Imitation of life/Everything is going according to plan

Illustrations of nostalgia and technocracy: 2014, and 2022. 

From Farrell/Brighouse/Quiggin and George Scialabba to Cooper/Bruenig and this.

The last time, in 2021: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked," etc. 

This works too. Click the link at the bottom and it takes to Alfred Kazin from 1960

Whatever Greenwich Village may once have been or may now be supposed to have been, anyone who has recently strayed down MacDougal Street on a Saturday night knows that now it is a playground. What Coney Island was once to the honest workingman, Greenwich Village is now to the unmarried or ex-married young professional. The Village streets, pads, coffee houses, and bars are jammed with people who look a million times more sensitive, artistic, and "interesting" than William Faulkner or Igor Stravinsky, but who live by teaching economics, analyzing public opinion, writing advertising copy, practicing psychoanalysis, or "doing research" for political candidates. They are not intellectuals, but occasionally dream that they will be. That is their secret ambition. Meanwhile, being young and frisky, they are not yet the "managers" in our highly organized technical society. But they have the skills someday to become managers.

And since Lehman in the New Republic, is linking to Adam Curtis, I should call, and raise. Especially appropriate considering Putin's words to Macron this morning.

Every image below is a vision of hell. And they're all in the links above as images of utopia. Are you all so fucking stupid that I have to telegraph this shit?

Ten years ago: Dylan Riley on Tony Judt. 

2020, on Erik Olin Wright, 

In ‘a Tale of Two Marxisms’, his stimulating critique of the life-work of Erik Olin Wright, Michael Burawoy raises a crucial question for the left. What is the relationship between capitalist development and the project of socialism? In the classical Marxist schema, the competitive and unplanned nature of capitalist investment meant that manufacturing overproduction would result in periodic, and perhaps worsening, crises. At the same time, capitalism was producing a new class, the industrial proletariat, with the capacity to establish another form of social production based on democratic planning—and with a keen interest in so doing. The scientific analysis of capitalist development was thus intimately linked to the socialist political project. The factory and, later, the large corporation contained the cell form of the planned society to come, while the working class provided the social muscle for its achievement.

The strong point in this account has always been its explanation of the rhythms of capitalist production; its weak point was its sociology of class formation. As Bernstein observed in 1899, capitalist society does not simply produce class polarizations, but a host of intermediate positions as well. Subsequent thinkers, from Sorel to Wright and Burawoy’s ‘sociological Marxism’ and beyond, have pondered whether these layers could unite in an anticapitalist coalition.2 Yet as Burawoy points out, Wright’s interventions in this discussion were somewhat paradoxical. Rather than producing a new synthesis of class analysis and socialist politics, the two demarcated different phases of his intellectual career: class theories and empirical investigations of increasing scale and complexity preoccupied Wright through the seventies and eighties; the ambitious international project of Envisioning Real Utopias and its satellite volumes consumed his energies over the next thirty years. In this cursus, class analysis and real utopias seemed to have little to do with one another.

This poses what Burawoy correctly identifies here as the central conundrum of Wright’s work: the move 'from a class analysis without utopia to utopia without class analysis.'

2017, on Bourdieu

Given this intellectual and political profile, it is quite understandable that Bourdieu would be an unavoidable point of reference for the contemporary intellectual left: a brilliant and indefatigable sociologist who combines the intellectual sophistication of Lévi-Strauss or Jean-Paul Sartre with the empirical rigor of Anglo-American survey research and ethnography while also carrying on the venerable French tradition of the engaged intellectual, especially toward the end of his life. Indeed, the social theory that he has singlehandedly created is to the contemporary intellectual left what neo-Marxism was to the students of the 1960s.

Distinctively, however, Bourdieu, while attractive to the avant-garde, also appeals to the stolid mainstream of American social science, whose tolerance for French imports is usually quite limited. What explains this strikingly broad appeal? This essay will consider two accounts: the view that Bourdieu’s is a grand sociological theory (or what I will refer to hereafter as a macrosociological theory) like those of Marx, Weber, or Durkheim, and a contrasting view that Bourdieu’s sociology resonates with the social conditions that char- acterize elite academics, especially in the United States.

Macrosociological theories are distinguished by their explanatory ambition. In particular they have three characteristics: They link structural divisions in society to observable behaviors; they develop explanations for why, given those divisions, societies can reproduce themselves; and they sketch the processes through which societies change. When successful, these theories thus offer some account of stratification, reproduction, and social change. Marx’s theories of class conflict and mode of production, Weber’s sociology of domination, and Durkheim’s accounts of the division of labor, anomie, and social solidarity are all macrosociological theories in this sense. Bourdieu’s work also presents itself as just such a theory, but a close examination of his work reveals that his explanations are often tautological or weak. Indeed, this essay strongly endorses Philip Gorski’s recent claim that “Bourdieu’s oeuvre does not contain a general theory of social change.” This, I argue, poses a puzzle: If Bourdieu’s sociology is largely nonexplanatory, his current popularity cannot be accounted for by the power of its macrosociology.

