Wandering the Net for a good way to condense Habermas into a blog post (a laughable effort, I think – but my familiarity with Habermas is close to twenty years old, so should be refreshed), I tripped over this, which seems dramatically relevant to the enterprise of this blog and to the point I’m trying to make about patriotism:
Rorty’s last words on Habermas!
“When I was told that another figure much discussed in Tehran was Habermas, I concluded that the best explanation for interest in my work was that I share Habermas’s vision of a social democratic utopia. In this utopia, many of the functions presently served by membership in a religious community would be taken over by what Habermas calls “constitutional patriotism.” Some form of patriotism – of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes for the country’s future – is necessary if one is to take politics seriously. In a theocratic country, a leftist political opposition must be prepared to counter the clergy’s claim that the nation’s identity is defined by its religious tradition. So the left needs a specifically secularist form of moral fervor, one which centers around citizens’ respect for one another rather than on the nation’s relation to God.
My own views on these matters derive from Habermas and John Dewey. In the early decades of the twentieth century Dewey helped bring a culture into being in which it became possible for Americans to replace Christian religiosity with fervent attachment to democratic institutions (and equally fervent hope for the improvement of those institutions). In recent decades, Habermas has been commending that culture to the Europeans. In opposition to religious leaders such as Benedict XVI and the ayatollahs, Habermas argues that the alternative to religious faith is not “relativism” or “rootlessness” but the new forms of solidarity made possible by the Enlightenment.
The pope recently said: “A culture has developed in Europe that is the most radical contradiction not only of Christianity but of all the religious and moral traditions of humanity.” Dewey and Habermas would reply that the culture that arose out of the Enlightenment has kept everything in Christianity that was worth keeping. The West has cobbled together, in the course of the last two hundred years, a specifically secularist moral tradition – one that regards the free consensus of the citizens of a democratic society, rather then the Divine Will, as the source of moral imperatives. This shift in outlook is, I think, the most important advance that the West has yet made. I should like to think that the students with whom I spoke in Tehran, impressed by Habermas’s writings and inspired by the courage of thinkers such as Ganji and Ramin Jahanbegloo, may someday make Iran the nucleus of an Islamic Enlightenment.“
from here
[emphasis added]
From Ali Rivizi’s blog “Habermasian Reflections”
…Some form of patriotism – of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes for the country’s future – is necessary if one is to take politics seriously. Rorty says it far more clearly than I have managed to so far. But then, he was a famous philosopher, and I’m a high school dropout…
Welcome Instapundit readers…it appears to be ‘patriotism’ week here, so please check out the four posts I’ve done this week on the subject: ‘Patriotism – Goldberg to Couric to Yglesias‘, ‘You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me‘, ‘Patriotism Rears Its Head Yet Again‘, and ‘Rorty on Patriotism‘
I don’t think you’re there yet, A.L.
Nobody takes politics more seriously than lobbyists paid by special interest groups to extract the most pork they can for their clients.
Rorty’s statement is absolutely right, provided it is amended to say something like “if one is to take the politics of liberty and human dignity seriously.”
For there are whole realms of serious politics that dispense with those notions, and have no need of solidarity with the human cattle they want to herd into their social utopias.
Does Rorty speak for himself, or does he claim to find this notion in Habermas?
I don’t know Habermas well, but he comes out of two traditions that I don’t trust: Frankfurt “Critical Theory” and Dewey’s Pragmatism.
Critical Theory began with some valid insights, like the fact that Nazism and Fascism were popular movements, not capitalist conspiracies. Unfortunately they parted with the Old Left only to help found the New Left, with its elitist contempt for free human beings. The Authoritarian Personality is one of the stupidest books ever written.
Pragmatism, the so-called “American philosophy”, is not so bad. A lot of Libertarians rail against it, but I always thought it was just a way of saying that Americans are too rich and comfortable to worry about philosophy too much. Sidney Hook was a Pragmatist that I admire, but the Liberalism that used to draw inspiration from Pragmatism is a long, long way from Hook.
Attachment to democratic institutions as a basis for patriotism is not a bad idea, but I have an idea of what the Habermas version would look like: a socialist-secular state religion that says “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
In passing, I’d notice that alphie was banned from Protein Wisdom after earning the nickname “telephone pole” to describe his debating style. So debate him at your risk…
So far, I see a lot of drive-by hip-shooting from alphie. If his batting average improves, I’m sure he’ll be welcome to stick around. The other outcome is also possible.
