008-01-15T15:20:00.000-08:00

You think you've got problems of understanding, maybe. Poor astrophysics: "Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?," by Dennis Overbye, NY Times, Jan. 15, 2008.

The article at least dramatizes an absurdity of rendering mathematical physics in ordinary terms, but also suggests the ultimate reality of mind in "nature": Facing the edge of our capability. (Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin surmises that we haven't evolved far enough to create a mathematics adequate for decidability in quantum cosmology: The Trouble with Physics, 2006.)

The notion of multiple universes (the Multiverse) seems to be a way of expressing a regionality of physics (a "universe") in The Universe, i.e., in the Multiverse that yields Big Bangs and infinitely variable kinds of physicality. Most universes (the speculation goes) don't have a physicality that leads to stars, thus possibly to conditions for a biology that can become intelligent, then maybe (in at least our case) allowing for evolution of cosmomathematical capability, whose learning curve would inevitably include a history of paradigm dissolutions (with aporetic, even funny, ends). Our astronomy is looking through a fishbowl "universe," our Hubble Volume, which happens to express an anthropic region of the Multiverse.

What difference can any result of research in this area make? What's so fascinating is this interest of inquiry that's apparently for it's own sake, as I mentioned to Mr. Overbye some years ago.

I told him today: "To this philosopher, you've got the coolest journalism job on the planet."

He replied, in part: "...It is a fun job, when not nerve wracking."

a note on objectivity vs. factuality vs. normativity

2008-01-12T14:59:00.000-08:00

I sent the following note today to Brian Leiter, Professor of Law and Philosophy, U. of Texas, Austin:

Professor Leiter,

You know, Jürgen Habermas has received a lot of attention in philosophy, including philosophy of law (e.g., the anthology Habermas on Law and Democracy, 1998, oriented around his Between Facts and Norms). So, when you write, in "Leiter Reports," that "I don't think much of Habermas as a philosopher-—who does?" (11/08/03), I think: Gee, what's wrong with me?

You say "Habermas is too philosophically insubstantial, and too derivative when he tries to be substantial" (9/14/03). Such a waste of paper, then, at MIT Press over the years.

Granted, you change moods: "Although, I have my reservations about Habermas as a philosopher, there is no question that he is an important public intellectual and critic,....And the integrity of Habermas...comes out very nicely" (8/27/03).

Yet, the most, perhaps, that you've said blogwise about your ambivalence (reservations in August become dismissal in November) is at your Legal Philosophy Blog, where you rely on someone else's brief characterization of Habermas' sense of meaning (re: David Gray, 11/16/07), which happens to be invalid; but you apparently don't see that. So, I surmise that you haven't given much attention to Habermas' work---OK, who does?

Have you given substantial attention to Habermas' work offline? I would hope so from a Chair in Law and Professor of Philosophy.

Anyway, at your Legal Philosophy Blog, you write: "Habermas's understanding of objectivity as intersubjectivity may actually be inconsistent with what is alleged to be the original meaning of 'cruel'....For it seems that on the Habermas view, the objective referent of a moral term like 'cruel' is constituted by intersubjective agreement [under the right conditions] about that referent, which is not really a view that any moral realists would, in fact, accept as adequate to their realism. Maybe someone can think of a counter-example?"

I find something quite useful here: an opportunity to distinguish objectivity, factuality, and normativity, in keeping with Habermas' view of meaning.

We may both entertain the same proposition, though one of us believes it to be false and the other believes it to be true. There's an objectivity about the proposition, as to the shared conditions under which its validity can be established. The false proposition is still a proposition. The objectivity of the proposition (as to what the proposition is: its components, its proper pronunciation, what may be logically implied by it, etc.) is quite intersubjectively determinable. Its validity isn't a matter of simple agreement, but that we have the same proposition before us is quite so.

"The original meaning of 'cruel'" is an odd thing, quite different, I would think, from what's going on with "originalism" in law, since originalism is about a determinate first stipulation of meaning, whereas ordinary terms of language have an etymology and, commonly, a range of meaning that has become normative as range, such that a given token of 'cruel' expresses a context-dependent choice among lexically-normative options. "Cruel" punishment (re: def. 1a at Webster's Unabridged) is no "cruel" joke (def. 2a). There is no such thing as the original meaning of 'cruel', unless you're getting etymological. But etymologism is obviously not a valid approach to meaning-in-use.

So, "the objective referent of a moral term like 'cruel'" may be "constituted by intersubjective agreement," in the sense that we may agree that a given use of 'cruel' is closest to a specific lexical sense of the modifier, such that a specific referent is cruel in a specifiable sense. But there's no suggestion by Habermas anywhere that meaning is some--what?---simple denotation? It's an evidentiary matter whether or not a person is "disposed to inflict pain especially in a wanton, insensate, or vindictive manner" (def. 1a). The moral claim here is not yet met by saying that, of course, the actual infliction is unacceptable (and punishable). Why is the actual infliction unacceptable? A response to this question is likely a "moral" issue, but a moral response to that question doesn't require a moral realism, though a moral-realist response is an option.

There's a substantial distance between issues of evidentiary meaning and moral theory. This distance is expressed in the difference in kinds of validity claims that issues of factuality and normativity are. I submit to you that Habermas has a substantial appreciation of the difference.

some deeply-valued empathy for religious minds

2007-11-11T20:51:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't say I have a religious mind—a spiritual mind, yes—but I am committed to appreciating, as best I can, religious perspectives in contemporary political life (as time allows; it's not a high priority), especially relative to Habermas' interest.

Today, I defended Habermas' openness to religious voices in "the public sphere" against a misreading of his intent in the current issue of Philosophy & Social Criticism, beginning with somewhat expressive reaction to the abstract of the essay before writing today in light of a careful reading of the article.

some writing on the wall about a holy grail

2007-11-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

Oil and coal—hydrocarbon fuel—is waste of the Earth, which of course takes millions of years to accumulate, and it's not in the human interest to learn to fabricate it, due to greenhouse effects. Yet, we have learned to fabricate nuclear energy, but its waste is not practically disposable, unless we abandon a hundred-mile radius around nuclear waste dumps for about 25,000 years, as we've not yet discovered the holy grail of energy: hydrogen-fusion-produced energy that breeder reactors would generate. But that will happen this century (cost-effectiveness of hydrogen-fuel cells is already within sight); so, a dwindling politics of oil will leave the Arab region to whatever alternative resourcefulness that it has been able to develop in the meantime.

Iran needs to divert oil income from a welfare state to greater modernization while it can. Nuclear power will give it greater discretion with oil-based income in regional competition that traces back to Babylonian times.

But the name of the global game is technological infrastructure for self-governing employment of the holy grail of energy when it arrives. This is a game of political epistemology.

In this game, Arab union, due to its Sunni openness to the West, is far ahead of the Persian campaign of fundamentalist Shi'ism. The Russian alliance with fundamentalist Iran is just a business opportunity, as they need all the clients they can win in the global technology market that the north Atlantic economies lead, as Russia amasses oil-based wealth that China can only envy, and the Earth writes its ultimate reality in the wind, Chinese, Russian, and otherwise.

Who will prevail in the global market for hydrogen-generated power (which, by the way, includes solar power, which is what breeder reactors would emulate)? Will it be a north Atlantic/Australasian alliance? the Russian orbit? Probably not the Chinese orbit; yet, the Pacific market and flourishing character of U.S./Australasian knowledge production seems to favor Chinese-U.S. relations over Chinese-Russian ones (generally favoring anchors in the evolution of knowledge over oil rigs). (It seems to me that accelerating Indian power is clearly within the north Atlantic/Australasian orbit.) But the great reality for Iranian isolation is a singular global ground of Russian-American, Russian-EU, Russian-Chinese, Euro-Arab, Asian-African, South American-Asian, etc., etc., evolution of knowledge that ultimately marginalizes Sunni-Shi'ite conflict.

A couple of days ago, an Arab consortium offered to provide Iran with enriched uranium for nuclear energy, and today, Russia balked. All the world's a theater. "Prince Saud said Iran was considering the offer. He said the enrichment plant should be in a neutral country, such as Switzerland" (Reuters, 11/2). To me, the tacit implication here is that Arab power buys the principle that provision of enriched uranium be "neutrally" controlled altogether, which is implicit in the idea of a U.N. IAEA regime of transparency that ensures non-proliferation—which Iran has been dismissing in its conflict with Sunni modernization. It's not news that Arab competition with Iran is "West"-leaning, subscribing to the U.N. order, which is so much a feature of global economics (mirrored by the WTO), so modernly contrary to the fundamentalist Shi'ite conception of power.

A few minutes ago (as of this writing), Iran transposed its resistance onto the consortium proposal by expressing that it "would be ready to join a body that would provide enriched uranium" (Reuters), rather than (as the Arab consortium suggests) be a client of that provision under neutral auspices (such a modern notion), and Iran even claims that the idea of the consortium originated with Iran.

In my view, the fundamentalist Shi'ite welfare state is nearing collapse. Arab economies have outstripped the dream of a new caliphate. Chinese alliance with Iran is a fragile opportunism, while pollution is quickly choking the Chinese economy. Green industry within the more healthy U.S. and EU economies is flourishing. Though the evolution of knowledge is broadly distributed within the ecology of leading political economies, it will be only the nations with high-tech infrastructure that will be able to manage hydrogen-based energy production, and it will be those nations that will be greatly advantaged in the energy-hungry future. Fundamentalist Shi'ism sees the writing on the wall and flails.

It is time for Iran to join the prevailing union of knowledge management and become full participants in the U.N.-accordant order. Iran will not flourish outside of this planetary union.

aspects of a sense of evolutionary engineering

2007-10-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

Oct. 19

Today's finalization of the European Union treaty caused me to read Habermas' essay, [PDF}"A political constitution for the pluralist world society?" in terms of today's event, a discussion now available as: "Habermas and 'pluralist world society': a sympathetic critique."

Oct. 19
Talk about planetary communication for coordination of human development...

"Next week," begins this week's Science Editorial, "Feeding a Hungry World, "more than 200 science journals throughout the world will simultaneously publish papers on global poverty and human development—a collaborative effort to increase awareness, interest, and research about these important issues of our time. Some 800 million people still experience chronic and transitory hunger each year. Over the next 50 years, we face the daunting job of feeding 3.5 billion additional people, most of whom will begin life in poverty. The battle to alleviate poverty and improve human health and productivity will require dynamic agricultural development...." [continued as PDF]

Oct. 20
World Bank Report Puts Agriculture at Core of Antipoverty Effort

"For the first time in a quarter century, the World Bank’s flagship annual report on development puts agriculture and the productivity of small farmers at the heart of a global agenda to reduce poverty....[T]he report crystallizes an emerging consensus among wealthy countries, philanthropists and African governments: Increased public investment in scientific research, rural roads, irrigation, credit, fertilizer and seeds — the basics of an agricultural economy — is crucial to helping Africa’s poor farmers..." [continued]

beach party and clam bake news

2007-10-17T14:52:00.000-07:00

A report in today's Nature indicates that 164,000 years ago (far earlier than scientists had supposed), people on a coastal cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean in far-southern Africa cooked shellfish and used make-up. "Shellfish were among the last additions to the human diet before the debut of domesticated plants and animals, [the lead researcher] said. Early hunter-gatherer relatives of modern humans for millions of years dined on only land plants and animals, the scientists said."

For millions of years! That's what's so amazing (old news anewly surprising to re-realize). For millions of years, our species didn't figure much out. Homo had been around for millions of years—millions and millions of years—then whomp!—relatively suddenly—we mind-bogglingly accelerate to become a planetary communications organon self-formatively accelerating, lonely hearts of the cosmos.

aspiring to hyperhumanity is integral to our nature

2007-10-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

Today, it's reported that researchers have identified a new batch of genes that slow the aging process. This may not seem to be news, but it's a reminder that the aspiration for immortality is becoming Big Science.

By the way, recalling that Darwin wrote "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke" (Notebook M, 1838; quoted in Baboon Metaphysics), today's research is about genes shared by worms and humans.

More primordially still, this week's Science presents the complete genome of a species of algae that specifies eukaryotic functions shared by plants and animals. This kind of research into biomechanics has importance for aspirations to design artificial life, as well as for astrobiological venturing. Given the increasing liklihood that life begins easily and easily evolves to higher forms—relatively quickly—doing bioglyphics outstrips metaphysical pretense (that history of conceptualist mythics) scientifically, as real bio-ontology or biontology.

for love of enhancing humanity

2007-10-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

I posted a note on philosophy of higher education, as I'm quite committed to that context of practicality, as I begin a new era of conceptual adventuring that doesn't pretend to seem practical (but is so).

"How does a naturalist make sense of the meaning, magic, and mystery of life? How does one say truthful and enchanting things about being human? It is not clear. [In the following book,] I make an attempt to explain how we can make sense and meaning of our lives given that we are material beings living in a material world. The picture I propose is naturalistic and enchanting. Or so I hope....We can adopt different legitimate attitudes toward the truth about our nature and our predicament. I recommend optimistic realism. Joyful optimistic realism. Life can be precious and funny. And one doesn't need to embrace fantastical stories—unbecoming to historically mature beings—about our nature and prospects to make it so." Owen Flanagan (Professor of Philosophy, Duke U.), The Really Hard Problem: meaning in a material world, MIT Press, 2007, pp. xii-xiii.

how many moments of silence we need

2007-09-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

The Code. I'll add my own thoughts later, after the Journal's comment period.

Most directly, this pertains to engagement with humanizing medical practice. But the larger issue—my interest especially—is the example this provides for (1) the importance of issues of empathy in the conceptualization of care, (2) the boundaries of the medical model of care for health care generally, (3) the applicability of health care modeling for scaling care in public life, and (4) the importance of care for philosophical ethics.

Oct. 25

Aaghh! 223 responses to "The Code," which I don't have time to read. I will dwell with this sometime, but not now.

getting beyond "a secular age"

2007-09-02T12:53:00.000-07:00

Though I'm not going to soon take a side trip through Charles Taylor's new, monumental A Secular Age, that trek will have to happen eventually, so this posting is a marker of that inevitability down the road. I'll here link (someday) to wherever the trek through A Secular Age is tracked, whenever. And I'll develop some notes anticipating that.

This posting, relative to the previous one, also briefly dramatizes my problem with distractability. Slote's book will be arriving this coming week, and that will take priority. Meanwhile, the world turns, more emerges, and there's no way to keep up. Speaking of the world turning and distractibility, I'm a news junkie (pretty comprehensively), but I manage to not comment on that, yet I'm always at risk.

"Getting beyond 'a secular age'" is about getting beyond relativizing understanding of the present "age" in terms of secularity (which is a notion relativized to passed religious orientation, life, whatever). Getting beyond secularity is about finding the motive of our humanity in that humanity, evolutionarily appreciated and oriented by the futurity of the human interest (itself anthropoligically deep-seated). Relative to such humanization, religious life (thus secularity) looks like a Moment in cultural evolution, whose nature was always already a humanization more profound (as a matter of its temporal horizon) than religious life ever imagined.

thank you

2007-08-23T13:25:00.000-07:00

I see I’m in a road born from the one I was in before we crossed paths. I’m going a different way now than then, thanks to you. I didn’t expect to meet you, didn’t expect your great influence. We're parting ways now, and I wish you all the best along your way.

I’m thrilled anticipating new beginning

a secularization of prophetic calling

2007-08-11T18:05:00.000-07:00

Can religious sensibility grow to love its place in deep time, beyond tangles of theistic vanity?

In one of the postings from that Habermas group exchange I mentioned in the previous posting, K briefly renders an argumentation strategy for renewing the integrity of prophetic calling for progressive politics, which I want to dwell with further. None of my comment below was part of the email exchange. First:

K> Amanda Anderson[...] claims that sincerity functions more as a legitimating factor for existing norms, which is why postmodern theorists reject it as simply re-inscribing dominant power structures. Postmodern theory tends to favor authenticity, she claims, in the sense of rejecting existing norms (and assigned identity categories) and challenging the status quo.

G (today): I mistakenly recalled that you wrote that Anderson favored authenticity, but maybe the upshot is the same since, apparently, she accepts the sense of norms that allegedly causes the postmodernists to favor authenticity over sincerity.

K> In the case of religion specifically, Anderson’s distinction seems to
map onto Ken Wilber’s distinction between “legitimate” and
“authentic” religious pratice, where the former reinforces existing norms and the latter agitates for social transformation...

G: There’s a little semantic vertigo here, based perhaps in ambiguities about the meaning of 'norms' (presumed invalid by postmodernists, but referring to valid regulatives for Habermas, who distinguishes norms from "factical" regulatives or unquestioned, so-called "norms"). So, so-called “legitimacy” (the object of “sincerity” that’s conformist for postmodernists and Anderson, according to you?) isn’t really legitimacy, but Wilbur depends on a notion named “legitimacy” that is apparently (from a Habermasian perspective) related to really-genuine validating (“reinforcing existing norms”)—depending on whether you mean by ’norms’ valid regulatives (Habermas’ sense) or inherited “norms” (factical regulatives, for Habermas). Wilbur’s notion might accord with Habermas’ (not equivalent, but workable together), if by 'norms' Wilbur means valid regularives; but the postmodernist/Anderson sense wouldn’t accord with the Habermasian sense and Wilbur’s (depending on his sense of “norms”)—worse yet if Wilbur’s sense of legitimacy is also conformist (where “existing norms” are the conformist variety). In that case, Wilbur's sense is just inapplicable to Habermas'— and that might be the case, given that you’re counterposing Wilbur’s “legitimacy” with need for social transformation. That's a lot of runaround, but maybe it usefully dramatizes the sense of semantic vertigo.

So (to vertiginously recapitulate—playfully), mapping the postmodernist’s distinction (which includes a sense of phoney sincerity which is not Habermas’ sense of ’sincerity’ and a sense of authenticity which isn’t religious) into Wilbur’s distinction which, if religious, includes a sense of authenticity that is unrelated to Habermas, is apparently invalid (though not inasmuch as Anderson retains a sense of authenticity accordant with Habermas’ sense of ethical life—but then the religiously-related mapping isn’t valid).

The vertigo dissolves, for me, in appreciating that: (1) there are valid and phoney claims to sincerity; (2) authenticity is primordially about fidelity to one’s own capability for flourishing (I would argue); and (3) theistic calling reflects the natural human interest in flourishing (I would argue).

K> In the case of American religious history, I have been wondering whether the so-called “prophetic” voice of religious liberalism (e.g., the Social Gospel and contemporary religious progressivism) represents the “authentic” aspect of this dynamic.

Religious sensibility may find a solidarity with secular life already awaiting it. Agitating for social transformation is integral to an emancipatory interest and for social movements in Habermas’ work, based in the natural human interest in flourishing, independently of its historical form in prophetic calling, which was also motivated (one could argue) by the natural human interest in flourishing, anciently rationalized in terms of theistic design. There’s nothing especially theistic about the interest in social transformation, though there has been something especially religious about the appeal of authenticity (for a theologized sense of lifeworldliness), because heartfulness is integral to intimacy and family throughout anthropological history, thus also for religious history born from anthropological deep time (which I like to call “the Face of The Deep”). “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (“Little Gidding”).

Authenticity is also integral to the history of humanism that never was religious, beginning with the poetic Greek love of wisdom that became philosophy, and the appeal of authenticity appears in Renaissance romanticism, in literary sensibility from the troubadours onward; and recently, in existential philosophy and humanistic psychology.

So, semantic vertigo arises from an apparent nominalism of drawing on shared terms (used differently by authors) to provide cues for related engagements. You have sincerity and authenticity itself (in normal, lexical meanings), “sincerity” that’s phoney/conformist, “legitimacy” that’s phoney, legitimacy that’s valid, authenticity that’s existential (JH), authenticity that’s religious (Wilbur?), and (I suppose) authenticity that’s prophetic (brought by you into the mix), and evidently the prophetic sense fuses the difference between the other two senses of authenticity and the sense of real sincerity. What a complex!

Religious calling is already always in solidarity (nonconsciously) with a historical legacy of human interest that bridges religious kinds of lives with non-religious lives. The shared calling, then, is to understand profoundly our shared humanity, which is primordially future-oriented, in light of which (making promising futures) pasts are found to have been anticipating our shared comprehension of already-always shared deep background. Our historically global Present is frontstage in futural Time—not born from the past, but from the primordial futurity of human sensibility.

After all, God was always a future awaiting us in our aspiration for perfectibility, ever unfulfilled, yet profoundly generative.

How is appreciation related to intrinsic value?

2007-07-01T11:24:00.000-07:00

• What's appreciation as such? How does it relate to implied high perceptibility? What is high perceptibility?