I then turn to a second account suggesting that Bourdieu’s appeal is based on the unmatched ability of his work to articulate the experiences and political hopes of elite academics in the contemporary period. 

 The last paragraph on Olin Wright. 

This brings us to a simple question. What is the purpose of re-describing the socialist project in terms that confusingly equate it with a variety of patently non-socialist institutions and outcomes, just because these seem to be in some way tangible? The problem of socialism doesn’t strike me as a lack of vision; the goal is human emancipation in every dimension, as it has been from the start. The problem is political: the need for a collective will. Re-describing present-day institutions as if they were ‘partly socialist’ has only a soporific function. Socialists would be better served, in my view, by a comprehensive investigation of their opponents’ resources and an unremitting analysis of the system’s weak links. This, it seems to me, is the most useful way of honouring the memory of Erik Olin Wright.

"the goal is human emancipation in every dimension,..."  After all the clear analysis, it's a pity.

The simplest reminder that I know that utopian bullshit does nothing but undermine the fight for actual existing human decency: Harry Brighouse's sincere belief that Beyoncé Knowles would be a good running mate for Hillary Clinton.

Fallen Rock Stars of the 70s. It should be a tag.

---

"the goal..." The other option would be to read it as an explication of conflicts within religious doctrine, with no claims made for the beliefs themselves. But given the source...

1 

But those who’ve adopted the cause of wild animal suffering believe we ought to address even the problems that exist when humans aren’t around. If humans suddenly vanished tomorrow, flesh-eating screwworms would still infest deer, slowly eating them alive from the inside. Lions would still hunt gazelles and violently wrench the meat from their still-moving bodies.

2 

Such language, not least because it echoed much of the redemptive idealism of the Risorgimento, had fallen on receptive soil, and anarchism had begun to spread swiftly in regions such as the Romagna and Campania, especially after the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Spanish revolution two years later had indicated the insurrectionary potential of the International. In 1874 a band of 150 anarchists had set out from the town of lmola, hoping to stir up a rising among the local peasantry (who had recently been involved in agricultural strikes and food riots) and capture the city of Bologna. But the police had stopped them with little difficulty. In the spring of 1877 two of the most prominent young anarchists, Errico Malatesta — a diminutive former medical student from the province of Caserta — and Carlo Cafiero — a wealthy Apulian landowner, with a deeply mystical and religious turn of mind who was later to die incarcerated in a lunatic asylum agonizing about whether he was getting more than his fair share of sunlight through the window — had tried to lead a rising in the Matese mountains to the north of Naples. Twenty-six anarchists had gone to the small town of Letino, burned the tax records, proclaimed the social republic, and handed out a few old guns to the bemused peasants (though one local priest had apparently tried to help by explaining that socialism and the teachings of Christ were much the same thing). But nothing had happened, and the insurgents had quickly been rounded up by troops. 

Tagged Freedom of Speech because the "philosophers and scientists", who want to protect gazelles from lions –sheep from wolves– want to protect us from ourselves, most recently, by advising and defending Facebook. 

As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook’s top executives faced a political dilemma.

Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted. Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?

It wasn’t a particularly close call for the company’s leadership, newly disclosed emails show.

“I am fine with this,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG’s photos and updates about the Turkish military’s brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can’t be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey.

 I'd have a tag for Liberal Fascism, but it's covered already.

Arendt's distinction between Social and Political.

An argument made by a person raised with the distinction between means of address: Sie and du,  formal and informal. But both are equally formal: equally coded. The issue is less the distinction between social and political than the collapse of formal acknowledgment of the distinction between self and other, between individuals as such. 

 "Legitimate Parental Partiality"  Friendship is anti-egalitarian.

---

Immigrants and voting. No surprises.

By 2000, the Muslim community in America was several decades old, and had started to mature as a political entity. Muslim organizations almost unanimously endorsed George W. Bush. I voted for Bush that year. I would have voted for Bob Dole in 1996 if I weren’t so busy with medical school that I forgot to vote; I would have voted for Bush Sr. in 1992 if I weren’t still 17-years-old.

In the 2000 election, approximately 70 percent of Muslims in America voted for Bush; among non-African-American Muslims, the ratio was over 80 percent.

I've said it all before 

I teach a standard Contemporary Moral Issues/Applied Ethics course once a year, usually in the Spring, in lecture format, usually with 80-100 students (but this year with 170). Normally about 70% of the students are seniors, and about 70% are business majors (it meets an ethics requirement in the business major). We discuss topics such as abortion, inequality in education, parental licensing,...

I really don't keep up with this shit.

Technocracy
Opposition to freedom of speech.
"Epistocracy"
Liberal Fascism: Jonah Goldberg is the poor man's Foucault.

Some people would want children taken away from parents for teaching them that Zionism is racist.

Literacy tests for voting, since the American people are responsible for the deaths for millions.
How about abortion licenses, since some women are just irresponsible.