“Some form of patriotism – of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes for the country’s future – is necessary if one is to take politics seriously.”
The problem with this is that it doesn’t say very much. Solidarity with fellow-citizens you can find on your neighborhood pick-up baseball team. Shared hopes for the country’s future is anemic at best – gosh, it would be nice if good things happened to all of us.
“Dewey and Habermas would reply that the culture that arose out of the Enlightenment has kept everything in Christianity that was worth keeping.”
Dewey and Habermas, then, are in the position of people who go to a bakery to buy enough bread for the day and then don’t object to the bakery being razed and the baker exiled. They have, after all, kept everything in the bakery that was worth keeping. Except, of course, the knowledge of how bread is made…
Glen – Habermas broke with Adorno (literally, as I recall Adorno was his PhD sponsor, and Habermas left to finish it somewhere else) and the rest of the Frankfurt School guys over the value of the Enlightenment – Habermas sees it as a great advance that needs to be pushed forward, and Adorno et al rejected it.
A.L.
_Some form of patriotism – of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes for the country’s future – is necessary if one is to take politics seriously._
AL, I usually jump in when there’s something that I disagree with, but I want to be sure I chime in to voice agreement here. You found a gem, and I think what that statement articulates is a very clear, and positive, and inclusive vision of what ‘patriotism’ should be.
Just wanted to point out that the contemporary American Pragmatists include people like the University of Texas’ Frederick Turner (not to be confused with Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian who popularized the “frontier thesis”). The basic notion is that what is considered valuable depends on how humans are constructed, especially the “neurocharms” that comprise a common set of perceptions about what is fair and beautiful, as well as what is ugly. He has forthrightly countered the notion (in TCS and similar publications) that Americans had anything to do with the motivating the 9/11 attacks, or that our response should involve anything other than counterattack. Rather, he argues that the 9/11 attacks were motivated by ignorance about America, an ignorance at least partly indulged and promoted by elements of the left. In fact, he goes much further, arguing that the contemporary “multi-culti left” are the heirs of a radical intellectual tradition growing out of the French Revolution, that tortures human perception into perverse notions of “aesthetics”. These intellectual contortions have led many to believe that was is ugly is beautiful, and immorality is just.
Demosophist [#8], Weren’t you arguing “here”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/009801.php that academia is only hospitable to liberals, and not even always them?
Frederick Turner at the University of Texas (which is certainly top-tier) seems to be evidence of a robust debate in the humanities from a variety of different points of view.
Alphie was also banned from my site. Twice.
There are some arguments that are so below the general standard of logic and coherence that it’s demeaning to reply. But at some risk, how does the fact that there are a few Robert Georges, Frederick Turners, and Harvey Mansfields invalidate the observation that academia is profoundly, even grossly, biased?
Is this really the best you can do?
I’ll tell you what, Beard… let’s ask the Mansfields, Georges, and Turners what they think of the proposition? Well, we don’t have to. They’ve already spoken on the matter.
Of course, we all know that Burma must be a shining example of democratic justice because Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is still alive, and there are even a few Buddhist monks who aren’t pushing up daisies.
Haha, Michael,
You banned me from your site just because I pointed out that your “friend” Eli Khoury has received millions of dollars from the Bush administration.
Never figured out why that was a bannable offense.
alphie – got a cite for that? When people make serious charges, it’s nice to see how they are backed up.
I won’t ban you for disagreeing or arguing, but you have kinda tended to driveby comments rather than serious engagement. More debate, please…
A.L.
A.L.,
Is receiving money from the Bush administration a “serious charge?”
I don’t want to mess up your site by posting a link badly, but here goes:
“This link”:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=bad_reception_part_ii talks about the money Eli Khoury got from the Bush administration.
As for a serious debate on patriotism, I’m still struggling with its definition.
Today, Jonah cites a letter from a “friend” who basically defines patriotism as anyone who disagrees with me hates America, anyone who agrees with me loves America.
What can you say in response to that?
Been painting cabinets all day…I’ll go look. Thanks for the link; if you think a charge is serious enough to make in a comment, it’s serious, isn’t it? So why not include a link?
A.L.
Alphie – didn’t see it at The Corner – link please? (see, if you just put them in, people can reply faster…)
A.L.