• Is deservingness in valuation no more than what's addressed standardly through the issue of "desert"?

• Must the meaning of 'high valuation' derive from a sense of intrinsic value?

Much more is tacitly put to question in "your highness," e.g., "caring," "genuinely sophisticated culture," "healthy market".

whose "quality of life"?

2007-06-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

We want a high quality of life. (I write to those who do, those who would probably read this, though many persons don’t show that they want this, given the slacker lives they live.) But probably no two aspiring persons have a similar sense of that: quality of life?

“Quality of life” is commonly a socioeconomic notion, but low-income artists might have a more meaningful life, a more flourishing life than many persons who are considered “successful” and “happy”.

So, what is it that one really wants? We don’t merely want love (yet, at least that) or merely comfort (ditto) or merely fulfilling productivity, etc., etc. We want “It All,” but (I trust) with prudent humility about deservedness.

We want a richly enjoyable and meaningfully productive life (as I put it earlier). So, for the sake of practicality in upcoming discussion, I’ll use ‘genuine well-being’—or: ‘well-being,’ for short (not presumed well-being, rather the real “thing”), which is to beg the question of what well-being is: A richly enjoyable life can’t be bought, of course; but money is money. Beholding Yosemite Valley (in the California Sierra mountains) isn’t expensive, but is richly enjoyable. Meaningful productivity is a very individual thing, but we can come to some rich sense of shared fulfillment.

So, ‘well-being’ is an emblem of open potential. Whatever it is that well-being is, what we want can be comprehended in that emblem, I think. We want long life, but minimal boredom; longevity is insufficient without sustained Meaning. Fame can be nice, but on your deathbed, you want the caring of true friendship (which is also intrinsic to true love). Many terminally-ill persons find great meaning in their remaining time. Perhaps Meaning is the baseline (in an existential sense of significance that no Analytic theory of “meaning” addresses).

honoring The Flow of discerning lives

2007-05-27T11:15:00.000-07:00

The extended discusssion that was here is now a Webpage, "Habermas and the market for ideas," now somewhat revised (less "attitude" and a little more clarity of stance in my reading of Habermas' article).

June 19 update

I had more in mind with the title of this posting—the header above—than is addressed by my overreading of Habermas' article, and what I did discuss involved claims that (to me) call for explication—which was tacitly a self-provocation for doing some follow-up, particularly relative to earlier recent comments on the importance of "flow" ("exercising for a better America," previous posting)—which is no impulsive or vague notion!

Beyond that—I came to realize—I wanted to share some thoughts on (2) the ontogenic basis of genuine valuation, (3) the deliberative consumer, (4) institutional enabling of deliberative vitality, and (5) think some more about "discursive vitality."

But now I feel that a follow-up on flow is enough. The other themes have either turned up substantially in other discussions or deserve to be parts of topics I want to do later.

So, here's a discussion of flows in living well by design.

...and a follow-up note that I'm not further elaborating:

Democracy belongs to those who care to participate, and markets can be no better than the quality of choices that sustain it. But adult degree of deliberativeness can be no better than the quality of enabling education and parenting available to one’s native interest in learning, which happens through the flows of aspiration.

the pressure cooker of China

2007-05-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

The Party in China today seems forced to evolve into a utilitarian technocracy dependent on global collaboration in figuring out how to avoid imploding, otherwise forcing the world economy into extended recession.

"Hong Kong and the former Portuguese enclave of Macau are the only places in China where people are allowed to commemorate those killed in 1989" (Reuters, May 27).

exercising for a better America

2007-05-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

See Al Gore fostering a meritocracy of ideas.

May 25

The idea behind the cute subject line is that we Democrats should be very involved in a running conversation that looks to the 2008 presidential election, at least in our localities. My "locality" is partly here, in the various online contexts I'm managing to develop, albeit "biased" by my academic commitments.

2008 will be a summer Olympic year, this time in Beijing. 2009 will bring EU-wide elections and an opportunity for great European solidarity with a Democratic U.S. administration in planetary efforts at environmental control, sustainable economic development, and facilitation of human well-being.

I've been periodically impressed deeply by the self-sacrifice of recent Asian immigrants for the sake of their children's future, something common to European immigration in earlier centuries. Imagine that, by some magical cause, most of humanity decided that this generation is going to give itself to its grandchildren, once and for all getting things right for the future of humanity, as we face the planetary fever of unsustainable species development.

reason #506 why the extraterrestrials don't reply

2007-05-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

(Daniel Aguilar/Reuters)

Sunday, May 6, a record 18,000 people took off their clothes to pose for U.S. photographer Spencer Tunick at Mexico City's Zocalo square, the heart of the ancient Aztec empire.

Green multipolitanism (beyond transnationalism)

2007-04-12T21:26:00.000-07:00

"...[D]emocracy itself needs redefinition according to a new transnational ideal...," says the publisher's description of Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi, by James Bohman, MIT Press, May 2007. In his "Introduction" to the book (available as free PDF), Bohman shows how he seeks to establish the conceptual foundations of transnational democracy.

But his argumentation strategy seems to me (after having read that "Introduction") outdated by the Internetted globalization that he supplementarily seeks to appreciate. I see a multipolitan planetarity (later parts of that discussion) that liberally antedates Bohman's "republican" statism. My sketch of infospheric evolving seems, frankly, beyond Bohmanian republicanism because pluralism implies a multipolitan liberalism, and leading news proves it regularly. (By the way, I'm tired of referencing my precursory set of discussions. I'm moving on! The past is preface!).

Especially relevant to all this is an appreciation of the cultural geographic character of any polity, such that environmentalism and green politics express the starkly common ground for a multipolitan politics that develops regional and local geographies relative to our planetary legacy.

Tom Friedman argues in this "flat world" direction as well, albeit as an American economic matter, in the April 15 New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Power of Green":

"...I want to [make 'green'] geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century."

Of course, America's situation isn't the whole world's, but America's side effects do pertain to the whole world; so, our prospects for green telos would be important all around, if not exemplary for other cultural geographies. Indeed, we Americans must show leadership for addressing problems that we had a large hand in creating.

I'm seeking American exemplarity for united nations' governance of our shared futures.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told environmentalists on Wednesday they needed to stop nagging and make their cause sexy, likening it to bodybuilding's evolution from a weird pursuit to mainstream.

Our evolutionarity is beyond a universal Darwinism

2007-04-05T18:05:00.000-07:00

Indeed, it's our evolutionarity that gives appeal to the idea of unified theory, due to the evolved and ontogenic character of mind that inquires into "as such" prospects: So many modes of change; so, what is change as such? First, more or less, it was the power of a Sun god, then the oh-so-human Face of The Deep Creating the Heavens, etc. Everything is, so "is" Is, too?. But ultimately, we're beyond the question of "Being," back to the Sun, albeit relative to Earth's "goldilocks" water-hole distance from a star, Gaian depths of Time—geologeny, biologeny, paleoanthropogeny, culturality, history.

Richard R. Nelson, Columbia Earth Institute, Columbia University, provides a good example of the challenge of integrative discursivity that I discussed last week, in the last section of "philosophy as integrative discursivity," in his recent essay for Biology & Philosophy (22:1, January 2007): "Universal Darwinism and evolutionary social science." Here's the abstract:

"Save for Anthropologists, few social scientists have been among the participants in the discussions about the appropriate structure of a ‘Universal Darwinism’. Yet evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena has a long tradition, going back well before Darwin. And over the past quarter century significant literatures have grown up concerned with the processes of change operating on science, technology, business organization and practice, and economic change more broadly, that are explicitly evolutionary in theoretical orientation. In each of these fields of study, the broad proposition put forth by Darwin that change proceeds through a process involving variation, systematic selection, renewed variation... has proved both persuasive and powerful. On the other hand, the evolutionary processes involved in these areas differ in essential ways from those we now know are operative in the evolution of biological species. The objective of this essay is to highlight those differences, which a ‘Universal Darwinism’ needs to encompass, if it is to be broad enough to be a theory that is applicable to the evolution of human cultures as well as evolution in biology."

evolution for everyone

2007-04-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

"Of course, even as humans bond together in groups and behave with impressive civility toward their neighbors, they are capable of treating those outside the group with ruthless savagery. [David Sloan] Wilson[, in Evolution for Everyone] is not naïve, and he recognizes the ease with which humans fall into an us-versus-them mind-set. Yet he is a self-described optimist, and he believes that the golden circles of we-ness, the conditions that encourage entities at every stratum of life to stop competing and instead pool their labors into a communally acting mega-entity, can be expanded outward like ripples on a pond until they encompass all of us — that the entire human race can evolve the culturally primed if not genetically settled incentive to see our futures for what they are, inexorably linked on the lone blue planet we share....For their universal appeal and basal power to harmonize a crowd, he recommends more music and dancing and asks, 'Could we establish world peace if everyone at the United Nations showed up in leotards?'”

Natalie Angier, "Sociable Darwinism," New York Times Book Review, April 8, 2007

Stanley Fish is confused about learning to reason

2007-03-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

In "Advocacy and Teaching" (New York Times, March 24), Professor Fish misunderstands the importance of advocacy for intellectual growth. He's correct that "Emily Brooker’s professor was wrong to enlist her in a political campaign," but he confuses a political sense of "public advocacy" with the curricular importance of advocacy, by his apparent complaining about "advocacy" itself.

Indeed, as he says, "a student assigned to study an issue must be equipped with the appropriate analytical skills," but that's for use in good reasoning, which standardly is used to make cases that take stands, i.e., advocate something. Fish occludes this purpose for building analytical skills.

Though it's surely useful that an "assignment is to give an account of the dispute about gay adoption rather than to come down on one side or the other," understanding each side of an issue requires seeing the claim to validity that each has as advocable stance.

One can't genuinely understand another's perspective apart from its claim to be worthwhile for advocacy, which involves doing one's best to "see" the case, achieved by taking on that perspective as best one can.

Of course, "academic performance and individual beliefs are independent variables," but analytical skills are only as good as the case-making they enable, which is independent of whether or not one actually subscribes to the well-made case. You'll never be persuasive about what you do believe, if you can't see the presumably good case for the stance you wish to change.

That said, I strongly subscribe to Professor Fish's objections to "intellectual diversity" conservatism.

Gary E. Davis
Berkeley

philosophical practice as discursive reading

2007-03-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

I feel a sense of closure on my participation in the Yahoo! Habermas forum—participation which has been especially intense the past month, for my part in the site's posting span from #1719—#1787 (hence little posting here). It's been a remarkable month for me because I've shown now, to my satisfaction, an integrated sense of theory and practice through discursive readings and interactions that apply my sense of philosophy as integrative discursivity in terms of my sense of Habermas and development that may also exemplify how Critical Theory has normative investment in a telos that's essentially Open.

Today, I extracted all of my thematic interests and explicative passages (distinct from critical response directly to what Ken MacKendrick says, whereby I tried to exemplify a sense of discursive reading as critical interactive practice), and sought to see what set of topics the passages altogether might make, as a matter of integrating a discourse that is entirely drawn from discursive interaction. A value of this for a reader might be to show a coherence of interest and themes, across tens of interactive moments of response. But the consolidation of all my commentary into nine sections, it turned out, also brings thematically related material, drawn from so many interactions, into adjacency for more formally integrating the thematic areas, a practice I've long called "thematology" (related to phenomenology's tendency to parse itself into complex thematics).

I'm not going to soon recycle all that material into a singular discourse, basically because it's all improvised (or occasioned) from already-well-thematized work that I'd prefer to get back to (like wanting to get back to one's research, rather than write lectures). But the past month or so, I satisfactorily tested my sense of critical practice through an extended textuality of interaction with Ken. If I wanted to do a formal deconstruction (or psychoanalysis) of our interaction (applied to me, as well as to Ken), there's plenty of material to work with.

But that's not what I want to do. However, the material provides the basis for nine good and long discussions:

1. What sense of progressive interest might exemplify a practical motivation for theory, inquiry, philosophy, and critical reading?

2. Aspects of developmental theory relative to Habermas as exemplary theorist, in light of the sense of progressive practice.

3. How a therapeutic interest is derivative of developmental interest in Habermas' work.

4. How discursive reading may express a therapeutic interest in interaction that grows toward good discursivity

5. Aspects of the relationship of discursive inquiry to scientific inquiry

6. A sense of philosophy as integrative discursivity that learns through scientifically conceptual efficacy

7. Habermas, discursive inquiry, and naturalism

8. Aspects of social evolution as singularity without teleology

9. Viewing Critical Theory for the future, relative to progressive interests in healthy freedom and potentials of discursive inquiry.

But, again, I'm not going to dwell with all that; and I don't suggest that you read all of my postings from #1719 through #1787. Actually, it's all pretty interesting (I would think so, of course) and worth your time!

What I do intend, though, is to develop part 6: "A sense of philosophy as integrative discursivity that learns through scientifically conceptual efficacy." That would take the various allusions I've made lately to an evolutionarity of discursive inquiry and try to make practical sense of that for a reader (as it's already very practical to me, but not in the improvised terms I've recently used). I would constrain myself by what was earlier occasioned, for the sake of integrating that set of relevant comments (from postings and a few occasioned Web pages of the past month or so), but not try to go much beyond that (though somewhat beyond that, otherwise the endeavor would have little interest for me).

However, what I do intend and what I actually make time to do are often not the same. The pile of books on my desk is much more appealing, but one should need both midland mediations and highland explorations in philosophy—like the balance of teaching and research that's healthy for academic life. (But one should be given more free time.)

"Reason for Democracy," revised

2007-02-17T21:14:00.000-08:00

Last year, I wanted a short but accurate philosophical statement of Habermas' life-long project which would appeal to new readers, for the sake of Habermasian discussion at the Yahoo! group. A short article by J.G. Finlayson inspired my critical revision of his article, which became my mid-2006 statement of Habermas' basic project, "Reason for Democracy."

My point had not been primarily to critique Finlayson, but his article's inspiration made my very substantial revision implicitly a critique, which I capsulated with a footer statement that I've now deleted: "In my view, Finlayson's account tends to miss the general coherence of Habermas' work, sees theory as ontology, pulls in leftist rhetoric from Cold War years, and concludes with a sense of dogmatism toward Habermas' work that doesn't follow from his account (and is untenable in any case)."

When I read my version today, I realized that I'd still remained very dependent on portions of Finlayson's picture which are very misleading—but more importantly, the discussion could be much better written. Intending further revision of my "version" today resulted in a fundamental reworking which is not now substantially related to Finlayson's account.

Also, it's no fair introduction to the scale of Habermas' philosophy. A really brief but fair introduction is not yet available [at this writing, but now available through that link, 7/07]. What I've done is provide a succinct but fair conceptualization of Habermas' grounding of democracy in our form of life.

leading creativity for facilitating evolution

2007-02-16T20:25:00.000-08:00

Currently and through next Tuesday in downtown San Francisco (amid coincidently beautiful Bay Area weather—so far), the world's largest association of scientists is having its annual conference. This year's theme for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—its cohering interdisciplinary focus—is "Science & Technology for Sustainable Well-being."

If you believe that the theme is a piece of tired rhetoric, then you don't know the AAAS: the folks who were pushing the issue of global warming long before it became green chic in the mid-'90s.

Anticipating the conference, AAAS President John P. Holdren wrote an editorial in last week's Science, "Energy and Sustainability" [PDF] which provides a good sense of context for this issue. But, it's only a preface to a developed sense of the issue of sustainability and well-being that the conference advances (there are also many 180-minute symposia).

But Harvard Professor Haldrene may be exemplary of what a progressive realism about planet management is about. Haldrene specializes in environmental policy and directs the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. This alone is exemplary to me as planetary complement to the more usual sense of well-being in public policy—now recalling Theodore Roszak's longstanding concern for "Person/Planet" (1978) that became "ecopsychology" (Voice of the Earth, 1992) or Edward Wilson's "biophilia" (1986). But such dyadity—personal well-being as "atom" in evaluation of public policy vis-à-vis planetary well-being—requires that Haldane's planetary concerns be seen to have their own complement in the human-centered sense of well-being. That complement is properly a distributed manifold of practices such as I indicated through my previous posting (sans my poetic license). A proximal dyadity becomes a manifold of interfaces possibly cohering through a comprehensive sense of well-being.

However, Haldrene's context—elaborated, let's say, as the topical scale of the AAAS conference—is challenging enough. And I would here keep my further remarks relative to merely his editorial.

[to be continued, perhaps]

...back from "home" trip to American kitch

2006-12-27T20:24:00.000-08:00

Soon to be a trek near you (i.e., here, more extensively).

Merry holidays and happy next year, for at least we can count on there being a good chorus for winners of The Darwin Awards (who are honored for improving our gene pool by removing themselves from it).

an astrobiological perspective

2006-12-09T21:54:00.000-08:00

revised Dec. 12

Today's "news" is largely follow-up on ordinary advents: primate behavior in the Middle East, ongoing geopolitical competition, public health problems, poisoned spies, crashes, bombs, bad weather....You know the story.

Yesterday, the space shuttle Discovery docked with the International Space Station.

Most all lives move on unnoted—mostly in good health (I hope), productive, peaceful, honest, learning. The prevailing story is really about a species evolving fairly well by its own designs. It's our virtue to give so much public attention to tragic exception (but it's never enough).

Questions of Meaning, ultimate coherence, and temporal continuity—quests of "Being"—belong to every version of human life. Religion serves supernaturalist childhoods of evolutionary devotion to high valuation, modernly expressed in scientific humanities. Those who have the freedom to research the cosmos, now astrobiologically, can have deep-time solidarity with the evolutionary ethos of desire for ultimate coherence and continuity that began religiously and became philosophical.

Humanity will have a permanent lunar base in a couple of decades (at one pole of our moon, entertaining godknowswhat on the hidden side). Mars will someday be terraformed. Eventually, we'll abandon the Sun.

Scientific plausibility causes me to bet that we're not the most advanced beings of our galaxy. In any case, realistic idealism can be greatly good. My understanding of what's good for development of productively creative intelligence causes me to believe that we're left "Alone" to evolve our capability to appreciate where we are.

son light

2006-12-09T20:01:00.000-08:00

Frankly, I think that my characterization of Habermas' work as a philosophical anthropology can get rather profound.

But I want to again signal in such characterization that I'm in a post-Habermasian venture that nonetheless continues to honor his profound example (and prolificness that I never hoped to approach), as I've done for many years.

Not taking time soon to further detail an intimacy of involvement with his work (which I've done so much in the past, largely eliciting only frivolous response, but thanks anyway, folks; our relationship was a useful sounding board) just silently "expresses" influence by that engagement, which is ambitiously developing beyond his engagements, but will eventually return to further detailed appreciation of his example (if I don't die first) by kindred revision of his conceptions relative to that development which he in part enabled and inspired. (At least, I've mastered the Germanic sentence length.)

Perhaps, he was doing likewise in his readings: honoring the influence of mentors through explication of his entwined distance to their address (forever "Kantian," forever "Hegelian"—forever "Christian," even; certainly very "humanistic," very "evolutionary"—I said to him: "very 'Heideggerian' of you," and he didn't disagree).

So long, dear friend—until spring? I've got an incredibly heavy agenda ahead of me; in a phrase: a set of readings by which I expect to clarify a progressive integration of epistemology and ethics relative to cognitive anthropology—"progressive" inasmuch as the anticipated results entail a geopolitical ethics of development.

neuroeconomic note

2006-11-23T19:56:00.000-08:00

Polar opposites. Two-dimensional representation of the relationships between 11 goal domains. Data are derived from a questionnaire about the importance of 57 different goals given to a sample of 1854 undergraduates from 15 different countries. Note the diametrically opposite placement of financial success and community. [Reprinted from F. M. E. Grouzet et al., J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 89, 800 (2005) in Science, Nov. 17, 2006.]

Dec. 3, 5, and 9

The text above is the caption from the Science article indicated. One might also note the diametrically opposite placement of physical health and conformity. Valuing financial success distances a person from valuing community, and valuing conformity distances a person from valuing physical health, among other interesting aspects of that chart.

More interesting to me, though, is the x/y axis. I won't doubt that the researchers appropriately associate each of their 57 values with a goal domain (I'm accepting the referee processes of the well-known journal). A respondent in the research can gauge degrees of intrinsic/extrinsic or somatic/mental value because the poles of the x/y axis are intuitively cogent: Sense of embodiment, higher self; extraversion, introversion.

In fact (by my lights, but strongly corroborated by the above-indicated research), we distinguish inner self from outer self or self-seeing ("I") from self-as-seen ("me")—which William James distinguished early last century. This and the kind of x/y-axis above have also been keynotes of major research on child development (Self-understanding in childhood and adolescence, Wm. Damon & D. Hart, Cambridge U.P., 1988).

Indeed, the individuated historicity of this difference relates to a dyadity in identity, which I've long distinguished as self-identity and personal identity. Idiomatic English often registers the same difference: personality, you have; selfness, you are. Obviously, what's intrinsic deeply matters (self), and what's extrinsic may largely show (image, "face").

Disintegrated identity tends to be a depersonalization order, like teen alienation. Taken to chronic extreme, there is depersonalization disorder, as defined by The Diagnostic Standards Manual (Is that DSM-IV-R these days? DSM-V is in development.).

Creatively mature minds—called the "plural psyche" (Jungian psychology) or "protean psyche" (Robert J. Lifton)—involve a strong self-identity stably integrated with a diversity of personas or personal identities (think of a writer's capability for extended characterization mapped into dramatically-understood real life), which is a "thick" sense of the "thin" diversity of roles we normally integrate: friend, lover/spouse, parent/teacher, employee, etc.

I conjecture that high self (i.e., "self-transcendence") with extreme extrinsicness tends toward exemplarity. High self with extreme intrinsicness tends toward originality? Extreme extrinsicness with high physicality tends toward material productivism? And extreme intrinsicness with high physicality seems to be very regressive, I don't know.

But it makes sense that a distinction between interpersonal and intersubjective interaction is useful (and real): Civility is very interpersonal. Solidarity is less merely interpersonal by being more intersubjective (more emotionally bonded). Kindredness is somewhat interpersonal, but usually very intersubjective. And intimacy is intensely intersubjective (such that interpersonalness feels like an act, like lovers back in the office). We should need to appreciate such a continuum—civility, solidarity, kindredness, intimacy—as a natural feature of our humanity because the psyche has an intrinsic/extrinsic compass (which, I would argue, arises from primal self discovery, e.g., in infant recognizing, in effect, that the hand moving there is "mine" because "I" moved it; or the face there is not me, but is familiar, whereas that other face is strange).

In any case, the research indicated above (with screen-back image of coins arranged in the shape of a brain) relates to a continuum between mental valuation and social valuation that is transcultural. The appeal of neuroeconomics arises in part from increasing evidence that valuation expresses developmental, if not evolutionary, investments (but neuroeconomics also arises from research indicating that dynamics of emergence apply to neuroscience analogously with economics). Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, a leading researcher in cognitive neuroscience, has for decades advocated a theory of "neural darwinism" that depends on dynamics of emergent valuation and primal cognitive valuation that has withstood the test of time, evidently. Neural valuation figures into the ontogeny of value in perceptual preference, temperament, and formation of conscious preferences, and this dimension of neural e-valuing shadows mental development (conative, affective, and cognitive) throughout life.

Indeed, this dimensionality profoundly supports new senses of evolutionary ethics that have emerged from studies of natural sociality and due diligence in other species. This kind of inquiry suggests new prospects for ethical intuitionism (now developmentally-based, rather than essentialist) and ethical naturalism (based in research about healthy human development and flourishing). There is even a subspecies of bioethics called "neuroethics" (clinical bioethics applied to neuroscientific research) which faces transhumanist prospects emergent from neurological modeling and neurogenetics

man of the north in shades make little earthquake

2006-10-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

... just as South Korea's Foreign Minister is formally nominated as the next U.N. Secretary General.

The abandoned mine was otherwise useless anyway, so Pyongyang might as well:

(1) dramatize its lack of resources for population management (which is what it's ultimately about: a lack of organizational innovation capability in the north, and the resistance of vanity against brighter lights);

(2) bolster the last corporate state's impotent luster, so to motivate worshipful workers to intensify what they were lacklusterly doing with the meagre resources that Stalinism-with-wineglass affords them;

(3) provide customer demonstration for Pyongyang's desperate military marketing campaign (but it was evidently too little poof to provide radioactive proof); and

(4) dare the U.N. Security Council (now made into more than a debating society by being forced to prove its capability for consensus) to spend more than lip service on what really matters (e.g., real nonproliferation)—for a U.N. order now surely to be led by a South Korean gentleman.

What's "evil"?: a revised note to a student of religion

2006-09-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

Once again, you're a good stimulation for thought. I'm no expert on evil, so let me know what you think here. You say that "....evil comes from ... experiences [of] fear, dread, uncanny, monstrous, disgust, disorder, unclean, polluted." What is the "comes from"? My sense of what's soberly called "evil" comes from what people normally mean my 'evil' (as indicated lexically or via standard accounts).

Standard accounts of "evil" seem to me to be realistically about vicious absence of Good (a primordiality, like God), rather than objectification of emotionality (born of idiosyncratic proximality, like the body). Evil is commonly thought to come from vicious Absence, so to speak.

Is evil an objectification of fear (as if idiosyncratic projection is primary); or is it a perception (sometimes invalid, but largely perceptual nonetheless, not just projective), derived from real prospects of harm? Is evil an objectification/projection of dread or is it largely perceiving vicious absence of (threat against) hope?

Likewise, it seems to me, evil is born from vicious absence of (or threat against) coherence, vicious threat to belonging, vicious absence of value, or vicious threat to health (i.e., risk of deathly dis-ease). To understand evil is to understand the really threatening conditions of vicious Absence, which is archetypally a result of the absence of "God" (to which a phenomenon of evil is always relativized). "God" is (at least) the integal integrity of—relative to the above—integrated trust, hope, coherence, belonging, value, and health. "God", at least, names a purposeful cohering of highly held values, conveying a sacred sense of our humanity. Evil is born from vicious absence of humanity in real threats to oneself. To find Eichmann "evil" is to construe a vicious absence of humanity in his career.

beauty of reason is a philosophical one

2006-09-24T19:38:00.000-07:00

The incendiary reaction by some Muslims against the Pope's academic recollection of a medieval Christian emperor's view of Islam's fetish for the sword is fair fodder for cartoon.

Now, Iran's Nasrallah in Lebanon exclaims that no army can remove Hezbollah's extant 20,000 swords (i.e., rockets) that are devoted to godknows what "resistance"—apparently resistance against a U.N. order of rights that Israel symbolizes.

Fundamentalist Islam is a campaign of the sword that nostalgically idealizes a new caliphate, contrary to all the Muslim lives flourishing peacefully within modern societies the world over. What Israel basically symbolizes for fundamentalist Islam (not just for violent extremists) is EuroAmerican modernity, and it is this realm of reason that was the point of the Pope's discourse earlier this month—something which has everything to do with the evolution of democracy within the Islamic world.

Judism, Christianity, and Islam dwell relative to—belong together in the same order Of—"God", which shows Itself in reasons of Love's Reason, according to the Pope (and, in secular terms, according to contemporary virtue ethics, e.g., Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University in Reasons of Love, 2004). In light of modernity, what's divine shows in intellectual virtue of humanity, in which we all belong as planetary phenomenon by grace of the cosmological order that is irrefutable.

But equally irrefutable is that our planetarity is geographically "comprehended" by its cultures. Europe was born from Christian historicality. According to the Pope in his Regensburg lecture (who's not connoting merely Church doctrine here): The "inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry...," which evented Christianity, "finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe."

More than that, according to Habermas recently, "Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love" ("A Conversation About God and the World," Time of Transitions (Polity Press, 2006).

No wonder, then, that latter day Islam would find its resurgent fundamentalisms essentially troubled by the global appeal of Westernity's universalism (which was born from Christian ecumenism) exemplified by the U.N. order currently led by the West.

But fundamentalism fails to understand that universalism is constitutively unhegemonic (thus non-essentially Western), due to its primordial humanism (whereas theocentrism cannot be primordially humanist and must be ultimately threatened by universalist humanism). Philosophical Christianity (distinct from fundamentalist Christianity) has a constitutional basis in reason that ensures its adaptability (e.g., its hybridity in South America and Africa), which fundamentalism ultimately cannot bear, since appropriation of such adaptability dissolves the anger (and the sword) that's integral to fundamentalism.

Just before his trip to Bavaria, a keynote of the Ratzinger/Benedict's annual meeting with former students was conveyed ("an important meeting at the highest academic level," according to Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn [Reuters, Sept. 4]), to the effect that the Church has no problem accepting evolution, unlike fundamentalism (in its unscientific resort to creationism), because the Church's reasoning is "a philosophical one" which fundamentalism lacks.

"There's a controversy in the United States," according to Father Joseph Fessio S.J., provost of Ave Maria University in Florida, "because there is a lack of awareness of a thing called philosophy. Evangelicals and creationists generally lack it and Catholics have it. When you look at the world and see what appears to be order and design, the conclusion that there is a designer is not a scientific conclusion, it's a philosophical one."

Concordantly, I would argue that a universalistic humanism of lovely reason may be understood to express an evolving humanity to which each of us may contribute, and the bridgework between faith and science—facilitation of human flourishing—is ultimately a matter of philosophical reasoning. Here is a hand offered to Islamic hermeneutics (ijtihad, which I related to democratic interests earlier). The truth of "God" is at least as subtle as reason's capability (but only as comprehensible as one's developmentality)—religion relative to capability for reason (rather than "religion within the limits of reason")—which expresses evolving human comprehensibility, representable always only relative to developing lives.

Beauties of reason appear to varying degree, always relatively speaking. Yet, the highlands of humanity may speak singularly—for example: as our shared planetarity of Time in "Being".

How we may each authentically live expresses potentials of flourishing accessible, in principle, to each one of us in Belonging together in the Same evolutionary humanity.

Habermasian streetlife

2006-09-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Matt, for sending a copy of General Vessey's letter. In sending your transcription of the letter, you justify posting it to the Habermas group by noting to me that it contributes to a "thread". What is that thread? Where does it begin? I decided against forwarding it on, explained by the following which thinks about the role of news in inquiry.

A third-person attitude below seems more pertinent, since the following isn't personal.

One might think that the following polemic against Matt's "thread" is unfairly obsessed. But relative to the complexity of the real world, a little obsession can herald ideals of analytically critical inquiry (see previous posting here).

Generally, I'm interested in gaining analytical clarity about critical issues in terms of the specifics of real contexts. The thread I see in Matt's postings the past week is largely his instrumentalist use of news (rather than accurate employment of news—a theme I would explicate in a detailed sense of applied Habermasian work). Maybe it's unfair to hope for much interest by non-U.S. citizens in details of U.S. politics. But it is fair to question exploitation of news stories about it.

Matt's prevailing thread is useful for detailing how "critical" instrumentalism (rhetoric fronting as polemic) relates to information. (Let me say at the outset that I'm a moderate or "Third Way" Democrat, wishing for another Bill Clinton in the White House, since we can't have Tony Blair.)

Last week, I posted availability of Habermas' The Divided West. Matt then posted a quote from John Bolton (U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.) out of context in order to suggest that the U.S. should be less influential in the U.N. In response, I disagreed with Matt and tried to provide some broader context.

Jeffrey Tate posted a short frustration about U.S. foreign policy, and I responded sympathetically with more context. A new subscriber, Derya, then posted briefly in solidarity with Jeff; and Matt responded very usefully and constructively to Derya and Jeff's postings with mention of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope; and he agreed with me about the importance of appreciating context .

But then, rather immediately, Matt ignored that appreciation by next simply calling U.S. democracy immature, with nonspecific reference to the unrelated IAEA situation, first because it simply involved a protest of a Bush league Congressional report; then—in reiteration of Jeff's anti-Bush-league comment—again referenced the issue because another account of it had a U.S. Senator's protest of the report at the bottom of the article. Who cares about the IAEA context itself? I pointedly objected to, in short, Matt's instrumentalist use of articles, and I did so in general terms of what the articles were really about.

Matt replied, in effect: point taken—but changed the subject to Colin Powell's objections to Bush policy on interrogation of non-U.S. detainees, but again with no apparent interest in context. Now, Matt sends the Vessey letter because it contributes to a thread. Let me put a positive spin on that by seeing his action as an invitation to closer scrutiny of issues:

I would see the Powell-Vessey letters as an opportunity to focus on the politics of the legislative process causing such letters and competing claims about what is appropriate (rather than simply flagging one side of the issue), relative to torturous sectarian violence in Iraq, heinous disregard for human rights exhibited by terrorism, political posturing on all sides, and Constitutional issues relative to necessarily ambiguous universals in international conventions—something beyond the genre of the email discussion list, I suppose.

But the existing "thread" there is that Matt is enthusiastic about protests against the Bush league, sometimes with allusion to Habermasian themes, but he's not expressing interest in details or contexts of any particular issue, apart from instrumental usefulness of news reports for his rather spontaneous alienation (i.e., non sequitur-ial postings)—and apparently a couple of other group subscribers are interested, but not beyond short spontaneities, as The Great Silence of the many tens of subscribers means whatever one supposes; but it's reasonable to suppose they're interested in Habermas, not superficially instrumentalist use of news. But, then, who knows; few subscribers responded to my query about why they subscribed. The reality there was at least that I'm a fool for discourse in a dissociative mall.

I'm happy to have people email me about what interests them (Thanks, Matt, for drawing attention to the Vessey letter), and I would welcome his beginning of a blog for his solidarity with anti-Bush-league citizens in the U.S. and Europe (there's the vaguely Habermasian relevance?) and his avowed solidarity with members of that Cold War anachronism called the "non-aligned nations." But I'm going to begin to insist on specifically Habermasian content at the Habermas group, even if that means that postings apart from mine become rare (which I do not desire).

Habermas as entrance into philosophical futuring

2006-09-16T15:23:00.000-07:00

I have a rather intense sense of applied Habermasian work, making me a neo-Habermasian at best, but actually I'm not anymore basically Habermasian in my thinking, while I know of no better exemplar of philosophical work than Habermas. My post-Habermasian sense of things results after many years of avowedly Habermasian endeavor. Yet, I'm glad to hear from those who subscribe to the Yahoo! Habermas list because it seems to them that Habermas is at the leading edge of philosophy. They're right! Few really understand what he has been uniquely and profoundly trying to do in his career, as a matter of postmetaphysicalist thinking devoted to prospects for cosmopolitan life. If there's another philosopher more worth one's time, let's hear about it.

I try to make the Habermas list more than an intellectual chat room, but I'm apparently alone. Can the Habermas list typify more than that? Would I be censorious to seek that, in group postings?—something that is attuned to details of news and interpretive acuity? Would such seeking cause the list to have few postings, other than being a bulletin board about Habermasian materials? Is something beyond intellectual chat beyond the pale of the email software platform? Frankly, I'm not looking for fraternity via the Habermas list; I'm looking for challenging thought (and, in that venture, I give far more than I get).

Let there be a Web ring of acuitous blogs (I just coined 'acuitous' from 'acuity')—a Critical Circle beyond the sunset of 20th C Frankfurt Schooling—but what a difficult ideal to actually embody! It must seem unfair to idealize discursive challenge in a venue lacking overt editorial policy (which is considered democratic on the Internet, though no medium that one professionally admires actually lacks editorial focus and policy—and it's apparently unprofessional to take Internet groups seriously, maybe as a matter of coveted intellectual property).

My plan for the Yahoo! Habermas list, down the road, is that I (and others?) will begin corresponding with leading Habermas scholars and will post to the list replies and interactions (approved by those quoted, of course), as a matter of developing a philosophical Web ring in which Habermas is a key focus. (I think of Heidegger's sense of symbolic examples of Heisenberg, Trakl, and Klee at the beginning of "On Time and Being," in the group of presentations titled On Time and Being.)

But presently I'm focused on post-Habermasian work. For example, I want to soon share a discussion of Epistemology Futures—but frankly I don't know when I'll have time to do that (and it has no overt relationship to Habermas, so my discussion would only tacitly relate to what "post-Habermasian" may specifically mean).

To say that what I'm doing is post-Habermasian is just to relativize it to Habermas for those oriented by his work. Actually, I think I was working in a post-Habermasian way at the beginning of my participation at the Spoon Collective list, 1997.

In the near term, I want to see the Yahoo! Habermas list overtly support interest in his work (including—especially for my part—substantive disagreement with his views, which of course honors the critical spirit that all scholarship implicitly honors), keeping in mind (honoring) that most subscribers are just trying to basically understand what he argues. Maybe I too readily go my own way in employment of his work (and even "worse" in critique of him).

In the long term, I see no alternative to understanding Habermas' work other than as primarily relative to issues of the 20th century, i.e., work increasingly of merely historical interest (like Kant), rather than relevant for epistemically contemporary philosophical inquiry (relative, for example, to "ontological" issues in the continuum from neurobiology to cognitive science of intelligence; or the netweaving character of multipolitan life where Internetted value is googleable, so to speak—neural Darwinist wisdom of neural crowds in bright individuation meets the electro-latticed emergences of planetary value as global mentality of evolutionary meritocracy?).

Of course, each new generation faces the recapitulative reality of getting up to speed, as they say, i.e., realizing that its generation didn't begin history (and each philosophy student faces the romance of Kantian transcendental illusions, if not its fate expressed in Heidegger's "end of philosophy" as "the task of thinking"), and the 21st C is now still largely a child of the 20th, as the 20th was a child of the 19th, and humanity is largely an historical "phenomenon"—a flourishing of its anthropological Earthliness. (And I am an American Earthling.) But originality happens: 20th C relativity wasn't anticipated in the 19th century. The Internet wasn't anticipated in 1960s dreams of machine intelligence. What happens when it's announced that the S.E.T.I. has succeeded? (What's that International Space Station really for, very secured communications that most Earthlings aren't ready to know about?)

In the long run, habermas@yahoogroups.com will become merely honorific of a period in the development of Internet life antedated by a Webring I imagine we bring about belonging primarily to the 21st century, as all children may grow to primarily belong to their generation, if not becoming points of originality in evolution.

Cheers to a philosophical manifold of Webrings—lattices, netweaves—and philosophy as conceptual design?, as tropological topology?

investing in human futures

2006-09-10T13:33:00.000-07:00

To: David Brooks, New York Times, re: " Investing in Human Futures"

David,

What's going to make parents really better parents? I'll vote for raising the child tax credit if it'll facilitate the engaged parenting that Unequal Childhoods addressed (which you discussed March 9, 2006). What ensures that consumerist adults will use the tax cut to buy time with their kids, if they're not constructively engaged with their kids already in the time they have? (This isn't a presumptuous question, since chronic learning difficulties are usually related to home life.) Again, what's going to make parents really better parents?

What are those "many cultural ways to strengthen marriage"? Is it unemployment that's ruining 50% of marriages? No, the single males who are failing school, then failing to strive to make a reliable place for themselves in the labor market aren't going to put their miniscule extended earned income tax credit into self-directed job development that makes them better marriage material (and besides, what's that got to do with marriages lasting?). The problem here goes back to the family-school background of the low income employee (and the family background of the marriage partners?), which entails need for strong home-school partnerships for the sake of children, which can also address the issue of engaged parenting, given the quality of schools and teaching that can afford to develop and sustain such relationships. Put those government funds that would be lost via tax credits into more well-designed and accountable educational reform (more on this below).

What's a savings account at birth going to do to address the problems at the childhood level that inhibit so-called "human capital" formation? If the family-school relationship worked better, the savings account wouldn't be needed later in life. You certainly don't want to make the funds available to the weak (and consumerist) family during their child's childhood. So, what's the point?

Three cheers for quality preschool. Let's have a "Manhatten Project" that results in universal childcare, universal child access to health care, and universal preschool. Take those funds that would be lost to progressive government via new tax credits and apply that money to those universals instead!

About learning styles: Teacher education programs are already very sensitive to this. The problem is drawing talent into teacher education programs and keeping talented teachers in the profession. Bad classrooms don't result from what schools of education try to do, but from localities lacking the tax base to attract talented persons into the profession and, when they do get good talent, to keep it in their districts. Then, from good teaching comes good educational leadership, and from that come good school districts.

David, you are not "hinting at an agenda that is...economically progressive." Cutting the mortgage interest deduction for the wealthy is not going to do anything constructive unless the extra funds are directed to community-based human development, i.e., the items indicated above. But, reforming the savings and health insurance tax incentives can be socially progressive, when linked to higher teacher pay, home-school partnership, child access to healthcare, to good child care, and to good preschool. Also, we need more critical journalism that counters the consumerism which has for decades undermined those "many cultural ways to strengthen marriage," whatever that is.

Gary E. Davis
Berkeley, CA

desiring good society

2006-09-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

I'm enthusiastic about Maeve Cook's recent Re-Presenting the Good Society, which I expressed to the Habermas list. But I deleted some thoughts educed by looking at her book:

That enthusiasm arises from my own hopes for a neo-Habermasian approach to things—including the difference between "the ethical" and "the moral" (which has been with me for a long time (e.g., Sep, 97 and Oct, 97: 2, 5, and 11).