Patriotism in France or Poland (or most of the rest of the planet) can’t mean what it means in the US, because the allegiances in France and Poland, etc., are generally to ethnic identity… whereas they have to be to something else in the US because there is no common ethnicity. If it’s a struggle for you to define what that “something” is Tocqueville might be a good place to start.
Also suggests that US patriotism might be at odds with “identity politics” just a little.
Yeah, I can understand how you’d be struggling a bit…
Who was it, Robert Putnam of Harvard, who wrote “Bowling Alone?”
A study that showed that “diversity” ALWAYS without fail increased distrust among citizens and led to less participation in civic affairs, increased distrust, even among like-formed ethnic/racial groups.
The implication is that more diversity = less patriotism and attachment to country.
Patriotism may be impossible. Certainly it’s illustrative that a man like Barak Hussein Obama, who spent the first 9 years of his life in a Wahabbist Madrassa in Jakarta, and has written of his dislike of America and “love” of Kenya (“Dreams of My Father”) has said he does not like the flag or what it stands for and won’t wear one on his lapel pin.
The more diverse we are, with immigrants (particularly those who are not forced to cut ties to the distant, unreachable home country) dominating, the less patriotism we will have, given Putnam’s conclusions. Which so far no social scientist has been able to refute.
Particularly, Mexicans in the US with ties to the nearby Mexico, with the ability to live an entire life never speaking English, and with Mexican-lobbying organizations, offer a dagger in the heart of patriotism. You can’t be for La Raza and America. Be for Aztlan and the Constitution. Be for Reconquista and the US.
Maybe we are destined to be somewhere between Belgium (corrupt, slow-motion collapse) and say, Yugoslavia circa 1988-1998.
I certainly think that Putnam’s research shows that patriotism and love of country/nation as a mutual defense pact between country and individuals (as Frank Miller put it) can only happen if we stop accepting immigrants and expel most of the illegal aliens now resident. Otherwise it seems fairly clear looking at Putnam’s work “here”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/la-oe-rodriguez13aug13,0,4015315.column?coll=la-util-opinion-sunday
or a better take “here”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c4ac4a74-570f-11db-9110-0000779e2340.html
Money quote:
“His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.
The core message of the research was that, “in the presence of diversity, we hunker downâ€, he said. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.â€
Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, “the most diverse human habitation in human historyâ€, but his findings also held for rural South Dakota, where “diversity means inviting Swedes to a Norwegians’ picnicâ€.
When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. “They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,†said Prof Putnam. “The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.â€
——————
Note Putnam delayed his publication out of PC-cant fear. I think it’s very likely we will see a raw power struggle, between those who lose with diversity and win with patriotism (average Anglos) and those who win with diversity and lose with patriotism (elites and ethnic groups).
A Frederick Turner poem:
Riddle
This sickness thirsts, but hates desire,
Chills when it burns, but is not fire;
Sweet-tasting to the fair and just,
But once it catches, sour as dust;
Pretends to free the human race,
Makes monsters of the human face;
Corrupts the meaning of the mother,
Turns he and she against each other;
Twists truth into an ancient lie,
But has no shame to testify;
Servile, despising those who serve,
Seeking what it would not deserve;
Cyst upon the human heart,
Canker of science and of art;
Gives love a new excuse to hate,
Envies the power to create,
And yet can only imitate.
What is it?
Jim Rockford,
When you write La Raza you should always add The Race. Like this:
La Raza (The Race). I makes it clearer where they are coming from.
Alphie,
Want to explain why taking money from the Bush admin. taints some one?
What about the man’s ideas? Do you agree with them? Why? Or why not?
I take money from aeorospace companies to help in aircraft design. I’m nominally a Republican. As are the majority of engineers. Does that mean you will never fly again because of that?
Your reasoning is no reason at all.
A.L.,
“Here”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWZlNTg2ZmQ1MmExMDhjYjc4NTc5NmUxY2IzZDI3NWY= is the Corner letter.
M. Simon,
Today’s commercial airliners are based on Nazi-developed technology. But flying on a jet is rarely a political stateent, is it?
People who take money to push a particular political agenda are a different matter.
Jim:
Can’t recall the print citation, but I’ve heard Lipset refute Putnam pretty effectively… not only in terms of the Bowling Alone thesis itself, but that he apparently pulled some of his data out of thin air. I also heard him make essentially the same arguments to Nathan Glazer’s defense of “the lonely crowd” thesis.