Lifeworlds may be reflectively deepened to universalistic proportions, which is Habermas' recent sense of an "ethic of the species" (I would argue), potentially forming anthropologically deep-seated solidarities that may be validly transcultural. Such proportions don't call for transcendental objects (contrary to Cook), rather an evolutionary-historical approach to learning processes that expresses transcultural developmental and existential values. (I don't expect that claim to seem intuitively plausible.)

Distinctively "moral" understanding pertains to (1) compensations for the inability of ethical life to adequately include the other (which is a therapeutic or emancipatory function of impartial perspectivity), which isn't in principle unavailable to ethical life; and (2) distinctively "moral" understanding pertains to need for universalistic impartiality in regulation, particularly legislative processes.

Anytime there is a conflict of ethical views, an impartial (or at least bipartisan) venue of resolution may be required (or else—commonly the case—the disputants construct a simulation of this between them which accomplishes resolution). The range here is not universalistic, but only that of principle (D) in JH's discourse ethics. I see no problem grounding the value and cognitive character of impartiality in the ethical cognitivity of good individuation, in a transcultural sense.

Legislation requires a satisficial approximation of Habermas' principle (U), such that legislation is always susceptible to review and revision. One might not recognize a "satisficial" view as distinctly Habermasian, but I would argue that he would accept this portrait of his view—and I've shown preliminarily how to do this via the "pragmatics of justification."

I think that a sense of the ethic of the species can be clarified, in anthropological terms (I'm confident that available research enables this), that (1) shows the evolutionary character of basic (transcultural) values (solidarities) without transcendental objectivism (in a phrase: replacing structural thinking with a process sense of basic concepts, as Ruth Millikan does); and (2) shows transcultural grounding for a formal pragmatics that directly entails universalistic impartiality for the depth-structural reflectivity of ethical life. Accordingly, the motivation for fidelity to universalistic programs may be seen to arise from one's ownmost human interests.

erasing one chalkmark against Iran

2006-09-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

Is threat of U.N. sanctions against Iran's refusal of cooperation with the IAEA (more evidence of highly enriched uranium was discovered yesterday) causing Iran's professed cooperation today with the U.N. process in Lebanon?

Reuters writes: "Some analysts say Iran may have been emboldened in its nuclear standoff by the Lebanon conflict, which Tehran declared a victory for its ally Hizbollah."

The victory would have been Hezbollah's opportunity to save face by being left standing to be disarmed and brought into normal processes of Lebanese democracy and U.N. supervised peace.

"European Union foreign ministers agreed on Saturday to give diplomacy two more weeks to clarify Iran's nuclear stance."

on really bridging personal and social growth

2006-09-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

A respondent to my "Hamas, grow up!" wrote:

R: I am not sure how beneficial it is to shout about it, no one likes being told to "grow up" or that they are "stupid" even though there comes a time when it is [nearly] impossible not to be exasperated beyond the point of endurance.

G: The respondent provided a great analogy in terms of teaching (or trying to teach) early teens, and I want to expand on this analogy relative to interest in social evolution, which my Hamas posting was tacitly about. It was not about primarily implying that Hamas is stupid. The content of that posting is about gaining political realism. Of course, teens are paranoid about looking stupid.

A Jewish comedienne / talk show hostess in the U.S., Joan Rivers, has a trademark retort: "Oh, grow up!" (She happens to have suffered a lot in her life, and her public knows it.) My point was (at least tacitly) that Hamas' refusal of Israel is ultimately a "Great Refusal" (Marcuse) of modernity (which is supposed to be politically oriented by U.N.-types of problem-solving processes, including the U.N.-based entitlement of Israel to exist as member state of the international community).

A keynote of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action is that there are isomorphisms between developmental and social-evolutionary processes. This implies that "mature autonomy" in one modality (political cognition) may be tied to another (self-identity). Genuine modernity is an "adulthood" in political cognition, as well as in post-conventional role competence.

The Marcusean "Great Refusal" was endemic to the countercultural '60s for good reason—but also was sometimes taken to extremes (becoming an extremism!), and some lives got stuck there. (Relative to the comic strip Doonesbury, the aging Zonkers of the world need to be told by the teen Alexes on their way to M.I.T. "Oh, grow up!")

During the counterculture years, paternalist and imperialist versions of authority were validly refused as simulacrum of real maturity, but this sometimes became a way of life, a self-aggrandizing extremism that retarded lives. Some leftism systematically prevented itself from gaining capability to engineer actual progress. Obviously, well-publicized demonstrations and civil disobedience are powerful instruments of social activism, especially when the activism is integrated with broad-based "programming" through organizational learning, manifold educational processes, institutionalization of exemplars and models, engineering of new laws, and smart use of media. But world-historical alienation ends up having to reproduce the despicable Other that "justifies" its congestion of self-development (which is stuck in a reification of world-historical time)—opposition-dependent identity that feeds on itself, leading to nihilism. (The academic correlate is the straw man reading that "warrants" one's self-understanding.)

While many readers of Habermas in the 1990s continued to come to his work from stances of a romantic Marxism that works itself out primarily via out-of-The-System adversarial organization, Habermas was doing theory of law relative to the real complexities and potentials of modern societies. Those who protest war primarily (or merely) by carrying signs and yelling do little more than supplement those who work directly to elect progressives; or those who can gain a voice for good arguments in leading venues (and those who persuasively promote those leading voices among others), or those working for systemic educational reform, or those who gain expertise to contribute to organizations that are engineering genuine progress systemically (which includes community infrastructure, technological development, integration of change with constitutional processes, etc).

In light of this, extremist violence is either merely cathartic (when others aren't harmed) or criminality. Non-defensive pretenses of violence as having political significance are something to diagnose, rather than engage collegially.

I'm delighted by thinking of dealing with early teens. Ironically, one can't simply tell them to grow up, even though they'd kill to be adult ASAP. The selfish gene still "anticipates" a lifespan of 20 or 30 years: Early teens in modern society are paleolithic near-adults that were supposed to be initiated by rite of "elders" (in their '30s!) into majority. Modern postponement of cognitive majority, relative to real social complexity, meets resistance by genetic legacy of hormones, relative to brutally short lives.

Most of human history lacked any notion of the teenager—even lacking a notion of the child as such, rather as unblossomed adult-in-miniature. Socialization was oriented for what we know now as merely adolescent-level conceptuality (post-conventionality belonged to esoterics, etc). Modern adulthood is now relativized to distinct eras of childhood and adolescence in an extension of normal maturation into, say, one's 20s, which was generally inconceivable several centuries ago.

Though high individuation within a private life has been part of aristocracy for millennia, sociality has been almost entirely composed of extended familial life at an adolescent level of cognition. Isomorphism between conceptions of history (e.g., theocentrism of Western religion) and conceptions of identity (e.g., according with paternalism) expressed isomorphisms of cognitive "adolescence" common to a differentiated world, in Habermas' sense (differentiation of world concepts within singularly adolescent worldviewing). Differentiation of world concepts happens within an evolutionary-developmental level of worldviewing differentiation itself.

Modern education strives to educe socially unprecedented actualization of capacities that are largely unanticipated (let alone supported) by the backgrounds of the student. The better the student background, the more beyond that an excellent educational process strives, as the aims of education serve actualization of individual potential, rather than socialization. (It is largely invalid to understand the potential of individuation—what makes an individuation distinctive or really individual—relative to socialization, except inasmuch as one fudges to make socialization mean everything, and all cows become black, and the nature of individuation is lost in a sociocentrism that defines everything relative to its defense against marginality.)

Education for high individuation is not basically nurturing a development whose end is already latent, as if given potential contains some homunculus of its futurity (a given "end in itself" with some discernible sense that can distinguish individuations, thus validly appreciate individual developments). Rather, education for high individuation challenges immanently-evolutionary developmental processes (the difficulty of achievement, which expresses entropy in biological systems) that cannot bloom on their own, but must be dramatically drawn into innovating their capability in ways that capacities (which develop into capabilities) aren't set to anticipate. Individuation originates its futurity unforeseen by sociogenic legacy (which is inherently conservative) and unforeseeable by instructional design (which should be primarily facilitative of self-managed inquiry, curricularly sophisticating one's capability; and only training in support of that or as last resort—or for instilling functional skills. Teaching is not basically instructional; instruction serves teaching. Training involves instruction, too, but it's not teaching; it's training).

In puberty, the young explorers (tending to hormonally bounce off the walls, with no apparent interest in potentials) need to get as good as they give, so they sometimes relentlessly test every adult for candidate modeling. Correlatively, social development needs secure "normative authority," as It meets evolutionarily original challenges that aren't implied by its given bases (but may relentlessly test authority in order to discern for itself what still deserves fidelity). The power of valid norms for individuation is primarily to constructively channel potential, secondarily to regulate interaction. Validity here involves openness to unanticipated constructive outcomes, e.g., via norms of good teaching, which are "consensually" established relative to the progressive history of the profession; or norms of good parenting, which are modeled through family life, otherwise via progressive guidance for parents through family medicine, schools, libraries, bookstores, and other media—where altogether emergent "consensus" about what's validly developmental is part of an epistemic reconstruction of tradition that is ongoing. Potential evolutionarity of development tends to mesh with ongoing evolutionarity of tradition.

The teen tacitly needs to know what are the practicable, really feasible boundaries to their "automatic" explorations, and they will declare that they can figure this out for themselves, which is sometimes true (maybe even largely so, for those with a cognitively well-formed childhood, which instills good self-management of learning processes). Likewise for societies vis-à-vis leading figures and norms which foster constructive development (but become lightening rods for generational testing).

Rules have to be challenged to be revised to fit the times, obviously, but they're also challenged in order to learn what they durably mean. (The moderating outcomes of '60s radicalism led many baby boomers into graduate school, etc). Resistors that lack willingness to learn why meaning may be durable (and rules worthwhile) never gain the competence to change the ineffective rules that are in force; so, they can only imagine expelling authority from their willful domain.

Teens (and societies) need trustworthiness and reliability, as new generations are always at risk of endangering themselves exploring their own potential to juggle multiple plates (competing social agendas), to live up to proud avowals of self-responsibility (ideals of self-determination), to push the envelop of self formation (the liberal ethos). They are looking to shape anchors in their "night sea journey" that will fatefully undermine their dreams of immortality (e.g., the tacit belief that they can't he harmed by what they "truly" desire).

R:...My main tactic in class...[with disruptive 13 year-olds includes] a little bit of class-shaming...

G: That works, especially in light of a distributed solidarity with most of the students that can make the shaming more quickly effective.

On the one hand, for distributed solidarity, the disruptive person needs reassurance that you identify with who s/he's becoming. S/he needs appreciation of the validity of what s/he's living through, not overtly in terms of articulations or mirrorings of what exactly that may be—no one knows, in particular cases (and presumption otherwise is either embarrassing or insulting)—but appreciation that tacitly respects the integrity of the other's need or desire, relative to clarification of the desirable goals (action-orienting boundaries) that "we" really do share: What we are here together to do that's really so worthwhile for all of us to do, that I know "you" already appreciate. This is a commissive element in recognizing the other: imputing to them what they really want to be the case (though they may not acknowledge this), thereby helping make it so, as something originating from them. (Let's act as if Hamas really is on the road to legitimate leadership in Palestine. What must we thereby see in Hamas' struggle that validates it?—which they may secretly—maybe desperately—wonder of us, as they need to save face in facing their learning curve.)

On the other hand (in building distributed solidarity), you create popularity for yourself among most of your students, which can be turned into tacit peer pressure toward rogues in terms of everybody else's apparent buy-in to your mission, widely shared because it's evident to most all as worth "our" time. (Supposedly, multilateralism in "the international community"—the diplomatic theater—can be an effective basis for inducing conflict resolutional processes without sanctions.)

Don't overtly isolate the misbehaving person before this is necessary. (Constructive engagement was needed by China, now needed by "rogue nations"). Be clear about your need to have their membership in what the class is doing. (Commissively preserve the scope of meaning for 'the international community'.) But use "everybody's" preference for what "we" are doing as tacit peer pressure effecting the rogue's desire to go along constructively. Let the misbehaving persons get the message on their own. (Let the leadership save face.) At heart, we all need to belong.

If peer ethos doesn't work effectively in the classroom, one disciplinary method is to use checkmarks on the chalkboard by the rogue's name, such that a certain low number of public chalkmarks results in clearly-understood debts, like 15 minutes of detention somewhere, after "indebting" 2 marks (first mark is a warning, second is a "bill" for 15 minutes of detention; third mark is 30 minutes).

R: Again, how to analogize this [classroom work] successfully to the Arab Middle East...Hamas and Hezbollah?

G: U.N.-defined interventions remain an option broadly supported by the international community, but at worst, sanctions processes will happen in a stepwise way.

This began as a short and pleasant response, but obviously to me, I've sketched by now such a slew of themes that the discussion may lose coherence. Actually, I'm improvising from extended discussions elsewhere that are more properly focused, rather than trying to innovate anything here. A short email to a respondent became a recollective occasion for me that I've tried to make coherent. But this is an online workbook. If you had read the above every few hours during the past 24, you'd see that it was changing, like any drafting process. But normally, drafting processes set out with an aim in mind. I didn't; this just got longer and longer, and I've tried to make the best of it, rather than deleting what was spontaneously here 24 hours ago (and more crudely written because I was inadequately focused, symptomizing a complex of old interests that I've realized I needed to somewhat clarify).

hoping to see multinational experience evolve the Rawlsian tradition

2006-08-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

A posting to the fledgling Rawls group today.

identity via mediality: text as authorship

2006-08-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

"Everything we know we learned from television" – Tom Goodman, TV Columnist, S. F. Chronicle

I'm surprised to discover that 'mediality' isn't in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (nor in the Collegiate), so I hereby claim the sense of it I'll introduce in a moment.

The word exists already, mostly in a sense related to McLuhanesque appreciation of the centrality of electronic media as medium. That's the environmentality of something's mediality. But the mediality of something isn't primarily its relation to perceiver via a medium, but the ontic character of the thing itself as genuinely not constituted by the medium but merely mediated by it, while being very aware that the reality is otherwise, but getting away with it inasmuch as the self-consciousness of this is masked in the pretense of there being no mask. Mediality belongs to the actor preceived to be not an actor. Mediality is a self-consciously distanced naïve realism whose deliberate pretense of actuality requires perceiver presumption that the speaker, though available via a medium of course, is itself unquestionably genuine independent of its media reality.

The typical instance of this is the candor of a master politician. The excellently hilarious framing of this is Jon Stewart reading the news on The Daily Show or David Letterman interviewing someone on Late Night. It's beyond simulacrum, because that remains unaware of its own reality, like the hologram that doesn't know that it is merely that. Mediality is the hologramicality of presence as not possibly hologrammatic, but with full awareness of its hologramality-preceived-as-not-so. It's playing for keeps in improv, whereby it doesn't easily occur to someone that it's improv. (That it's obvious with a deadpan Jon Stewart or Letterman is the intended comic frame that masks dead-serious comedy, where every break of the comic pretense is just another level of pretense, and the candid interview off set just continues the show as no-longer-show.) The California teen's "as if" allegorizes prime time's "no as about it—no question" in broadly hybridized onticization of As-ness as no As. Really playing for keeps makes cynicism a small time simulacrum of the reality that plays circles around such self-righteous non-players, because mediality can also generate genuine value, in which case the invisibility of mediality dissolves into the genesis, as happens with proffered norms that become genuinely normative; or "art" that becomes canonical art.

Celebrity—a kind of performance art—works because of its implicature of "mere" celebrity masking genuine presence, even when the celebrity is the product (like Paris Hilton, who is famous for being famous). In other words, the mediality there isn't the celebrityness, but the shared difference between celebrity and genuineness behind the makeup. Celebrity works because the consensual sharing of the shallowness of celebrity is exuded by the celebrity especially, as pretense of mere celebrity composed with the audience as hiding the valuable privacy that one's public is dying to witness, but which both public and celebrity tacitly agree belongs to privacy. (Paris Hilton "deserves" fame because a genuine talent that both public and she impute must be behind the highly made up facade that we all know is highly made up.) The mediality of imputed private realm gives validity to the celebrity (who is thereby vulnerable to "invasions" of privacy that undermine an imputed genuiness that was supposedly masked, but turns out to not be there at all).

When this same reality is a presidency that has become dependent on the genuineness of the president (handled by the marketing of genuineness), mediality becomes the power of marketing unassuming ("Aw shucks") power—the power of ideology as mediality of legitimacy (fronting as legitimacy of popularity/celebrity/fame), which shields the real power of the presidency (in the hands of handlers). One has only to see a studious George W. Bush with glasses reading briefing papers to appreciate the cowboy on the stump as worthy of his White House attorney's view that he's the smartest man she ever met. The skill of "W" is the preppie's relentless appreciation of the Texans who are always virtually in his public audience.

The constitutional legitimacy of the presidency is variably sustained (depending on the times) by the mediality of the president in that office. When that power of mediality is more or less unrelated to the real presidency (e.g., Reagan, who was in charge of nothing), then the power of mediality serves the presidency (maybe badly, but also maybe well, as in the case of Gerald Ford after Nixon, who was in charge of nothing, but rescued the presidency). When the power of mediality originates from the real presidency (Eisenhower well, Kennedy well, Johnson pretty well, Nixon badly, Carter well, Bush-I well, and Clinton, well, most times), mediality of the president is genuine and popular support is really legitimate. Mediality is not as such phoniness or simulacrum or con, etc. "Big con" (recall The Sting) is just short of commissive validity in speech acts. Promise (potential) in the promise (act) may stay true. The political campaign may be well remembered. It depends.

Bush-II never was a legitimate president, but the corporatist league, from the beginning, mastered marketing (from church to Madison Avenue, from 1974 to 1980 onward) so well beyond the Democrats that there has been one Democratic president in the past quarter century: billiant son of a salesman, genius of genuine mediality, still so evident. Bush-I represented the aristocracy of that corporatist league that has now reached its end. I hereby predict that a new Democratic era is near; and globally, a new multilateralism will follow. A renaissance of global development will be the story of the 21st century, establishing a continuity between progressivism of the late 19th and early 20th, the 1950s and early '60s, and the mid-1990s through the turn of the millenium. The corporatist Republican era in America (such an insult to Lincoln) is nearly over, as the Cold War corporation is dying and has no replacement in the wings.

But mediality is part of our social being—divined in the Shakespearean court, as well as by that committee once upon a time doing Genesis, etc.

intimations on the existence of "Truth"

2006-08-27T09:33:00.000-07:00

Matt,

Your posting today suggests that you're working toward representation of your general philosophical position, expressed today inasmuch as anything brief can be fair to oneself. It's important to venture these kinds of things.

I wonder how strongly you would support your own phrasing today, in the sense that your terms chosen may be (or not) exactly the ones you stand by (contrasted with rough sketching that you'd dismiss beyond its private usefulness), such that explication, elaboration, and deepening is a matter of, at least, standing by that phrasing. I doubt you'd want someone to parse today's posting very finely, but the importance here is that a philosopher should come to the point where s/he nears phrasing things exactly as they "should" (for one's work) be phrased and welcomes further discussion relative to exactly those terms/phrasings. I hope you're working toward your basic formulations of your chosen vocabulary.

Over the years, I've tacitly prompted that by sometimes addressing others' postings line by line, which is apparently not appreciated (like recording a party conversation and publishing an analysis of it), but I enjoyed the surreality of it all, in complement to non-surreally doing the same with passages by Habermas-in-English (cf. the Spoon Collective list, e.g., October, 2003: postings 5-6, 10, 2-15, 18-19, 24, 58, and 108).

Some of your other postings have been in the vein of generalizing your position, too, particularly as you were leading up to completion of your dissertation (I should lament that I remember these things and get a life?). Suppose you died tomorrow and people sought to know what you think by drawing together all your best postings and dissertation. What would they find?

For starters, they'd find (relative to the general archives) that the group discussion medium is a pasttime, rather than an opportunity, and that's interesting unto itself, as a matter of Internet life, but also relative to the economy of intellectual property. The young academic covets one's own ideas for use via standard journals because it's peer-reviewed, thus good for the tenure track, and the journal protects copyright because that's what academic writing is all about: intellectual property for career advancement. People who populate discussion lists (at Yahoo!, of all places) can't be one's proper peers, of course. (I haven't tried peer-reviewed publication, but I don't believe it would be difficult, given the degree of forgettable material that normally turns up to fulfill so many editors' publishing deadlines—and O, the dust on the shelves where those journals are stored).

But one might also find that "you" are really present, across time of many discussions. "Your" actual philosophical views show (unstated) over time via discussion as conceptual isomorphisms across postings that may together be "diagnosed" to tend toward a particular implicature of conceptuality, more so than through the relatively displaced attention of focusing on others' given discursive [con]texts. In the extended time of philosophical discussion, the inescapable desire for the overall coherence of one's thinking is interestingly evident, albeit not yet with the terminological rigor that's ultimately required for enduring stature (clearly evident in the canonical pragmatist's love of ordinary idiom). A kind of psychoanalytical criticism is tenable relative to the long term of spontaneous discussion (borne especially by a correlate silence of the audience, as if one's freely exposing oneself without witness). Ha!, maybe that prospect was evident in my "dialogal" form of posting, and therefore emperors had to dismiss the court, leaving me to my own freedom (a pathos among competing emperors?).

Anyway (as my fondness for tangents goes free in a non-peer-reviewed medium—very useful for developing themes), generally for academic philosophy, concern for ultimate coherence and—for the philosopher—that kind of prospect backgrounds hermeneutical parsing of canonical texts and Analytical philosophy's and Ordinary Language philosophy's concern for linguistic analysis—typified by tortuous expositions of deflationary senses of truth, which comes to mind because I was reading Albrecht Wellmer on this last night ("The Debate About Truth:..,").

I'm amazed, as I read Wellmer, to see how obviously is concern for the theory of truth-proper confused with concern for theory of validity (which entails a contained theory of truth-proper)—or else I'm a very bad reader (may be); or, more likely, Wellmer's target of critique is making such a confusion (I didn't read beyond the first 3 sections of his lecture, but will later). In any case, one has to surrender hope for a coherence theory of truth-proper (i.e., theory of evidential/empirical "truth conditionality" as basically a matter of coherence modeling), but the classical search for Truth is what Habermasians would now identify as the search for overall coherence, and a coherence theory of validity is at least what Habermas' career is about. One can, in principle, say what is essentially Habermasian, which is a stance on the ultimate coherence of his work that makes him singularly "Habermasian" beyond the sense in which any other writer could be Habermasian. And you might hope for the day when it's clear what's distinctively Piscionerian!—a happy day to work toward, as long as you don't expect of yourself—as I don't for myself (future Davisian?)—the rarity of stature that Habermas has achieved (comparable to anyone in the second half of the 20th century).

It puzzled me sometimes, 2005, that, in your postings relating to Habermas, Adorno, etc, you didn't refer to parts of your dissertation as backdrop or extension of your points (which would have been good service for readers, as well as deserved self-promotion). It was a great opportunity for discussion. I regret to say I haven't read most of it because (1) pressed for free time, end of 2004, I'd expected to focus on parts relative to direction from you in particular discussions; (2) skimming it, I sensed a discussion largely directed to readers unfamiliar with Critical Theory and Habermas; and (3) I found its basic argument (abstracted in the beginning) implausible, but was eager to eventually address that finding (my mistake?) relative to specific discussions initiated by you. I located parts of the dissertation that I did focus on, as I sought the philosophical claims at the basis of your project to be in those sections discussing "ontology" and "naturalism" (I worked from searches of your document for all instances of 'ontolog' and 'natural' and focused on those contexts that involved substantive claims, rather than mere mention of the concepts.) You didn't defend your views, if I recall correctly (or did so only briefly, and I've forgotten)—or was it that you resented that I worked from extracted contexts, rather than having read the entire work? The discursive challenge was to show how my tacit claim was wrong: that your basic explicit claims were argued in sections that had to stand on their own, despite what you said about other topics elsewhere, and there I took you at your word (and disagreed in terms of what Habermas wrote). The compliment to you is that I took your arguments that seriously, and what I got in return wasn't useful for my own critical learning.

Inasmuch as the dissertation is being left behind, I suppose you'd wish for the monographic work that you can refer to comfortably for that backgrounding and extension that might serve short postings. (I do so for myself, ha!, way down the road.)

I'm not suggesting a return to discussing your dissertation now, but, in going for your own basic philosophical formulations, one might wonder how that relates to your largest existing work, as an opportunity to advance your sense of ultimate coherence relative to the best parts (in your estimation) of that work. I encourage the search for clarity on ultimate concerns here by writing (somewhat floridly, I know) about the dimension of that which is the continuity of career, which one inevitably is (even when that's not yet overtly self-understood autobiographically).

The above discussion seems to me (at the moment) to emblemize my own interest in understanding how the holism of the so-called search for truth ("Truth"?) is also an existential search for one's place (self-understanding) in ultimacy (which is clearly the keynote of Matt's posting today, pretext for my own excursion, to be sure), which is always a matter of one's ultimate sense of validity (or sense of ultimate validity: Validity) implied, if not overtly addressed. Whatever one thinks of "God" talk, the concern for ultimacy remains—or haunts, as perhaps in his "flawed...star dust" (end of posting), with which I sympathize, but can't empathize, as I live in the Pacific zone.

I should emphasize that none of this today is about my own self-understanding (since I'm quite overtly preoccupied with that via a different idiom), but all this is certainly dramatizing my actual approach to the interest in the "existence" of—the existentiality of one's living relation with— "Truth" (or, in Matt's case, "Being"—for him, without quote marks).

a primer on Islam, democratic development, and philosophy

2006-08-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

One has to begin somewhere. So, I've used a very small amount of reliable material on Islam and democracy as basis for sketching a philosophical view of the theory-policy-activism relationship relative to the issue of Islam and democracy. I worked only with the summary statements of the conference and 2 research reports, and just that resulted in a relatively long discussion. If I had worked with the entirety of the conference materials and reports, I would be more confident of the result. As it stands, though, I believe it was a very worthwhile exercise, at least for exemplifying an approach to doing philosophy practically.

Aug. 30

• The Project on Middle East Democracy

Playing the West for fools

2006-08-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

So, Iran needn't worry about being prevented from making a nuclear weapon because procedural justice in the West plods along so slowly—so justly—that there's plenty of time, as long as Iran can prevent the threat of military attack by keeping Anglo soldiers tied down in Iraq via care and feeding of sectarian violence.

But the risk for Iran is that the violence may get so heavy in Iraq that the Anglos withdraw from Iraq—accepting a reading of the situation as civil war that forces withdrawal due to Anglo domestic opinion—thereby removing Anglo soldiers from danger of retalliation by Iran when Israel attacks Iran.

So, the path to nuclear weaponry in Iran requires a controlled sustenance of sectarian violence in Iraq.

I'm meritocratic, not undemocratic.

2006-08-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

I have to tell you, I see the blogosphere as largely the new genre of idle chatter. I have no interest in the narcissism of "IMO" spiels, and I really don't care to be widely read. (That bell curve in high school is humanity writ small, and I've always been in the tiny right percentile, which is not lonely, but which, thank goodness, gives me more cherished solitude, of which I never have enough). I also don't wish to spend my scarce free time writing things unrelated to my philosophical life (which tends toward a monographic conception). Elitist? Hey, I'll vote for meritocracy over populist sovereignty any day.

Democracy, relative to this dyad, is not about populist sovereignty, rather about constitutional sovereignty of the public or populace in constitutional marriage with meritocratic institutions across generations, which implies for social evolution a primacy of intellectual virtue, so to speak, which the university, as planetary kind of organization, exemplifies. Inasmuch as that's "elitist," then I'm happily elitist (while proud of my humanitarian duty of care that derives from the philosophical bases of such an attitude).

Can the U.N. at last be effective against violence?

2006-08-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

In complement to my pro-Israel stance in the Hezbollah-Israeli war, I need to say I am not an Israeli hawk. For many years, I was vocally biased for the Palestinian cause, but was increasingly disappointed by Palestinian leadership failures, and the last straw was Arafat's all-now-or-nothing abandonment of the Clinton effort in 2000—an immaturity that just got more extreme as Israel got more moderate in the following years. A basically bipartisan stance toward the peace process can include belief that one side has more work to do than the other.

Peace is an engineering problem, as well as a matter of principle. If the Palestinian administration can't control violence among its people, it has no leadership basis for causing moderates in Israel (let alone liberals) to successfully sustain their end of the process. Tragically, pan-Arabist rocket attacks have destroyed the security potential of the Israeli barrier plan and destroyed the credibility of Israeli political centrism. Time after time, Arabs shoot themselves in the foot.

The Palestinians—perhaps the Arab people—have an obsession with revenge that isn't justified by history. I used to accept the Arab line against Israel, but the more I sought to find the origin of the Arab grievance, the more it got displaced further back into history, until it disappeared in a legacy of colonialisms unrelated to Jews. (Was it the Romans against the Assyrians? At the moment the Romans—excuse me, the Italians—are being invited by both Lebanon and Israel to lead the U.N. force)

Peace is not proximally about history; it's a synchronic state of affairs—the "engineering problem" that allows disputes of history to be properly remedied. Right-of-return issues can't be addressed without peace first. Borders can be changed, but not without some peaceful borders to contest through civil means, specifically an international forum whose authority is effective against terrorism. What can that global authority be, if not the U.N. (and supposing it's not to be the U.S., which, by the way, has been the leading agent of bipartisanship; the Palestinians have made a mockery of the the "Quartet" process). But the U.N. hasn't yet been effective for curbing terrorism against Israel.

Above all, the world has to make the UN effective. The tenuous cease-fire in Lebanon and the processes now in play have world historical importance for the evolution of globally bipartisan conflict resolution prototypes (and globally nonpartisan regional development), which didn't have a chance until 1989 (end of Cold War) to be what it was supposed to be—which couldn't yet work effectively in 1991 (Saddamist invasion of Kuwait), couldn't yet work effectively in Bosnia or Kosovo, and couldn't yet work effectively to enforce sanctions effectively against Saddamism. In each case, a coalition outside the UN (NATO or a "coalition of the willing") was required for the UN to have credibility in an enforcement process. Today, the UN has a chance—with the IAEA over Iran; and Lebanese sovereignty over its southland—to show its capacity for the global role in conflict resolution, which can be to lead the creation of prototypes for region-based conflict resolution generally. But Hezbollah has to let that happen. The news at the moment is that Lebanon hasn't yet stopped Hezbollah's importation of more arms, which is a twofold violation of the cease-fire agreement (and Lebanon's earlier backpedaling on commitment to disarm Hezbollah in the south was also a violation).

People should recognize that local conflict resolutions are the substance of the process of evolving global, generalizable approaches to conflict resolution. Concordantly, the democratic experience in one locality is the only possible basis for other fledgling democracies to avoid pain in social learning. Likewise for trade disputes and for human rights, etc.

The "rarefied space" (first "[MP]" comment) of diplomacy is a kind of communicative engineering that strives to merge its designs into real, existing institutional structures, as we all seek better institutional designs through ideally fractalic, isomorphizing successes in localities that may have genetic robustness across geographies.

a cheer for Hezbollah

2006-08-16T18:43:00.000-07:00

It's good sense that Hezbollah lead reconstruction of southern Lebanon, since they are responsible (over years of rocket-based taunting of Israel, then Hezbollah's escalation of the taunting, just as their patron Iran is getting dangerously beligerant) for causing Israel's allegedly "disproportionate" destruction of the Shi'ite region. Who cares if Hezbollah rules southern Lebanon, as long as they're nonviolent toward a peaceful Israel? Israel shouldn't mind. The stature that Hezbollah will gain via the reconstruction process can give them the self-confidence to acquiesce to being disarmed down the road. This can also be the beginning of their mature collaboration in the Lebanese government, and Lebanon may indeed become a model for other multi-ethnic Arab governments.

Don't spin Iran's intransigence as relative to the U.S.

2006-08-14T14:13:00.000-07:00

To: The New York Times
[links and bracketed content added for here.]

Editors.

Your editorial, Still Spinning" (8/14), plays into Iran's hardliner strategy of making intransigence a matter of Iran vs. the U.S., when the important dynamic is U.N.-based problem-solving. In order to not domestically legitmate [theocratic] authoritarians, a steady focus on U.N. processes must be the keynote of dealing with Iran. The U.S. relation toward Iran must be kept strictly relative to U.N. processes.

All the more reason that U.N. leadership must work in the Lebanese cease-fire follow-up. Since the founding of Israel, Arabist extremism (then Islamist extremism) has rejected a U.N.-oriented world order. The Cold War kept the U.N. so ineffective for conflict resolution [and against anti-Israeli terrorism] that the U.N. wasn't ready for prime time when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, not ready during "Bosnia" and "Kosovo"; and not effective for sanctions against Saddamism.

It's vitally important to not mislocate the "damage...to...standing" that is at stake here: Iran's intransigence is not about it's relationship to the U.S., but to an IAEA regime against nuclear weapons proliferation. We must keep the focus on the potential of the U.N. to become an effective global authority, so that someday—sooner rather than later, one hopes—so-called "coalitions of the willing" and NATO can take a back seat in military conflict resolution. All eyes now are properly on Lebanon, but let this not bolster authoritarian vanity.

Israel & the universe

2006-08-13T21:14:00.000-07:00

Uri Avnery's MIFTAH article on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, cited by Matt at the Habermas group, implies that the current war was offensively planned by Israel (e.g., "That's what happens when you start a war without clear and achievable aims....").

But, first of all, the longstanding Hezbollah build-up implies that defensive war planning would have been the necessary interest, not offensive. Secondly, criticism within Israel of the war's management (so interesting to Avnery---and Matt) strongly implies that no offensive war was ever intended (unplanned, thus not offensively effective). Thirdly, the lack of enthusiasm of Israeli soldiers on the ground (according to Tom Friedman's eyewitness account, paragraph 4) implies that the military wasn't geared for an offensive campaign. There were no "tens of thousands of our soldiers" (Avnery) in Lebanon until very recently; that's the basis of the criticism of the generals (or of the government—one loses track of the target) that so interests Avnery (but undermines his attitude).

"[I]t is altogether impossible to win this war," not because a plan has failed, i.e., not because "nothing is working as planned" (Avnery), but because the Hezbollah bunkering of 12,000 rockets among civilians can't be humanely destroyed by a defensive military that didn't plan for such a war. (The regional idea had been that Lebanon's post-Syrian government would gain a monopoly on military resources.)

"[O]ur inability to plan" for Hezbollah's insane and randomly-targeted offensive against Israeli civilians is like the inability to plan for suicide bombers: The invalidated traditional military presumption of the enemy's desire to live thwarts traditional defensive measures. Hezbollah's insane degree of willingness to sacrifice its own population for scoring Iranian points against Israel wouldn't be properly foreseen by defensive military planning at a time of increased promise for Lebanese autonomy.

Avnery then insults Kofi Annan and begs the question of why, over past decades, Israel has not been able to depend on the UN to deal with the threat of terrorism against Israel. There was no "paradoxical situation" in Israel's initial rejection (now moot) of the UN cease-fire resolution: A "solution" that required immediate Israeli withdrawal and allowed Hezbollah to stay in place was no solution. Now, Israel has accepted a revised UN cease-fire resolution because it allows the Israeli military to withdraw relative to UN force implementation—and provides for eventual disarming of Hezbollah.

Moving now to Matt's discussion: Gorbachev's comment on "military-industrial and political elites" was U.S. President Eisenhower's theme as he exited in 1960. It relates to a corporate militarism that is unrelated to the Israeli context. But his point is otherwise good to keep in mind. Critical awareness of the "military-industrial complex" (Eisenhower's phrase) is a mainstream industry for American political media. Corporate militarism's lobbyists compete with other kinds of corporatist lobbies which all compete with health care industry lobbyists and education industry lobbylists and sugar industry lobbyists and consumer rights lobbyists and on and on it goes.

The black market in weapons is an evil force, whether it's Iranian missles going back to Syria on trucks that sent humanitarian relief to Iran's massive earthquake areas several years ago; or it's a Pakistani nuclear scientist selling know-how to Iran. But one should need to distinguish that from military relations between governments (e.g., U.S. and Israel); and distinguish defensive (e.g., Israeli) from offensive (Iranian) military interests.

Also, we should want nations to have the military resources to participate in UN enforcement activities. We should want African nations to have the resources to make an African Union credible against tribal wars. Obviously, we don't want to ban guns for the police (or for UN peacekeeping potential); so at least that degree of the military-industrial complex is sometimes justifiable (when highly regulated).

Part of the job of political theory is to develop a geopolitics that's both progressive and realistic.

Critical work (in a Habermasian sense) seeks, among many aims, to help at "street" level to dissolve [Matt] "hardened...dogmatic, imperial ideologies" and fears that get embodied in dissociative and dependent lives (which, in turn, inhibit democratic life, to the glee of sponsors of "fast food nation": Feed the suckers more to keep them attention-deficited, fat 'n "happy").

But a therapeutic must be oriented not by disillusioning, but by programmatic senses of healthy development: capability-oriented self-development, family development, home-school partnership, and community development—living well by design, in light of a secularly (knowledge-based) "spiritual" holism of lifeworldliness (rather than religious, faith-based holism), since particularly religious life fosters absentee ownership of potentials for human flourishing. (With Matt, "I am pessimistic that lifeworlds integrated mainly on the basis of theological reason can ever end their fear and rage against each other.")

In the beginning, we come into the world without fear. Ontologization of trauma (the Lacanian sickness) is avoidable. Knowing how is a matter of: How does good early development go? What is good enough parenting with decent resources? What's the nature of community-based human development? Etc. These aren't questions of theory (though, of course, each has its theoretical domain, related to that Theory/theory distinction I discussed a while back).

I'm made anxious by Matt's response to Jeff's comments in terms of cyborgian prospects, since that venue is completely unrelated (for me) to Jeff's contexts, but it's a fascinating issue for me otherwise.

Ultimate concern becomes us, be it in the pre-differentiating realm (cosmethic) of the origin of religion (a realm which spiritually or poetically survives the demise of religion) or be it the bioethical concern for apparently posthuman futures. In a cosmethical investment, all is anchored by the gravity of The One, which one may die to revalidate. But ultimate concern survives the death of The One.

The modern (even postmodern) condition of ultimate concern is incomprehensible to religious life, maybe even terrifying. This week, Science reported (nothing special for Science) research on human neural processing in terms of a fruit fly experiment, because fruit fly neurons and human neurons are genetically related.

String theorists in Santa Barbara grudgingly admitted that their work ultimately implies an anthropic universe after all (they had thought that string theory would be the ultimate undoing of anthropic nonsense), where the laws of physics are, increasingly, apparently regional (within the inaccessibly singular universe), such that a "landscape" of physicality is born from ongoing Big Bangs (old news) spawning what's commonly come to be expressed as our universe among multiple universes)—and (here's the new news) intelligent life belongs to the regional physics whose low vacuum energy—whose Cosmological Constant, whose dark matter—allows for life (and black holes), implying a manifold of parallel universes within the one that is in principle inaccessible by even string theory (with its 10-to-the-500th power possible states). Go figure—but we can't because we haven't evolved to discover the mathematics that can conceive tests of what given mathematics has entailed.

Meanwhile (apparently), a self-replicating, computational "Singularity is near," and will go its own way beyond human comprehension, like the intelligent life Out There that doesn't bother to answer.

But never fear: As intelligent life evolves, it increasingly respects the integrity of wildlife and leaves young planets alone to figure out how to govern its own evolution, because that's the way it is: Planets have to discover their own path of sustainability, first struggling tooth and claw for cosmopolitan cohering attuned to its forms of life, and "universal" (planetary) literacy everywhere is a rough road (one might suppose), rougher sometimes than others, rougher for some than for others, etc. I mean, some planets get wiped out by supernova before their sun inflates to engulf its water-hole region. We've got lots of time to figure out how to deal with that (we hope). Some theorists imagine (as we humans tend to strive for what can be conceived) that some forms of intelligent life engineer complete containment of their star, thus all its energy. (No wonder astronomers don't find them).

All this is normal thinking (normal kinds of speculation) in the scientific community—including, of course, modern Israel.

endgame

2006-08-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

Evidently, UN-oriented diplomacy is working, though not soon enough, as the Nasrallahan “state” in southern Lebanon needs to save face (before being disarmed), and the Olmertan administration in Israel needs to preserve its fragile legitimacy.

Hezbollah requires enough reason to claim victory that it can live with being disarmed, so it’s crucial that Israel not try to completely destroy Hezbollah’s weaponry—not that it could, as southern Lebanon is now nearly a wasteland anyway, due to Hezbollah’s insane design—its neo-bolshevik arrogance—of hiding itself widely amid the impoverished civilian population that’s been made dependent on Hezbollah’s social services.

I take a social-evolutionary perspective on the whole matter.

criminal misperception by Iraqi insurgents

2006-08-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

To: The New York Times
[links and bracket below added for blog version]

Editors,

Killing American soldiers in Iraq is a crime, not an act of war. Though T.W. Waters', "Guilty of Fighting a War" (8/12) expresses how confusing the relationship is between a war on terrorism and fostering peace in Iraq, the U.S. is not at war with Iraq. Is Mr. Waters ["who teaches human rights at Bard College"] arguing with a straw man, i.e., a misrepresentation of U.S. policy?