The US has always had far more “associational life” than nearly all European nations, in spite of the fact that we’ve no coherent ethnicity of our own to fall back on. What we have, in its stead, is a set of principles expressed in the documents and correspondences of the founding, that amount to a common ideology established on Lockean principles: religious sectarianism, anti-statism, egalitarianism (of opportunity). It’s strange that these would establish stronger bonds than bonds of common ancestry or even class, but we’ve two hundred plus years of history to prove that they can.
Not that there hasn’t always been a challenge.
One of the keys to understanding what “American” means is the almost unique notion of the “un-American.” No other national identity has such a notion. And although there’s bound to be some disagreement, most of us know perfectly well what “un-American” means, even though it involves the paradox that only an American can be un-American. It’s John Walker Lindh.
alphie – actually, I agree very strongly with the letter; patriotism is about loving the country you are a part of (one reason I hate the fanboy simile is that fans are not part of a team; they watch, the team plays) – even if you see ways to improve it – rather than holding out for the country you imagine you want.
I’ll play with that a bit…
A.L.
Well, I guess that lets Kofi Annan’s son off the hook. No one could argue that he had any agenda other than getting rich.
But seriously, Kos takes money to push a particular political agenda. Is that what you mean? How about the people running Moveon? I mean, they’re against huge wealth disparity, yet they take nearly all of their money from a multi-billion-dollar financier. Is that what you mean?
I guess you could same I’m having a little trouble with your definitions.
Demo – nah, it’s simple. People who are in it for the money need to so disclose. It’s totally legit for me to point out that the MyDD crowd is working at building jobs for themselves; it’s equally legit for alphie to point out that a particular ME commentator has been the recipient of significant US cash.
We can all read what they say enlightened by that…
A.L.
A.L.:
I guess there’s a meeting of the minds, then.
Heh.
Jim:
I should also say that I only disagree with Putnam’s thesis in its absolute version. It’s perfectly true that an ethnically homogeneous population has a much smaller set of social problems to deal with. That’s why children with married parents can become the exception, rather than the rule, in Scandinavia, without total disruption of the society. Moveover, there’s a finite limit to the speed with which the American Ideology can assimilate immigrant populations… or for that matter “convert” foreign populations. The future of the world, however, has to lie in the direction of that conversion, for precisely the reasons Putnam identifies. An ethnic identity can’t assimilate another ethnic identity without the dilution of both, or the unwilling subjugation of the other. Well, except for the Japanese example of assimilating foreign cultures as part of your own. But the Japanese model is almost entirely unique.
A.L.,
I think that is close, but it would exclude the Founding Fathers and the soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War, wouldn’t it?
If the original patriots are no longer patriots, what were they?
It’s both. Wretchard has a pretty good post about this on PJM.
The difference is that those who fought the Revolutionary War were fighting to establish ideals that had been specifically expressed in the founding documents. In fact, the Declaration of Independence is less a declaration than a statement of faith. If the truths expressed therein were actually “self-evident” then there’d have been no need for a two hundred plus year struggle to establish them, both nationally and internationally. The common thread here is that they had faith in something that was rational, even if only dimly perceived. And that isn’t the same as having faith in something that’s not even self-consistent (such as multiculturalism or the post-modern diversity cult).
There were also a lot of counter-revolutionaries at the time. If you walk into the Old North Church in Boston you’ll see the plaques to the Tory parishioners who skedaddled to Canada at the start of the Revolution. They were “patriotic.” They just weren’t liberal (whig).
“We the un-British…”
The Scots were a lot more sympathetic, I imagine.
Alphie,
You asked me what you promised was a sincere question about Rafik Hariri and said “Believe it or not, I come here to learn about Lebanon.”
I took you seriously and answered your question by directing you my my interview with Eli Khoury. Your response? “Khoury has received millions of dollars from Karl Rove.”
It is not possible to have an honest conversation with you, and you proved it once and for all with that paranoid and juvenile response.
Michael,
Do you consider Eli Khoury’s opinions on Lebanese politics unbiased?
Alphie: Do you consider Eli Khoury’s opinions on Lebanese politics unbiased?
No one’s opinions about Lebanese politics are unbiased. No one will be surprised if the Syrians kill him. He is almost certainly on their to-do list. So, no, he is not unbiased.
But he sure as hell isn’t a paid Karl Rove mouthpiece. He couldn’t give two shits about American domestic politics or your pet boogeyman.
Your response to everything he said with “Karl Rove!” is, seriously, one of the dumbest things I have ever read in my comments section.