Relative to American presence, there is arguably no justification for the insurgency in terms of rules of war. Denying amnesty to identified insurgents who have killed Americans is not inconsistent with supporting prime minister al-Maliki's reconciliation plan, in which the insurgency in general is forgiven its war against national unity government. [In fact, the al-Maliki plan doesn't seek to give amnesty to insurgents who have killed Americans.]

Waters apparently believes that the United States opposes amnesty for insurgents generally, but that doesn't follow from his claim that the U.S. opposes amnesty for insurgents who kill Americans. Does the U.S. blanketly insist that amnesty "must exclude insurgents fighting American forces," or does the U.S. insist only that amnesty exclude insurgents who have been identifiably charged with killing Americans? If the latter, then the rest of Waters' complaint is ill-conceived.

How could it be otherwise than that advance amnesty for insurgents who kill Americans encourages attacks on Americans? Is Waters, then, misrepresenting Republican and Democratic views in order to make a straw-man objection in order to air his useful clarifications about the nature of amnesty?

The key incentive for insurgents to stop fighting ought to be that the national unity government can credibly accomodate non-violent insurgent interests (just as Hezbollah ought to believe in the potential of Lebanese democracy). Not yet believing this is no justification for violence against Americans; but not yet believing in the new Iraqi government is just reason for fighting politically to make national unity government feasible. Iraq might learn from Lebanon (which was evolving well), and both might learn from Turkey (which is a well-working Islamic democracy).

Apparently, Waters confuses the difference between rational comprehensiveness in amnesty and appeasement of gang violence. Once again, the U.S. is not at war with Iraq. To refer to "insurgents fighting Americans" as "a normal fighting force" just begs the issue of what Americans are, in turn, fighting: They are fighting unprovoked violence between Iraqis, fighting terrorism in Iraq, and defending themselves against violently confused insurgents who are anything but "a normal fighting force," according to the rules of war.

Waters further confuses the difference between the domestic legal status of allegedly terrorist prisoners and the status of combatants in Iraq who have killed Americans. Due process issues for citizen defendents in homicides (i.e., Iraqis killing Americans) can't be equated with due process issues for non-state agents charged with terrorism (even though the latter have more "Geneva" rights than the Bush administration wants to grant). Waters simply inflates a projected double-think that suits his laudable promotion of comprehensive amnesty (and may be itself "doubly arrogant").

child's point

2006-08-05T17:32:00.000-07:00

I'm very aware that the deaths and suffering of war turn commentary into intellectualism. To the suffering, commentary is wasted time, "academic" in the pejorative sense. "If you really care about all this, do something practical," the voice says.

My response has to be: I am. I've worked for educational organizations that are dedicated to progressive practice my entire adult life. A devotion to progressive practice has to be oriented to the life that one can lead in the place that one can affect. It must (it will, with experience) grow to include a pragmatism about the actualization of ideals. In pursuit of that, and in the meantime of that pursuit, commentary is a kind of self-directed learning, an activist respite from the pursuit. So, one activism complements another.

It's a great accomplishment for a society when there is an increase in time spent actively reading (not to mention mastering intractable issues). Passive reading placates; active reading nourishes—including reading that's therapeutic, that "medicates." One should feel proud of a life spent advancing basic literacy or causing one's extended neighborhood to more highly value informed opinion. Multiplication of that modest venture universally would lead to fundamental transforms in humanity, as Truth always wins eventually, and human potential always flourishes (given fair chance), and humanity evolves in the Open, in the freedom, created by literacy. Needless to say—and far it is from there to philosophical investigations. Just the distance of that —from the economic bases of decent education systems through the politics of access to higher education to the interdisciplinarity of inquiry that constructively warrants theoretical work—all that is more than most lives can be expected to comprehend, let alone specifically philosophical endeavors that should not be ignorant of a history of discursive inquiry.

So, relative to that, humanistic higher education battles the budgetary process with engineering, etc.

A philosophical investigation is a point in a tapestry of thousands of endeavors, most maybe frivolous (e.g., most Yahoo! groups). If the topography of Internet social networking could be securely captured by theory (analogizing the topography of discretionary communication throughout modern society), what difference would that make to the network (the society), let alone to the suffering subjects of inquiry? Why do we bother? I suppose that most people reading this take for granted a vague background sociology of value, projects, endeavors, careers, and organized life that most of the world wouldn't understand as more than the signs of the vanity fair of wealthy societies—leisure culture's rationalization of the imperialism that protects and feeds the leisure.

The fact is—the fact must be—that we do this, I do this, because I must. Reflecting on that might be useful to others (certainly, it has been to me), but the overriding reality of the matter is exemplified by—believe it or not—the issue of global warming: It's been the aggregate effect of countless, undocumented conversations over decades that now an array of local environmental issues (e.g., metropolitan pollution, heat waves) imply a singularity of concern that has become truly planetary, as was expressed by "Multipolitan environmental engineering" Tuesday.

That's not only the result of the growing consensus of the scientific community (which, by the way, is singular; it's accurate to refer to "the" scientific community, as planetary organon); it's more the result of countless conversations (born from reading!) about the issue which, in the shadow of scientific consensus, has forced political corporatism to act, at least in terms of fabricating new market mechanisms that serve that public interest. The Conversation creates a market for alternative technologies that politics, in turn, serves, but largely doesn't lead. Leadership in social evolution belongs to no identifiable constellation. It's the emergent ethos of the human interest, and it always wins (albeit one step back for every two-or-so forward).

If my conversation can do some part to remind non-academic others of the importance of academic work—or remind people in academia of the virtue of philosophy beyond the general (well-rounding) curriculum, beyond filling out that portfolio taken into the budgetary process ("Can't we justify cutting back faculty in the humanities?")—or remind academics slumming in philosophy that public policy can be both multidisciplinary and effective in real institutions....If "Habermas" only stands for the potential importance of philosophy in understanding a world that would never have time for it, is that not reason enough to be here? Of course, notwithstanding—excuse me—the apparent attention-deficited and disssociative self-interestedness of the mall that Internet communications must live in.

Fact is, one person, a few, likely contribute very little directly. But it's like voting. The upshot of history's pointillism only happens by making points. Your point is the background topography of communications you exemplify, not basically the overt promotion of issues (though that too), but the way you live, the way you remember. Let us not forget.... Let us not lose sight....

I live far, far from Middle East crises. I live where Christian, Muslim, and Jew live well together, truly—which extremists (those diseases of modernization who confuse pathological crime with "resistance") would like to see destroyed, in "light" of imputed imperialism (the disowned face of rage against their own incapability?). I live in knowledge that, no matter how well a society manages to be democratic, there is no escaping new generations of well-heeled "citizens" who would undermine the legacy of the generations that made such undermining possible. So, democracy is an endless project, just as education faces new generations endlessly, living with the power of those who love their own leisure luxuries more than their children (which is what spiraling national debts exhibit).

Meanwhile, as one commentator put it this week, the Middle East is plagued by "extremists who hate their enemies more than they love their children." Connect the dots: So many marginalized children in the anthropology of self-interest: accidents of passion, cheap labor, orphans of disease, and heirs of debt and war. What motivates a prevalence of decency in lives? What really redeems the decency of mentally diseased lives? What creates the "motivation", the volition to live or to sustain living really honorably?

(That's what I deleted from my earlier posting today.)

Multipolitan environmental engineering

2006-08-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

For a long time, I've claimed that humanity is increasingly prevailing in nature (intelligence of Earth) as a post-national lattice of metropolitan areas—expressing a post-classical legacy of the city-state (by which the transitory nation-state has always been anchored—Paris, London, New York, Berlin, etc). In fact, I argued this in the early 1990s, before Jürgen Habermas coined the notion of "postnational constellation."

Today, Los Angeles, London, New York, Seoul and 18 other cities joined forces in a project aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by pooling financial resources to that end. (Thanks, Bill Clinton.)

Such multipolitan activity signals a keynote of postmodern (postnational) humanity.

Sept. 1

And this week, California leads the way for the U.S.

Hezbollah vs. Israel—fundamentalist Islam vs. modernity

2006-07-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

The nature of the problem seems clear: It's a matter of social evolution in the long run, which no UN-brokered or multilaterally-brokered cease-fire can resolve. Only the Arab people can bring their region into our planet's somewhat democratic mainstream. In the short run, a local proxy war continues a geopolitical struggle for the character of Arab self-determination.

P.S., August 1

The frame of my discussion above is that Iran's interest in undermining Lebanon's democracy is a keynote of its support for Hezbollah attacks that draw Israel into military action in Lebanon, thereby fanning Arab anger toward Israel at the expense of Lebanese democracy, for the sake of Iran's ambitions.

Today, Lebanon's exasperated (and apparently exhausted) special envoy to the UN admitted that Lebanon is being exploited by Iran and showed no aggressive attitude toward Israel, only despair about its victimization in a war it did not seek. An interview today on the PBS News Hour ended, in part, this way:

GWEN IFILL: And, finally, I want to ask you to respond to [what] Shimon Peres had to say a few moments ago.... that the whole goal of [Hezbollah's] enterprise is ...also to convert the Middle East to Iranian control....

TAREK MITRI: Well, .... I don't want to see my country -- a country which is a country of plurality, diversity, tolerance, in spite of everything that has happened -- be caught in the crossfire of some planetary wars, some regional conflicts ... [Lebanon] should not become, never, never become the battleground for other wars....and this is the most dangerous thing for our country, taking our country hostage in a war that is not ours. [end of interview]

Earlier on the same news program, Peres said, in part, "There are four operations, not one [by Hezbollah, including]...to de-Lebanize Lebanon and make it a Shiite country, instead of a multinational country. To convert the Middle East from an Arab region to a Persian one, under the spell of Iran. Then again to win in Iraq. There is a great ambition of Iran to take over the Middle East,... [end of quote]

Here, I believe, is the basis for Lebanese collaboration with Israel for a durable cease-fire and disarmament of Hezbollah. Carefully read Mitri's comments (I listened carefully), and you see Lebanon not objecting to Israel's attacks against Hezbollah, only a mournfulness for the suffering of Lebanese citizens that, I would add, has been caused by Iran's victimization of Lebanese Shi'ites.

Energy without oil fights arab terrorism best

2006-07-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

[email to David Brooks, New York Times, re: "Cease-Fire to Nowhere"}

Subject: What "unified...ideas" of terrorists?
-----------------------------------------
Yea, "Cease-Fire to Nowhere"

David,

Your columns remain must-reads for me. I can even connect the dots between your fascinating psychosocial explorations and today's geopolitical commentary (which I hope Tom Friedman has praised).

The "great" achievement of terrorism is to keep our attention away from developing our societies, inducing us to fund military politics at the expense of educational politics, as extremism buys time for their network war.

But, if you'll grant that the real power of ideas is what's vested in global institutions—that the extremist wrath against Israel is a proxy for fundamentalist Islam's wrath for a world led by such ideas as the U.N. (creator of EuroAmericanist Israel) and the WTO—then it may seem obvious that terrorism is the death throe of unsustainable ideas.

And, as the "Inconvenient Truth" grows the planetary idea of energy futures without oil, those who were tied to their desert fortunes (and me-too religious visions) will be forgotten, fossils in the fuel of ideas.

Gary

a critical point in the fundamental war

2006-07-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

Fighting poverty through community-based human development

Had not Hizbollah attacked Israel, the news might be occupied with G8 follow-ups related to WTO resolutions that can complement the UN Millennium Goals' and World Bank's war against poverty in developing regions (and the Gates Foundation's material solidarity with the WHO's war against disease).

Meanwhile, "developed" nations have their ongoing war against poverty—well, it's not exactly a war, is it?—in terms of underfunded public health services, social services, and education. (The "great" success of terrorism is to keep public attention distracted from valid struggles.)

That's a macro-level comment. The following is about a micro-level attention to intervention that may seem to beg the question of macro-level complexity of chronic poverty. But, if there could be any one axial intervention (the public policy correlate to seeking essentials in philosophy), then human development might well be the key locale, and intelligent parenting the primordial practice that, long-term, alleviates poverty. O, please get us beyond paternalistic rhetoric about "family values" and the "work ethic," but all the same truly do more specifically to create community-based human development.

David Kirp, Professor of Public Policy, U. of Calif. at Berkeley, today published an article in the New York Times, "After the Bell Curve," to which I replied twice: to the Times and to Professor Kirp (without the links below). I'll let you know if anything comes of this (ha!).

re: "After the Bell Curve": critical need for comprehensive parenting supports

Editors:

David Kirp's "After the Bell Curve" (July 23) is right to focus on the developmental nature of intelligence and the negative importance of poverty, but he doesn't emphasize the importance of persistent and consistent support for parenting skills, as David Brooks indicated in his discussion ("Both Sides of Inequality," March 9, 2006) of Annette Laueau's ethnographic Unequal Childhoods: class, race, and family lifes, which indicates in detail what parents of successful children do.

We need more than weekday universal preschool (though that, too, obviously). We need a pediatric and community health care system that addresses the issues of mornings, evenings, and weekends throughout childhood. We need funded public policy oriented toward pre-parent and parenting education with ongoing home supports; and persistent, consistent home-school partnership throughout childhood.

Indeed, "it takes a village," and we're a long way from effective community-based human development for those who most need it. A fundamental rethinking of the interdisciplinary problem of public policy for human development seems critical, involving public health, education, social welfare, public policy, sociology, politics, and even philosophy (my bias).

Gary Davis
Berkeley

To: David Kirp
Subject: The root of the problem "After the Bell Curve": parenting education and long-term support

Professor Kirp,

Your engaging NYTimes article shows—implicitly, but, I believe, intentionally—how the matter is not "the roots of intelligence," but the roots of good development as indicated by standard IQ measures, i.e., effective intelligence is developmental, not genetic (which has been a keynote of leading intelligence researcher Robert Sternberg's work for many years). But researchers' focus on poverty (easy to measure) eludes the vital issue. Your article indeed mentions that poverty is not the heart of the issue, but largely you imply otherwise.

There is an unspecified correlation between socioeconomic status of parents and the vital issue: parenting effectiveness (very difficult to quantify). Obviously, high income level alone doesn't cause successful development. Something about parents who also produce higher economic qualities of life also educe more successful children. You mention this in passing: As "Turkheimer explains[,] 'Well-off families can provide the mental stimulation needed for genes to build the brain circuitry for intelligence.'” But that kind of issue should become front-and-center. Of course, "A family’s social standing is only a proxy for the time and energy needed to keep a youngster mentally engaged, as well as the social capital that helps steer a child to success." So, what is the character of that time and energy, that social capital? That should be a key orientation of progressive social policy, as a matter of integrated public health, social services, and education for community-based human development.

Maybe you're familiar with Annette Laueau's ethnographic Unequal Childhoods: class, race, and family life, which indicates in detail what parents of successful children do. Let me lift from a brief Web discussion of her book I did several months ago:

———————
.... Unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life, 2003, finds that successful children are far more communicatively engaged by their parents, for the sake of facilitating broad engagement of their children’s lives, than are the parents of unsuccessful children. This might seem unsurprising; but what’s interesting is what the parents of successful children do: They’re enmeshed in a syndrome, so to speak, that educes cognitive development and independence, whereas the parents of unsuccessful children tend to believe that letting their children have “freedom”—that “natural growth” takes care of itself—is good parenting.

The parents of successful children have a sense of “bugging” and tracking their kids, reasoning with them rather than dictating, insisting on their involvement in this-and-that—what Lareau calls “Concerted Cultivation” (CC below). Parents of unsuccessful children tend to have a “Natural Growth” (NG) attitude toward good parenting.

From the table on page 31 of her book:

language use: CC involves trying to reason with the kids and justify directives; NG tends to simply issue directives. CC acquiesces to “child contestation” of adult statements; NG doesn’t find questioning acceptable. CC: “extended negotiations between parent and child”; NG: “general acceptance by child of directives”

intervention in institutions: CC: “criticisms and interventions on behalf of child” (caused by non-acceptance of constraints); NG: “dependence on institutions” (caused by acceptance of constraints). CC: “training of child to take on this role”; NG: “sense of powerlessness and frustration” and “conflict between childrearing practices at home” (paternalistic parent-to-child) “and at school” (adult-to-child).

organization of daily life CC: “multiple child leisure activities orchestrated by adults”; NG: “‘hanging out’, particularly with kin, by child”

key elements: CC: “Parent actively fosters and assesses child’s talents, opinions, and skills”; NG: “Parent cares for child and allows child to grow”

consequences: CC: “emerging sense of entitlement on the part of the child”; NG: “ emerging sense of constraint on the part of the child”

This is a developmental class difference—not as such a socioeconomic class difference with different developmental correlates (though this may happen to be the case, too); rather, a differentiation of developmentality that fosters socioeconomic class difference! This is not a chicken-and-egg quibble. It’s within one’s power to learn to change developmental class when it’s not yet in one’s power to change socioeconomic class. The ambitious mentality of the voluntary immigrant who turns out to thrive may be equally available to the native poor who persistently fail. ...

———————
Though early child education programs (after age 3?) ought to be universally available, that won't address the lesson (for age 3 and less all the time; and for all ages of childhood mornings, evenings, and weekends) that should be taken from the research you mention that "home life is the critical factor for youngsters at the bottom of the economic barrel." Instead, this is the kind of problem that can best be addressed by a pediatric and community health care system oriented toward pre-parent and parenting education with ongoing home supports; and persistent, consistent home-school partnership all along—an apparently unmanageable problem? Maybe, but this is the "root" of the issue: Home life that fails to engage child development persistently and consistently implies motivational and character factors that require persistent and consistent therapeutic intervention, which ain't going to happen in a society that can't decently meet the basic health care access needs of couples prior to their parenting experience and well into their parenting years. Indeed, "it takes a village," and we're a long way from effective community-based human development for those couples who most need it. A fundamental rethinking of the interdisciplinary problem of public policy for human development seems critical, involving public health, education, social welfare, public policy, sociology, politics, and even philosophy (my bias).

Gary Davis
Berkeley (not affiliated with UCB)

July 24
David Kirp replies:

Dear Gary,

Many thanks for your thoughtful letter, with which I agree completely. I see the NYT piece as a first step, in moving readers away from the Bell Curve model, which I see as still the dominant paradigm. After that come the questions to which I alluded in the last paragraphs, and which you put front and center in your email. That's a major part of the book project.

Yours
David

PS I know Annette's book well; it's nudged my thinking in helpful ways.

Roads to Arab-Israeli peace

2006-07-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

• "...[T]his is not just another Arab-Israeli war," writes Tom Friedman, July 21. "It is about some of the most basic foundations of the international order — borders and sovereignty — and the erosion of those foundations would spell disaster for the quality of life all across the globe...It is time that The World of Order got its act together."

So, what is to be done?

• "Bring in the Quartet," says Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. "Old idea!," you say? No, there may be something paradigmatic in his very short op/ed article.

to be continued

How to be democratic

2006-06-03T18:33:00.000-07:00

Republicans (big R) dominate U.S. politics because they are more democratically organized than the Democrats. This is a reality also pertinent for progressives outside the U.S.

How can we facilitate corporate innovation for local pollution control?

2006-06-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

To: The New York Times
Subject: What "incentives"?, re: editorial "Look to the States for Cleaner Air"

Editor,

One would easily agree with you that "industry usually needs powerful incentives to make things happen," but what incentives are displayed in Governor Pataki's mercury control plan? The Pataki model is apparently the traditional statist challenge to industry to innovate in the face of fair regulation or leave the game, a virtue of liberalism, but no display of innovative incentivization. I want to see The New York Times give more focus to new ideas for incentivization for near-term local pollution problems.

The need for new models of local incentivization is vastly important. Of course, Bush-league credits-trading is inappropriate for incentivization against mercury pollution, as you and others indicate. So, the challenge of incentivization for local pollution control remains.

You call Pataki's plan an instance of states' "willingness to challenge industry to challenge itself," but all I see is a state's populist willingness to impose controls without fostering the innovation that exemplifies government-industry partnership. One may applaud such controls while still wanting to see new models for fostering green profitability within industry.

The Bush approach, no doubt corporatist, does seek incentivization within a government-industry partnership (which also accords with Bush's "answer" to "Kyoto"), but still needs new ideas for near-term local problems such as mercury pollution. I want to see New York Times leadership here. This is a matter of Democratic futures in government!

Gary E. Davis

P.S. (not sent to the Times)

Now, I appreciate that there's a hidden dimension to incentivization here: It's not up to government to come up with industry's innovations. It's up to government to, in short, enable innovation and ensure fairness. Democratically institute a fair regulation, give industry the freedom to innovate, and expect industry to competitively meet the fair challenge. In particular, the democratic response to the coal-based energy industry's complaint that mercury scrubbers will raise the cost of energy for consumers more than the $1/consumer/month anticipated by Governor Pataki is that it's up to industry (in partnership with regional public utility boards) to figure out how to avoid unfair price increases via increasing internal efficiences, fostering more compeititive markets for technology, and educating the public about the good attached to modest cost increases (which public utilities foster through their partnership with media).

My concern, in the letter above, is that democratic government should not miss opportunities to foster corporate support for fair regulation by failing to show partnership with the challenges that industry faces in compliance with new fair regulation. This is especially important for Democratic prospects. Maybe Pataki's model does display such partnership, in the details not reported. But that would be details that the public needs to understand (e.g., for the sake of other states' publics wanting to support fair regulation within fairly free markets, as everyone should want).

Progressives must swim in the mechanics of pragmatic realism and expect government initiatives that foster the public good in fair markets.

Instilling capability is critical for the health of nations

2006-05-25T16:17:00.000-07:00

One very practical employment of progressive thinking is to support progressive tendencies among very influential conservatives and otherwise try to influence the thinking of those who seem open minded (as well as working for open-mindedness among those who aren't). So, I frequently respond to David Brooks' columns, a very likeable guy (who early on, at his move to The New York Times, honored me with on-camera response to a query about his thinking: "Questions for David Brooks" [no longer available], but that's not why I respond to him monthly or more).

What follows is my response to his fascinating (as newspapering goes) column today, "Of Love and Money," (now with an added link):

Dear David,

So, by very falsely calling yourself a scientific imbecile and your discussion wonkish, you want to make the anti-intellectual reader feel you're one of them? I just hope you find more time to do more columns like today's. (Your column on Unequal childhoods was immensely valuable to me.) You have the leisure opportunity to pursue research-based trends that can contribute to policy leadership, and you do great service to we non-imbecilic wonks who can't get enough time for much-needed altitude.

You would do even better service if you would give citations, thus saving your preferred reader some search time.

It's important to recognize that, commonly in educational psychology nowadays, IQ score is a partial mesasure of intelligence, such that "self-discipline" is really a keynote of what intelligence is (e.g., see leading intelligence researcher Robert Sternberg's work, summarized in the paperback Successful Intelligence). Duckworth's self-discipline is better explicated as self-regulated learning, concordant with what you (Siegel?) note later in your column. (See also the special issue of Teacher's College Record on "volition," v.106,n.9, Sept. '04). This puts a proper emphasis on initiative rather than compliance, which Duckworth's sense of self-discipline may not do. Practically, fostering/instilling self-directed learning pertains to the kind of "concerted" parenting practices that Unequal Childhoods discovered.

You would agree that the problem is primarily not how does government compensate for home failures, but: How does government facilitate home success? Preschool isn't going to address the crucial period of child development through age 3. The pediatrician may be the critical agent here—though, ideally, a family legacy of excellent parenting practices between generations makes compensatory healthcare service supplementary. (It was healthy family legacy that got us all from village thriving to metropolitan thriving over the centuries.) The keynote now is the health care system, which may provide intimate-level leadership for instilling parent skills and healing parent practices. The education system can only at best work with what good parenting has already instilled (and continues to facilitate). But the crisis of the healthcare system is such that society can't afford basic medical services, let alone preventive or proactively health-promotional benefits that are comprehensive enough, accessible enough, and pervasive enough to do the good that broken family traditions can't ("thanks" to the lean-and-mean demands of the work world relative to the global labor market).

How do we turn our health care system into a progressive and effective means for promoting healthy development? (Also: How do we lead the media market to greater and sustained attention to what good families do, short of making the cloning of David Brooks and the like feasible?)

Health education is essentially about capabilities, rather than information. It is at heart about fostering good development, good family, which is essentially a matter of fostering/instilling self-directed learning about what's good for one's own capabilities.

A capability-oriented approach to social welfare policy got Amartya Sen the Nobel in economics (see Development & Freedom, 1997) and made Martha Nussbaum a leading voice in political philosophy (see Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, Harvard 2005).

You touch on something profoundly valid in correlating cognitive development and love. But we must appreciate—non-sentimentally—that love is not "the primitive realm," but the highest (primal, then primordial, neither of which can be real as primitively conceived). So, one sees the great American moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt capping his career in terms of "reasons of love" (having nothing to do with Christianity or religion, rather about the cognitive character of intrinsic value); see Reasons of Love, Princeton paperback, 2004.

We—the world—need moon-landing-scale commitments to fostering the health of nations, if only to give our children the capability to pay for the deficits—psychological, as well as economic—that their parents ceaselessly leave behind.

Letting those mirror neurons flourish,

Gary Davis

poverty reduction & environmental health need each other

2006-05-21T20:25:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey D. Sachs and Walter V. Reid, in a short Science "Policy Forum" article, "Investments Toward Sustainable Development," write:

"Sustainable development, meaning economic growth that is environmentally sound, is a practical necessity. Environmental goals cannot be achieved without development. Poor people will circumvent environmental restrictions in their desperation for land, food, and sustenance. Nor can development goals be achieved and sustained without sound environmental management. Environmental catastrophes will undermine economic life, whether in New Orleans or Nigeria. Therefore, investing in poverty reduction is crucial for environmental policy, while investing in the environment is vital for successful poverty reduction (see figure in the 1-page article [PDF]). Yet the world underinvests in both, and rich-country and poor-country governments overlook the policy links between poverty reduction and the environment...."

Science, May 19, 2006 (312:5776, p.1002)

J. D. Sachs is director of the U.N. Millennium Project and director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University. W. V. Reid was director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and is with the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University.

toward a comprehensive comprehension going forward

2006-05-20T20:46:00.000-07:00

I should imagine (and post) a comprehensive sense of this blog project, which generally here is meant to complement Webpaged discussions that are developing. I can imagine an integrated sense of the early postings relative to a conceptual projection (comprehensive prospectus) of this project that now seems fairly definite (as my motto that "learning never ends" pertains to conceptuality, too—even especially).

Comprehensive conceptualization is prospective, relative to unmet others' profound influence, such that a retrospective interest (inevitably reconstructive) is destined to be so relative. Any sense of the past is at best led by its background futurity, itself at best evolving—so too, thereby (at best), any sense of developmentality, historicity, or historicality.

What is envisioned "now" cannot validly revoke its background emplacement in evolution, in an evolved historicity of ontogeny—the life of inquiry—which may nonetheless be led by self-directed learning.

How well can that be fairly appreciated?

At best, one's work evolves, beyond developing (which as such presumes an unfolding origin, apart from considering the implied origin's evolutionarity).

So, at best one's work exemplifies its evolutionarity (but exemplification is not itself comprehension—"exemplifying what?," one asks) and may thereby (again, at best) advance our capability for self-comprehension via the ambition of its ongoing self-conceptualization (dying in the inevitably incompletable process, inherited by others), thereby ultimately exhibiting an excursion among humanity's excursions of facilitating its evolution—here idealizing some singularity (evolution, rather than evolutions interplaying without ultimate cohering) whose emergently telic cohering, of—and for—its Time (a progressivity inherent to the notion of evolution), is validly articulable, albeit belonging only retropectively to future historians (though one may play usefully, insightfully—even profoundly?—with conceptions of telic cohering about the Time that one's Of).

Amid the emergent wisdom of a Time's goods—call it an intellectual estate (itself amid the noise of the planet's communicative lives, muzak of The Commons), as if the university could be a planetary singularity with a topography of partial instances (great and modest, highland, midland, lowland)—one may try to write the whole Story of an (the?) estate, philosophy of philosophies, though ultimately ever failing—yet in the journey maybe contributing to our species capability for conception (which only philosophy has aimed to do, as a matter of self-conception)—not that I presume capability for that, but I can commit (and have sustained commitment) to doing my best to contribute something to the Good of the order— "the" Good of our designing "nature" ever evolving, an interplay of estates (epistemic domains, disciplinarities) that may be ultimately self-designing: the universCity of discursive inquiry, thereby evolving our unrepresentable evolutionarity in evermore comprehensive comprehensions of one's capabilities in play.

As if philosophy could be really fairly planetary—but who needs it?

What has the philosophical canon really done that's lastingly efficacious, as the world sustains itself without functional appreciation of the intellectuals (let alone conceptual designers of "philosophy"). Stuff happens, and the world adjusts. Whatever humanity does, the planet will adjust. Our evolving flourishes without governing conception, while we are ever learning Gaia's singularity (whatever the future results of astrobiology) in a centerless universe, whereby we have made the Meaning that sustains us across generations (with potentially evolutionary efficacy); and we are making the Meaning that will sustain our beautiful singularity on this heavenly planet relative to some SETI result awaiting our evolution to that epochal Day: threshold, portal granted at last by the ultimate internet, archival intelligence of our relatively local region.

unbearable lightness of being there

2006-05-20T14:27:00.000-07:00

vanity fair of self-validating media, episode #23791480056

The May 16 BBC interview of Guy Goma—computer tech job applicant from Congo, mistaken for guest expert on the recent Apple, Inc/Apple Corp antitrust case...

...—gets a proper profundity from John Tierney in today's New York Times, making the event allegorical of normal political spinning. (Begin reading at his 5th paragraph: "Hearing his introduction....")

what polite company wants (and does)

2006-04-30T19:20:00.000-07:00

One might regard Iran's duplicitousness with little patience. They think they have to hide their non-weaponable nuclear research, but in fact transparency will get them everything they say they want! Therefore, duplicitousness argues against their claims of wholly non-weaponable interest (though it may well be that maintaining an actually-false image of secretly-developing weaponry sustains domestic legitimacy for the sake of the Iranian economy, like Saddam's perpetuation of suspicions about an active WMD program intended to protect him from others' supposed adventurism).

"[T]he United States and some other nations ... want to declare that even if Iran is legally entitled under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for civilian purposes, Mr. Ahmadinejad cannot be trusted to do so. By deceiving the nuclear agency about its activities, President Bush and British, French and German officials say, Iran has given up whatever treaty rights it once enjoyed" ("Iran Strategy: Cold War Echo," NYTimes, 4/30).

Add to that their documented support for terrorism, their threats against Israel—both of which give their inflammatory rhetoric unacceptable influence on oil prices (which shoot up in the face of perceived risk)—and lastly (but not leastly) consider the oppressive anti-modernity of Iran's theocracy. Altogether, Iran shows itself to be an unjust, unreliable, and dangerous member of the global community harming and threatening to harm others. A neighborhood model or family model of global relations is not inappropriate:

[Reuters, 4/30} Rice [today] accused Iran of "playing games" with the international community, saying Tehran had had plenty of time to comply with earlier demands to halt its program.

She sidestepped a question on whether she agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a psychopath. But she said the Iranian president's behavior reinforced the world's concerns about his country acquiring nuclear weapons.

"I have no idea. I have never seen the man or talked to him," Rice said on CNN's Late Edition. "I just know that nobody speaks in polite company in that way and that he represents the Iranian regime very badly."

dark energy (or: a vista of primate living)

2006-04-29T21:51:00.000-07:00

The state of nature has hardly ended. We primates, once standing to look across a savannah, have now sometimes become "petroauthoritarian" regimes (Tom Friedman's coinage for Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and others) looking around the planet for primative (sic) petrocorporate clients (e.g., Chad to the U.S., Sudan to China), as the global species sucks the fermented legacy of planetary eons until it learns to fuel its technoeconomies otherwise via, e.g., limitless hydrogen (breeder reactors, fuel cells) and solar power.

Such comment may seem specious, but we're really a young species, epistemically speaking: attaining oil-and-gas technoeconomies only within the last 12-or-so decades. Anthropologically childish conflict and avarice remain common, while scientific and policy communities can realistically project our evolvability far beyond the readiness of most everyone. (Governing evolution—via education, public health, bioscience, etc.—is inevitable for the self-designing species that does what it can imagine.) Any doctor of medicine appreciates how primative we are. Any psychotherapist can complement that appreciation. We are still relatively avaricious—and, demographically speaking (the bell curve), still largely dumb.

Meanwhile, in the scarce realm of the bell curve's high end, the need for a "paradigm shift" is a wandering conversation. "Together, the EU and the United States must send a clear signal on the need for a paradigm shift on energy," said EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, Friday (Reuters, 4/29).

[R} [He] told a transatlantic conference that the 25-nation EU and Washington should press Moscow to create free market conditions and legal certainty to guarantee predictable energy supplies.

Republican Senator John McCain, a possible presidential contender, said Washington should be tougher on what he called President Vladimir Putin's autocratic rule and "some perverted vision of a restoration of the Soviet empire."

It was up to Russians[, said Barroso,] to decide whether they wanted "a real democracy or a half-democracy." The quality of Europe's relations with Moscow would depend on that choice. Barroso highlighted European concern at perceived efforts by Putin to use energy as an instrument of power politics with its neighbors and partners.

G: Iran becomes Russia's proxy in this paradigm? Russia certainly benefits from the high oil prices that the risk-haunted speculative market is sustaining. Mikhail Gorbachev warned last month of Cold War echoes in recent tensions between Russia and the West. Russia is having trouble getting into the WTO, and its power mongering isn't sitting well with the other G8 members who will be hosted by Russia in July.||

"We are seeing more frequently the use of energy resources as an instrument of political coercion," the Commission chief said, without explicitly naming Moscow.

The EU, depending on Russia for a quarter of its gas, is concerned that Moscow is keeping its pipeline network closed to competition, extending its network control westwards through Ukraine and Belarus, and trying to monopolize pipeline access to Central Asian gas supplies, notably in Turkmenistan.

The Kremlin is also resisting moves by Brussels to apply its strict competition policy to long-term Russian gas supply contracts to EU countries.

G: Perhaps the Kremlin's alliance with Iran is an effort to extend this paradigm to nuclear energy in the region. Relations between Iraq and Iran may become a post-Cold War proxy in geoeconomics (if not Gorbachev's feared return to a Cold War ethos).

dealing with Iran: an episode in The Conversation

2006-04-29T20:15:00.000-07:00

The U.S. approach to Iraq in 1991 was part of the multilateral forging of the post-Cold War world order that was to, at last, give centrality to the UN in problem-solving, which the Cold War earlier prevented. The Iraq Problem was nothing less than a matter relating to the promise of post-WWII designs, a neo-Wilsonian internationalism earlier confounded by the nuclearization of competing modernities (Sino-Soviet and North Atlantic, to put it oversimply) after the Great War of the 20th century.

Now, the Iraq Problem is in its endgame, as a post-ethnic, national-unity government is immanent, while Iran portends exporting weapons-grade nuclear know-how to its Islamic friends. The "New World Order" of 1991 (seeking to fulfill the new world order of 1945) fell short in 2003, but the Iran Problem provides a new opportunity to Show How It's Done.

Presently, the EU and US strike different tones on Iran, while insisting they are in full agreement.

[Quoting from the above-indicated Reuters article, unless otherwise indicated by "G:" and ending with " ||": ]

Speaking at a transatlantic conference, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said no one was considering military action over Tehran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment and Europe did not want to join a "coalition of the willing" against Iran.

G: This is an obvious reference to avoiding the 2003 UN stalemate that confounded the endgame of the 1991 process. It's more about ensuring consensus-forming efficacy for the Security Council, which is axiomatic for UN authority that avoids need for military means. ||

Influential U.S. Senator John McCain told the Brussels Forum in a speech on Friday night: "There is only one thing worse than military action, and that is a nuclear-armed Iran."

He said the United States would not stand by and let Iran wipe out Israel, as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinjenad had called for.

G: Today, acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Germany's Bild that "Ahmadinejad speaks today like Hitler before taking power," and Iran this week avowed its intention to export the results of its nuclear research. Meanwhile, thank goodness, Iran is really governed by cooler, albeit theocratic, heads.

Earlier Soviet patronage of the Iranian revolution, leading to a proxy war between Iraq and Iran through most of the '80s (until the twilight of the Cold War), has become largely corporate patronage by Russia, as both command economies—both paternalisms (one once-Communist, one Islamic)—manage unrelated evolutions toward effective democracies (one hopes), needing geopolitical alliance for at least the short term.

This week (a) China has signaled its likely abstention from UN-centered action against Iran; (b) the U.S. has offered Russia new collaboration in the development of its energy market (as the world deals with a speculative oil-price crisis); and—consequently?— (c) Russia has today insisted to Iran publically that Iran must comply with the UN-IAEA process and stop its nuclear research. ||

Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, a leading Democratic foreign policy expert, said the response to Iran's nuclear programme, which the West says is aimed at making weapons, was a defining issue for transatlantic relations.

"Iran is the test case about whether we'll have effective transatlantic cooperation," Holbrooke said.

[...]

NATO and EU foreign ministers, including U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had debated the issue at a meeting in Sofia on Thursday and[, Solana said,] "nobody at that point in time considered the possibility of a military solution in Iran."

G: This conversation is no less than the matter of the 1945-1991-2003 Conversation, then as well as now for the sake of the future of multilateral problem-solving in international relations. ||

Asked why he was unwilling to talk of military action unlike McCain and Holbrooke, Solana said that he held political office and did not have the same freedom of speech.

G:—which is to say that his frontstage role may be something else from his personal opinion, which presumably is very influential in backstage debates.

Iran is sweating about Security Council disapproval—amid so much brinksmanship about not considering military options!—because the Iraq Event showed that either Security Council sanctions will be made effective or a "coalition of the willing" will intervene. The 2003 Iraq Event has greatly increased the probability of Security Council effectiveness. (Habermas, 2003, was worried about the "normative authority" of the U.S., but basically the normative authority of the Security Council was at stake, and the U.S. has proven, by facilitating Iraqi self-determination, that the U.S. was acting in the interest of both the Iraqi people and the UN.)

The more that Iraq is demonstrably well on the way to effective self-government, the more retrospectively paradigmatic becomes the Iraq Event for bolstering Security Council credibility, as it's dramatically clear that the SC wants to avoid military solutions, dramatically clear that the SC needs enforceable sanctioning power, and dramatically clear that, when the SC can't handle this themeselves, someone will.

It should be clear that the U.S. doesn't want to be an occupying power, thus proving (through Iraqi self-determination) its early denial of interest in long-term occupation, which also proves the genuineness of U.S. interest in democratization that would, in the event of military action against Iran, be credibly applicable to Iran. (I have no problem with the U.S. expecting, for the long term, that a genuinely representative-governmental Iraq will be a stable and reliably constructive ally. I also don't regard a prospect of long-term U.S. military bases in Iraq as indicating any interest in U.S. occupation.)

The U.S. was primarily interested in UN multilateralism in 2003, but that process failed (due to France, Russia, and China). The U.S. is working multilaterally again, but (like before) has no hegemonic advantage in the SC process. It's up to the members equally to make the UN work. Now....||

The most important thing [is] to work with Russia and China to build the broadest possible consensus on a United Nations resolution raising pressure on Tehran to comply with international demands to halt nuclear enrichment.

Anti-Republican support for Iraq's republican evolution

2006-03-21T18:35:00.000-08:00

Though I don't support the Bush presidency, I've always (since 1991) supported the U.S. approach to Iraq, even arguing vigorously in support of the 2003 intervention in terms of geopolitical and humanitarian themes, rather than in support of Neoconservative designs. So, I don't want my defense of the U.S. in Iraq, against the New York Times editorial Sunday, to be read as my new conservatism. I'm a progressively moderate neoliberal conservationist.

Political reality is complex. (Reality is complex.) I can agree with both pessimist Zbigniew Brzezinski and optimist Walter Russel Mead (Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations) in their competing assessments of the Iraq status quo yesterday on the News Hour. I can see the validity of U.S. work in Iraq, while rejecting Bush's rationalizations for the low-common-denominator (or baseline) public—yet appreciating that political leadership (when it is genuine leadership) requires baseline rationalizations (in the best sense of rationales or rational policy translations) for the highly diverse public. My response to the New York Times editorial outlines how such agreement and sense of validity goes for me. It's not a matter of being pleased with a Bush presidency.

re: "The Stuff That Happened" (NY Times editorial)

2006-03-19T14:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Editors,

There's no basis for your view that "the horrors of the present [in Iraq] can be laid at America's doorstep."

One error made by many doubters (while doubt is a healthy thing, done lucidly) is to reduce the U.S. interest to military dimensions. You should recall, after the 12+ year effort to make the UN-managed sanctions process work (which is supposed to be the "new world order" successor to M.A.D. for ensuring economic stability), that the Bush administration faced an impendingly hot summer in Iraq, if they didn't invade during the spring; and faced a U.S. election season, if they waited. (Political considerations aren't specious.)