Michael,
Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the guy who gave Khoury his no-bid U.S. government contracts, is one of Karl Rove’s best friends.
Seeing as Khoury’s name keeps “coming up in Congressional investigations”:http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa24515.000/hfa24515_0.HTM into where all the money Congress allocated to Radio Sawa and Al Hurra went, I find your claim Khoury “couldn’t give two shits about American domestic politics” rather dubious.
To Dan S: read Robert Nozick:
“Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism”:http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html
The good talking ‘wordsmith’ students expect the real world to be like school — but it ain’t.
I love America, and especially love American ideals.
Everybody in the world could, in theory, become an American. (Perhaps the US should push to offer Baja California a chance to join, if a referendum there led to secession from Mexico city?)
Despite 16 years in Slovakia, while I can become a citizen, I can never become a “Slovak”. Most ‘nations’, like the Kurds, are a non-governmental identity. A nationality.
As an American, I believe American ideals are superior. In Slovakia, many Slovaks think being Slovak is superior … to being Hungarian or Roma (Gypsy).
American patriotism is, in this way, different than other European nation-state patriotism. (Wouldn’t it be OK if Flanders left Wallonia and Belgium went away?).
But what do the Leftists like about America? Free speech, as long as it’s not ROTC or Rumsfeld on campus?
The problem with secular morality is that atheists don’t generally believe in nothing, many start believing in all kinds of silly things.
But the fight over patriotism is also, perhaps mostly, a fight about what is justice, and how can we get it.
alphie,
You obviously care much more about American domestic politics than you do about Lebanon. The opposite is true of myself, and of Eli Khoury to a much more dramatic extent. I lived in Lebanon, but he has to live there forever and watch his friends be murdered by car bombs. He rarely ventures more than a few blocks from his house because of the threats to his own life by Syrian intelligence agents.
You said you wanted to learn about Rafik Hariri and Lebanon, but you can’t get past Karl Rove or bother to type even a single non-Rove related sentence about it. That is why having a real conversation with you about the subject is impossible, and it is why you are a troll.
Bye.
“You obviously care much more about American domestic politics than you do about Lebanon. The opposite is true of myself”
What an interesting statement to make in a thread about patriotism, Michael.
I do indeed care more about domestic American politics than I care about Lebanon.
I’m not sure what you have against me. I enjoy your articles in a “slice of Middle East life” kinda way, but the guys you interview in the Middle East, like Eli Khoury and Michael Oren, are, quite literally, propagandists.
So please forgive me if I question their statements.
Alphie cares so much about patriotism, he trolls every thread on it he can find, like “this one”:http://patterico.com/2007/10/06/american-patriotism-the-idealism-of-dissent/ at Patterico’s.
To make the blogosphere a more friendly and accommodating place to him, I suggest that from now on every post on every blog be entitled “I Have No Idea What a Neocon Is, But I F–king Hate Them.”
Since alphie makes himself the center of attention everywhere, this adjustment would be minor.
alphie: I do indeed care more about domestic American politics than I care about Lebanon.
Fine, but Lebanese do not, so it’s stupid to filter their statements through your provincial American lens and project your parochial obsessions onto them.
…Michael Oren, are, quite literally, propagandists.
Michael Oren is a serious and respected historian who just got full-tenure at Yale. Even some members of Hezbollah grudgingly acknoweldge that his work is excellent.
It is impossible to have a normal conversation with you. I only bother responding for the sake of others who read this and who may be unfamiliar with the people you slander in ignorance. I know these people personally. You don’t, and you never will because you do not deserve their time and attention. Nor do you deserve mine.
We’re done here.
bq. _To Dan S: read Robert Nozick: Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism_
bq. _The good talking ‘wordsmith’ students expect the real world to be like school — but it ain’t._ [Tom Grey – Liberty Dad, #35]
(Thanks, Tom, for inviting us over from the other thread. The Nozick essay was an amusing read.)
Nozick’s argument is that intellectuals (“wordsmiths”) feel they are entitled to society’s best rewards, and they hate capitalism because it doesn’t give it to them. He claims they feel this way because they always received the best rewards from the teachers at school, for being so verbal. They were always the elite at school, so they feel they should be elite in the rest of life, too. Their “downward mobility” on leaving school makes them hate the capitalist system.
This sounds to me like sophomoric psycho-babble.