More importantly, the U.S. had sought for years to gain UN efficacy through normal channels and multilateral efforts, such as we saw with the UN/NATO intervention in the Balkans, which continued the model set up by the first Gulf War. Intervention had to happen sometime, if only for humanitarian reasons of Saddamism. The Iraq process is fundamentally about making future UN authority more credible (because a coalition of the willing will step in, if the UN is not given resources to be effective; or the Security Council becomes paralyzed by self-interest, as was the case with France and Russia, leading up to the invasion).

Overwhelming force in this effort does not contribute to motivating Iraqis to learn to handle their own defense. As the coalition military entered into Iraq, everyone was aware of the dangers left behind in speeding to Baghdad. It was thought to be manageble, and actually turned out to be manageable! The insurgency is not the fault of the U.S. military. We always deal with crime that can't be predicted. The insurgency tragically dramatizes the disease of Baathism that has been disempowered, now being gradually eradicated.

U.S. geopolitical interests are not secondary: Containing Iran (between Afghanistan and Iraq), creating a center of Arab-based social learning for democratization elsewhere, and, yes, drawing criminal terrorism away from the West, are valid interests that contribute to the validity of the painful struggle that the U.S. is sharing with Iraq in creeping toward a national unity government.

Also, long-term interest in oil price stability is vitally important, as China and India accelerate their economic development. Such stability is not evident in the short-run, but, clearly, a stable Iraq will, for the long-term, contribute immensely to anti-recessional pressures (then on to facilitating peaceful transition to democracy in other OPEC nations).

But the Iraqis have to learn to self-govern. There's no comfortable way for them to do this. The pressure of civil war is constructive, and the U.S. is not responsible for Iraq's difficulties learning how to form their own national unity government.

Iraqis who are in worse straits now than earlier aren't there due to U.S. activity, rather due to insurgent criminality. The U.S. faced the need to re-create the Iraqi military from the ground up, and, to do this right, has required yielding to the Iraqi learning curve, which suits insurgents.

It's a cheap sarcasm to surmise that "Mr. Bush regards the election of Palestinian terrorists as the leaders in Gaza and the West Bank as a step forward." The dynamics of the Palestinian election have nothing to do with events in Iraq. You might take Tom Friedman's advice on Iran. And Afghanistan is a NATO matter.

Toward the end, your editorial is pretty unfocused. The U.S. situation? Complex. Comparison to Vietnam? Ridiculous.

One wants to look to the editorial page for wisdom, not a montage of whatever's on your mind. Let's see more thoughtfulness in your leadership.

academic standards, etc.

2006-03-18T22:20:00.000-08:00

A little exchange at the Habermas group today and yesterday (Mar. 17-18 messages #1439-1442) about Leo Strauss and neo-conservatism may be validly seen to express more than meets the eye (reading the brief postings). It's like walking past a conversation during a conference recess, not that Fred Welfare (professor of biology?) and Bill Barger (professor of philosophy?) have any long-running philosophical dispute signaled by their recent exchange; rather, the group itself can be seen as a singular long-running conversation (if not conference) returned to mind by any short exchange between members of the group—a conversation/conference which is, perhaps, an ongoing course on Habermas that is mostly freeze-framed, but gets active again briefly.

The general issue here is the medium itself, amid several media: the blog-with-comment vs. the html-friendly discussion group (e.g., Electric Minds), which is different from an email-based listserv like Yahoo! Groups vs. the chat room. In what online venue can any issue be collaboratively pursued in a focused way by any medium? What's a discussion group to do with expressed impulses to use its medium for chat? (not instanced by the Welfare/Bargar exchange! But the answer here is: an editorial moderator).

The ideal, perhaps, is a transcript of an actual symposium discussion at an academic conference, including extended attention to questions from the audience where the audience is allowed extended reply. But even here, time constraints inhibit detailed focus.

Very differently, a specific academic exchange in a given journal may take place across non-contiguous issues of the journal, extending over a year or more.

The ultimate upshot of this is that the history of philosophy has a singular character, i.e., an undergraduate eventually discovers (be s/he so interested to pursue an issue) that there are paradigmatic ways that a given kind of questioning goes (following from paradigmatic formulations of an issue, i.e., more-or-less full translatability of a proximal issue into a set of standard issues), and there are relatively few unique positions that have evolved for a standard issue, in the sense that an anthology on epistemology can be relatively comprehensive of its domain of issues and comprehensive of important stances on particular issues within the domain (thereby taking a tacit stance on what "important" means for that domain—which I would relate to Bernard Williams' focus on "importances" as a keynote to philosophy).

Back to the Welfare/Barger exchange. It can be seen to relate to a larger context of exchanges. But it's somewhat arbitrary to indicate the beginning (i.e., the proper boundary of the context), just as a notion of "Conversation of humanity" may implicate the university as such.

So, a given exchange is a collaborative episode in the lifelong learning of each participant, albeit in each's own way, yet together implicating, perhaps, a depth of conversation (really belonging to the exchange) that neither participant has overtly in mind.

At least, a larger conversation is specifiable: Bill responds on-group, March 2006, to an apparently dismissive comment by Fred in a private email (by the way, the URL in Bill's posting is incorrect), which was an earlier response—or part of a response—apparently to Bill's group posting last November, 2005, that was responding to Matthew Piscioneri's response, October, 2005, to Bill's thoughts on "nature", which seem to stand on their own as the beginning of a new topic—albeit apparently inspired by an immediately-previous October exchange between Matt and I on Ryle and linguistic action—and I could hardly begin to characterize the years-long discussion between Matt and I, beginning before 2000, that can be focused around his sense of physicalism (and linguistic behaviorism) during the writing of his dissertation and later focusing on his sense of naturalism in that dissertation.

Last November, I didn't respond to Bill's engaging posting on nature, due to my insecurity about causing the Habermas group to look like my blog-with-comment, which I never intended. I was grateful for the exchanges among Bill, Matt, and Fred—which are credits to the archive of the group! Bill had replied to Matt and not to Fred (which may be relevant to Fred's private dismissiveness?), in which Bill referred to "...Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, who have been playing a very problematic role in recent American politics...."

So, now we're at this week's exchange between Bill and Fred. I noted to Bill privately yesterday that I was surprised that Fred questioned the relevance of referring to Strauss relative to neoconservatism. "Gee, the influence of Strauss on key neoconservatives is well-known!," I said to Bill. Today, Fred has a somewhat extended reply to Bill, and Bill wisely lets the issue go.

Bill had mentioned Strauss earlier because [Bill} "I regard philosophy as a perhaps unpremeditated revolt against religion. That's why modern philosophy has provoked the kind of response that came from the post-modernists."

But one might be expected to think that modern philosophy was quite premeditated about its relationship to religion. (Modern philosophy would be the issue relative to "post-modernists," while philosophy's relation to religion goes back to the birth of philosophy and Strauss' favored focus on classics). So, I don't get Bill's point: associating Strauss and Schmitt with postmodernism?

But there should be little doubt that [Bill} "...Strauss...has been playing a very problematic role in recent American politics...," which Fred implausibly disputed.

Because of this, it's not trivial that Bill would emphasize the issue in terms of information about this that he found, apparently months after Fred's private objection.

I'm glad to say I don't know much about Carl Schmitt, but his high valuation of stability over nearly all else in society (thus for legal realism) might be relatable to Plato's sense of the philosopher kingship (secured by a mirroring realm of Ideas) shepherding a republic, which I suppose Strauss lionized.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Neoconservatives found themselves faced with the stunningly sudden end of the Cold War, which had served as a "M.A.D." deterrent (beyond proxy conflicts for regional influence) over the previous 40 years, i.e., a stabilizing atmosphere after "Hiroshima".

Axiomatic to economics is stability of markets (so that players have a reliable common ground for the investment risks needed for creative productivity). Economies respond to instability via inflation and recession (if not depression), which induces poverty.

The Neoconservatives had few choices for geopolitical stabilization, as the 1990s opened: UN efficacy, multilateral institutional problem-solving outside the UN regime (e.g., GATT, NATO), and crisis-specific coalitions.

A feasible "new world order" for crisis management expressed its potential relative to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, 1991. The multilateral containment of Saddamism and the UN-based sanctions regime could have been a paradigm for future crisis management. Later, UN/NATO intervention in the Balkans continued that model. But Saddamism's endless endeavor to invalidate a UN-based sanctions system and the UN's inability to enforce its own sanctions validly and effectively, coupled with the endless instability in the Middle East (and thus for oil markets, as China and India's energy needs were/are accelerating, thus for every other kind of market) forced upon every geopolitical actor (i.e., leading powers) an impending crisis of stability that could make global recession a poverty-inducing norm for decades to come.

No less of a context than this was behind Neoconservative concerns for global stability in the early years of the 21st century, as global recession looked immanent and organized terrorism moved into advanced modes of organization. Meanwhile, Saddamism, Syria, and Iran were buying terrorism in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as Iran clearly sought to position itself as the center of a new Islamic caliphate concordant with the aspirations of violent Islamist extremism throughout Arabia and southeast Asia.

It's an understatement to say that global stability is important, that the question of stability is critical, and that representative government in the Arab world is important—and desperately lacking. Neoconservatives saw Iraq as a real prospect for representative government in the Arab world (given Iraq's brief experience with democracy and its broad-based experience with market modernization, which is required for democracy). The hope was that Iraq could become a stabilizing model for Arab modernization elsewhere (for Palestine, as well as for Saudi Arabia).

But no one has pretended that Western-style government is likely in Iraq. At best, the theocratic leanings of political leadership within the Shi'ia majority may tend toward a "Platonic" (ayatollahic, so to speak) Islamic republic in the foreseeable future.

Perhaps the fate of Iraq is a tri-section of Kurds (affiliated with a Kurdish regionalism that alarms Turkey), a Sunni consolidation of Jordan, Saudi, and western Iraqi Arabia; and an Arab Shi'ite nation on the Persian Gulf (no extension of Iranian Shi'ism, I agree with Tom Friedman this week). But that would require a peace among the Kurdish, Sunni, and Shi'ite regions that the three societies face now in forming a national unity government, as the abstract notion of "Iraq" (once British, now the region's only hope for near-term peace).

In other words, there has been and there is no reasonable alternative for Arab regional social evolution other than an Iraq-like national unity government. This was the Neoconservative view in 2002 (exasperated by 11+ years of UN-based "management" of the situation and exasperated by a Security Council, early 2003, with permanent members secretly benefitting from Saddamism).

Generally, a world without stability has no hope, and a world without UN-enforceable consensus cannot gain and sustain the global stability necessary for addressing poverty in developing regions. The U.S.-British resolve in Iraq has set a precedent: A UN-based global stability will either be respected by its members, enforced by the UN, or, as long as the UN can't enforce its own resolutions, a "coalition of the willing" will do so until the UN is given the resources to be what it was supposed to be in 1945. For this reason, if for no other (e.g., inherent virtue of representative government in Iraq), a post-Baathist Iraq "fiction" has to work.

If "Iraq" works, then Iran's nuclear ambitions can be curbed by UN resolve (so, too, for North Korea). But first, stability in Iraq has to evolve. If that stability is to be valid, then the U.S. has to live with the tragically painful process of helping the Iraqis learn to handle their own Baathist/extremist insurgency. It's a matter of investing stability with homegrown legitimacy. There's no other way than what the U.S. is doing—and suffering—in Iraq, for the sake of global stability (which, of course, includes the "self"-interest in oil price stability—a self-interest shared by every nation!!).

A great contribution of Habermas is to show how homegrown stability (a "kingdom" of demophilic reason) can be philosophically grounded in a globally valid way. This is important for the university (as such), as it is a vital channel (even a great evolutionary power, as a globally-distributed phenomenon) for any knowledge-intensive development of societies.

One might hope for the future of philosophy that it expresses the guiding spirit of the university in a world where education ensures the good governance that serves social evolution, which might be characterized as the essence of any good republic—and any representative government's prospects for genuine democratic processes, i.e., that education ensures the good governance which serves society's evolution, the health of nations flourishing. One might hope that the university embodies the best hope of humanity designing its future on this planet. I bet that Leo Strauss would agree.

After quantum theology

2006-03-18T20:03:00.000-08:00

Earlier today, I sent a letter to Dennis Overbye, New York Times, relating to his response to questions about an article by him earlier this week, "Far Out, Man. But Is It Quantum Physics?".

Subject: After quantum theology

Dear Mr. Overbye,

What fun your whole response-to-questions article is! I imagine you and your editor sharing a big tongue-in-cheek by providing that whole discourse by Ed Reno, which you tacitly covered in your comments prior to the overt response to questions.

Most interesting, though, is the frame: that the NY Times is giving its readers a taste of real philosophical controversy—America's own Die Zeit (though I don't read German anymore). I hope that the Times will do more of this kind of deep controversy. You're probably the Times' best-placed advocate for that.

Actually, the Times does a lot of it, and one could gather the best of that together to render a portrait of Being In America now, combining the "metaphysical" qualms associated with Intelligent Design, when embryonic life becomes human, the conflict of Gods in the "clash of civilization," silence of the SETI results thus far, and other persistent anxieties (and fears).

You know, academic philosophy has made progress; there are settled kinds of issues. But it never does much for the public, as a new generation somewhat fatefully recapitulates old issues. This kind of thing gives developmental psychologists their solidarity with philosophy instructors, and both, perhaps, with evolutionary psychologists. I like to claim that the historical Question of Being (culminating in Heidegger) has been replaced by questions of evolution (taken to heart): Given that, as philosopher John Searle nicely puts it, "the mind is what the brain does" (analogously as digestion is what the stomach "does"), the explanatory challenge of self-understanding—as a species project—remains more daunting than ever, while our fledgling astrobiology increasingly entails that surprises beyond human imagination await (after Ray Kurzweil's "Singularity is near" is kept from overtaking us). [By the way, it's very useful to distinguish reductionism from substitutionism: The prospect that mental events are incalculably "reducible" to biological events doesn't entail hoping to substitute biological events for mental events in explanatory schema. Reductionism doesn't require claiming that biology can disappear into physics, nor that psychology can disappear into neurobiology. Reductionism is usually confused with substitutionism; this is a point made by the editors of Essays in Social Neuroscience, John T. Cacioppo and Gary G. Bernston, MIT 2004, ch. 9: "Multilevel Analyses and Reductionism: Why Social Psychologists Should Care about Neuroscience and Vice Versa."]

I, for one, never really worry in light of the evident fate of the universe (that I enjoyed burlesquing for you a while back ), as the fact that one will die should have no bearing on the meaning of being alive. Nothing we know implies any less reason for getting out of bed each morning.

But being both scientifically literate and in love with living is an elusive prospect for most of humanity. We need our philosophers, and we need our leading journals of the times to give our media generally the cultural leadership that is often so desperately needed.

Cause us to give time to thinking and reading and learning together rather than consuming and watching and causing people to, as David Brooks put it yesterday on the PBS News Hour, "choose the reality that flatters themselves." [Actually, I sent David an email about that earlier today:

David,

You said Friday, 3/17, on The News Hour that, in sum, "people choose the reality that flatters themselves." So, how do you avoid that? I don't mean this as a gotcha or rhetorical question. How do you avoid that? How does one gain confidence about validity claims? Are you saying, in general, that people are lazy about their views and one just has to be vigilant? But it's probably the case that no one believes that they're lazy about their views. So, how does one know that one's "reality" is reasonably valid? Wouldn't your claim entail that few are persuaded by commentary, let alone careful argument, so what's the point of what you do? I'd like to see a column from you that pursues this in depth, perhaps as the issue of promoting critical citizenship. ]

I would like to see you, David, and Tom Friedman running the OpEd domain of the Times!

Gary Davis
Berkeley

Integrating news for a singular world

2006-03-13T19:58:00.000-08:00

The notion of leading news continues to seem tenable. The fact that "more news media outlets are covering less news" relates to several kinds of developments: media market specialization relative to a proliferation of media, daily editorial equilibration (through wire mirrorplays) toward what the leading news is (tendencies toward consensus within the profession), and also regretable trends in the news business.

But the Project for Excellence in Journalism study referenced above ("more news...") evidently doesn't distinguish the differences. Finding that "Google News offers access within two clicks to 14,000 stories, but really they are accounts of just 24 news events" indicates only that there are lots of news outlets and a lot of consensus on quite a few stories in one day. That by itself doesn't exhibit exclusion of important stories. My local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, carries stories from several major sources, as well as having a large news gathering operation of its own, because no key source can originate all important stories, and my paper carries far more than 24 stories per day. (Yet, I basically rely on The New York Times every morning, Reuters throughout the day—other news sources during the week—and the PBS News Hour every evening). Point: If the citizen takes responsibility for ensuring that s/he's informed, s/he can be well-informed.

The Project's study showed that traditional media focus on immediately significant issues (tending toward short-term importance) while "the blogosphere...shrugged off most of the breaking news, focusing largely on broader, longer-term issues." So, it's not suggested that there is culpable bias in the media other than what inevitably belongs to any given medium. The fact that "bloggers raised new issues...[but] did almost no original reporting" accords with a broad-based media environment (bloggers aren't contesting what's news) with growing critical populism available to anyone with an Internet connection.

I like this: "Newspapers, which are the biggest news-gathering organizations, covered the most topics, provided the most extensive sourcing and provided the most angles on particular events, [the Project] said, 'though perhaps in language and sourcing tilted toward elites.'" One should note that the Internet presence of newspapers is rampantly growing, so that comprehensiveness belongs to the same enviornment as the rest of the targeted media. Who are the "elites," if not "The Influentials"? Educational activism increases that audience, while there's more than enough news accessible to the disengaged, if not dissociative, citizen.

Granted, "'More coverage...does not always mean greater diversity of voices." But in a rational society, not all voices are equally deserving of one's attention, in the simple sense that the an organization's representative and leading critics may be reasonably judged by the journalist to deserve coverage not given to the citizen on the street (covered by anecdotal local followups and polling). An unavoidable feature of popular sovereignty in democracy is that your vote doesn't require justification of your opinion. Both a "Pro-Choice" and a "Right to Life" advocate, both a "Creationist" and an "Evolutionist" garner whatever votes they can. But a journalist may be quite justified to seek the opinion of the spokespersons of these organizations, such that most journalists would rely on the same spokespersons.

Granted "consuming the news continuously does not mean being better informed," but it doesn't follow from that that one can't be well-informed via the news. What you have to do is follow the news diligently over time. I've found that there is a singularity to the news cycle related to the singularity of the planet, such that one can gain a sense of the singular evolutionarity of humanity in the diversity of its locales, interests, and perspectives concordant with there being an adequacy of the structure of the university covering the diversity of knowledge and practices related to all those locales, interests, and perspectives.

Though "reporters [may] be increasingly shunted off to an isolated area while covering events," no one is controlling reporter's investigative freedom beyond that which is normal for self-interested parties, which is itself a key theme of professional journalism, in the sense, for example, that the Freedom Of Information Act must be employed expertly to get the news from resistant sources. The struggle to track the leading news is at times like the struggle to make original discovery in science. It's an art, it's difficult, and it's expensive.

Ask not what humankind can do for you....

2006-03-11T19:57:00.000-08:00

Dr. Wafa Sultan, Syrian-born psychiatrist living in L.A. created a rage this week on Al Jazeera television with her critique of Muslim violence. She tells the New York Times today:

"The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling. We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

I hear the Islamist retort "Islam was a great civilization before Europe," yadda, yadda. Well, the Europeans eagerly learned from Islam, while Islam spurned learning from Europe (no thanks to the momentary Crusades, but that was just a moment of history, relative to the history of modern humanity—in the anthropological sense of 'modern'). Now, the prevailing voices of the West show eagerness to yet learn from Islam, yet in a context of burgeoning cosmopoly that Islam evidently doesn't envision. Meanwhile, the voices of moderation within the Islamic community (so justly distinguishing Islam from extremist criminality) couch that voice not in terms of the Q'uran, but in terms of ordinary "European" (really: humanitarian and humanist) modernity's integral capability for accomodation and hybridization (far beyond mere toleration).

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

Indeed. A human is no longer a primate (though having the lineage and retaining some primate emotionality), but some "humans" are prevalently primates (with elaborate cognitive makeup), socialized superficially (which can look quite civilized), but plagued by primative (sic) culture and primate opportunism. While homo sapiens prevailed over homo neanderthalensis, and the basic (neurobiological) differentiation of human species has ended (pending transhumanity), the sociality of basic evolutionary struggle continues in culturally rationalized violence. The moderns will prevail over the primatives (just as primitivist art was something that indiginous peoples couldn't conceive), but the primatives, true to their nature, will fight to the finish.