I don’t know what sort of high school Nozick went to, but in my high school, the elite were clearly the football team, the student council, and the prom king and queen. Not the smart kids. (The word “nerd” hadn’t been invented yet, but it certainly applied to us.) We knew we were the best at the academic metrics that mattered to us, but it was totally clear that many more people cared about other kinds of status.
Nozick observes that his analysis, for some unknown reason, doesn’t apply to people in the sciences and mathematics (“numbersmiths”). He overlooks the fact that people in these areas, contrary to stereotype, often excel at wordsmithing as well as numbersmithing. (We once discovered that grad students in our department got higher average GRE *Verbal* scores than grad students in the English department!)
I am skeptical of Nozick’s presupposition, that intellectuals hate capitalism. Many intellectuals are critical of various aspects and outcomes of our capitalist system, but “hate capitalism” is too broad and undifferentiated. However, even supposing that the phenomenon exists, I think Nozick’s school-experience explanation is silly and foolish.
Interestingly, if you look that essay up in Google Scholar, it has almost no citations, which essentially means that nobody pays any attention to it. Nozick’s books get thousands of citations, so he’s an important thinker. But this doesn’t appear to be an important thought.
Michael,
When you interviewed Michael Oren, he was serving as an IDF spokesman, not a historian.
I don’t consider propaganda as something evil, I just see it for what it is…an attempt to persuade.
As for “provincial American lens”,” it is the camera that all the drama queens of the Levant act for.
Their performance decides whether we “provincal” Americans shower their country with billions of dollars in aid or blow the crap out of it.
Statements like “we’re too busy to worry about American politics” are simply not credible. For the residents of the Middle East, domestic American politics are a matter or life and death.
Beard: (We once discovered that grad students in our department got higher average GRE Verbal scores than grad students in the English department!)
At the time I was in school, math and engineering students did well on the GRE verbal, in spite of popular conceptions about illiterate engineers.
On the national average they did not surpass English majors, but they decisively beat Education majors, who scored lowest on the GRE in every single category. Remarkable considering the high number of foreign students in the “hard” sciences, while at that time Education actually had the highest percentage of white students, according to the GRE break-downs.
So I agree that the idea of “wordsmiths” hating capitalism is way off. I’d say it’s more of a difference between glass-half-full and glass-half-empty people, and that applies to the different notions of patriotism, too.
Beard:
I know a lot of intellectuals who hate socialism. Well, they don’t so much hate it as have an awareness that its implementation demands a level of authoritarianism that’s inconsistent with liberal values. Hating capitalism is only something that a socialist, trained in the mumbo jumbo of Marxist dialectic, would be able to achieve, because there’s no unitary practical form of capitalism. In fact, the soviets lived for decades under a form of government-controlled capitalism, thinking there were socialists. I mean, if nothing is more productive than capital someone has to control it, and the difference is that “we” distribute that control to a greater extent than do the various forms of governmental socialism. (Religious orders may be a different thing.) Although our level of distributed control probably is not enough to meet the standards favored by the likes of Louis Kelso, we’re gradually improving. Capital is where it’s at, so one doesn’t really have the option of simply ignoring it… unless you’re a Marxist who believes in a voodoo stick called “congealed labor.”
I like cycling. I think they’ll get the drugs cleaned out before too long, because they’ve finally gotten around to holding teams responsible for the actions of team members. That dynamic will probably control performance-enhancing drugs, but it’s something they dare not try in pro team sports like baseball, etc. I like cycling because the crux of the matter rests on something as ephemeral as aerodynamics, and cooperation is absolutely necessary to competition. I’s very Madisonian. And that’s actually a pretty good analog for the sort of capitalism I like too. Of course, aerodynamics is far too subtle for a socialistic conception of competitive sports, so it’d be necessary to repeal the laws of physics. But voodoo can accomplish quite a lot.
I don’t think Nozick “gets” pacelines very well, either, frankly.
Charles Johnson does, however.
Glen #20:
Not familiar with that passage, so was waiting for someone else to take a shot and make a fool of themselves. Aesthetics?
Demosophist:
No, and now Gollum gets to eat you.
“This provides a clue, though.”:http://www.datawranglers.com/negations/issues/96w/96w_turner.html
bq. _So I agree that the idea of “wordsmiths” hating capitalism is way off. I’d say it’s more of a difference between glass-half-full and glass-half-empty people, and that applies to the different notions of patriotism, too._ [Glen Wishard, #42]
Whew! I’m not sure I can handle us agreeing quite so much!
Seriously, I think the connection with glass-half-full and glass-half-empty people is an important link.
One of the reasons I think that math/science folks are more comfortable with capitalism is that they understand feedback control a great deal better than humanists do. The strength of capitalism is that feedback is built into a competitive market system, so that a variety of desirable properties end up being stabilized and maximized without central control. Central control can, in fact, create spurious incentives that drive a system away from natural desirable operating points.
So far, so good. This is pretty doctrinaire free-market capitalistic conservatism. Liberals and others who fail to understand this feedback system are missing an important resource allocation mechanism that can do us a lot of good.
On the other hand, dogmatists who think this tool can solve every problem in the world are causing no end of human suffering, as well as economic failures.
For example, the allocation of resources for child health and nutrition simply should not be a market-driven process. Consider childhood innoculation for infectious diseases. The costs are so low, and the benefits (for society as a whole, not just the child and his/her family) are so large, that this level of medical treatment should be provided for free to everyone. (You are not required to let the school nurse innoculate your kid; you can pay your family physician to do it if you wish. But your kid must get innoculated, for the protection of all of us.) Back in the polio days, this was a no-brainer.
The market is a great way to allocate resources for discretionary investment and discretionary spending, but it’s not necessarily the right way for everything.
I pick the health-care example because I think it’s still a no-brainer, and because the Bush veto of the SCHIP bill seems particularly bone-headed. I certainly expect and hope that any legislator voting to uphold that veto will have a lot more time on their hands, starting in January 09.
“But what do the Leftists like about America?
American ideals, just like you.
“ I’d say it’s more of a difference between glass-half-full and glass-half-empty people, and that applies to the different notions of patriotism, too
Ooh, I rather like that as well.
Well, before I toddle off to bed, let me link to Langston Hughes’ magnificent poem “Let America Be America Again, which seems somewhat apropos . . .
alphie: For the residents of the Middle East, domestic American politics are a matter or life and death.
By definition, no. American foreign policy is a matter of life or death for some of them.
One reason (among many) that we can’t have a real conversation is because I want to talk about Lebanon (and Iraq, etc) and you want to change the subject to Karl Rove. You’re boring as well as provincial. Karl Rove doesn’t have jack-diddly to do with Rafik Hariri’s relationship with the Syrian regime and it assasins.
alphie: When you interviewed Michael Oren, he was serving as an IDF spokesman, not a historian.
I also interviewed him as a historian. That’s his real job.
Michael,
Domestic politics determine who sets foreign policy, and to a large extent, what that foreign policy will be.
I don’t really care that much about Rove, although I do see similarities between the way he is portrayed by the left and the way you portray Syria.
It would be intresting if you could report from Syria, instead of just passing along the opinions of people who have a vested interest in blaming Syria for all the Levant’s troubles.
Over a million Iraqis have chosen to live in Syria instead of Bush’s Iraq, after all.
And many Lebanese fled to Syria when Israel was bombing their country.
Why?
alphie: Why?
Is that the dumbest question you’ve asked me yet, or am I forgetting one?
If you don’t know the answer, Michael, just say so.
You don’t need to resort to constant ad hominem attacks against me.
Michael, alphie – I’m sure you both see how off-topic this dialog between you is becoming…
A.L.
A.L., I’m sure you can see how alphie’s every comment, beginning with #1, is intended to deflect the topic. And when he makes the kind of accusation he made in #13, it’s difficult not respond; you yourself responded to it.
Aesthetics is his big bugaboo in Beauty, so it was just a wild guess. But he also suggests that Beauty and politics don’t mix, so my second guess would be something like ideology or faction. That is, mistaking an extreme political stance as beauty itself.
Yeah, we’ll do better at keeping things on track.
Glen – we have periodic visits from people ‘on the other side’ ideologically (whatever that may mean); many of them start of with diversions and drivebys, and we’ve managed to convert a good number of them to strong members of the community – even where they may disagree with one, many, or all the positions I hold. I consider that a real badge of honor. So let’s work on alfie before writing anyone off …please?
A.L.
A.L. –
You’re going to rehabilitate the “Alpha Victim”?
I have to admit the idea has a kind of Victor Frankenstein elan. I look forward to the results.
To paraphrase Dr. Pretorius: Here’s to a new world of Gods, Monsters, and Super-Immune Trolls!