Abortion is legal because it's better to allow an irresponsible woman to abort a fetus that may be near viable than have the state chain her to a bed till she gives birth; a trimester is a measure of time not moral truth. We do not grant the state the right to micro-manage. Democracy's a bloody mess and needs to be.

Democracies have freedom of speech not because governments grant it but because the government is not granted the power to take it away.

This post is getting a lot of hits these days.

The Discovery of Experience

Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom

I'd forgotten I already had tag for Brighouse.

Freedom of speech is predicated on the assumption that experts are not what they pretend. It is not about personal freedom but self-government.

"The focus is on the freedom of a people, not on freedom of persons: on the plural, not the singular."

I wrote that before I'd read Arendt on plurality. I was raised with it.

Liberalism is garbage.

Harry Brighouse

-I would say, in fact, that the first amendment tradition has a terribly distorting effect on American public discussions of free speech. 

-I think there is a very strong case that hateful epithets can be distinguished and treated differently from propositional content, and do not merit protection under “the right to speak what one sees as the truth”.

Chris Bertram

The right frame, in my view, is to think of the state as “we, the people” and to ask what conditions need to be in place for the people, and for each citizen, to play their role in effective self-government. Once you look at things like that then various speech restrictions naturally suggest themselves. 

Henry Farrell

-I’ve suggested that academic freedom is a good thing on pragmatic grounds, but also made clear that it fundamentally depends on public willingness to delegate some degree of self-governance to the academy. If the public decides that academic freedom isn’t working out in terms of the goods it provides, then too bad for academic freedom. 

-But there’s also a much bigger point there, about the kind of space that the Internet has created. Liberalism of the small-l kind goes together with a strong emphasis on free speech. The implicit assumption is that we will all be better off in a world where everyone can say whatever they want, to whoever they want, even if it is inconvenient, or wrong minded, or crazy.

However, this assumption rests on empirical assumptions as well as normative ones. And as speech becomes cheaper, it may be that those assumptions don’t hold in the same way that they used to (see further Zeynep Tufekci, Rick Hasen and Timothy Wu, as well as Molly Roberts’ forthcoming book).

Eric Rauchway

If Kramer’s report is accurate, you can see why the Columbia faculty got frustrated. They wanted Bollinger to offer a traditional defense of academic freedom, which goes something like this: Academic freedom predates free speech. Although Prussia gave constitutional protection to Lehrfreiheit in 1850 (“science and its teaching shall be free”), academic freedom generally does not enjoy legal protection outside of contractual guarantees; rather, it rests on the authority and ability of a community of competent scholars to police their own discourse and on the willingness of universities to affirm this authority and ability....

[Perhaps Bollinger] knows the history and sources of academic freedom, but he thinks it uncongenial to assert them in this anti-elitist day and age.

Mark Tushnet

Is the loss of meaning from paraphrase or restatement or statement (in the case of nonrepresentational art) small enough to make nonrepresentational art sufficiently similar to expository writing that it should be covered in the same way that such writing is?

Brian Leiter

Much, perhaps most, speech, in fact, has little or no positive value all things considered, so the idea that its free expression is prima facie a good thing should be rejected. And since the only good reasons in favor of a legal regime of generally free expression pertain to the epistemic reliability of regulators of speech, we should focus on how to increase their reliabilty, rather than assume, as so much of popular and even some philosophical discourse does, that unfettered speech has inherent value.

Rick Hasen

The Supreme Court’s libertarian First Amendment doctrine did not cause the democracy problems associated with the rise of cheap [sic] speech, but it may stand in the way of needed reforms.

Tim Wu

-The First Amendment first came to life in the early twentieth century, when the main threat to the nation’s political speech environment was state suppression of dissidents. The jurisprudence of the First Amendment was shaped by that era. It presupposes an information-poor world, and it focuses exclusively on the protection of speakers from government, as if they were rare and delicate butterflies threatened by one terrible monster. 

But today, speakers are more like moths—their supply is apparently endless.... The low costs of speaking have, paradoxically, made it easier to weaponize speech as a tool of speech control. The unfortunate truth is that cheap speech may be used to attack, harass, and silence as much as it is used to illuminate or debate 

-What is more important: freedom
of speech, or freedom from propaganda?

Jeremy Waldron

The Harm in Hate Speech

Genevieve Lakier

It is widely accepted today that the First Amendment does not apply, or applies only weakly, to what are often referred to as “low-value” categories of speech. It is also widely accepted that the existence of these categories extends back to the ratification of the First Amendment: that low-value speech is speech the punishment of which has, since 1791, never been thought to raise any constitutional concern.

Mark Graber

I do not think I have a First Amendment right to post on a public website either “I fantasize about beating the world chess champion” or “I fantasize about murdering the world chess champion.” Doing so may be highly therapeutic, but with apologies to a significant percentage of my family, the Constitution provides no special protection to therapy. The First Amendment protects discourse about public affairs, defined broadly but not capaciously. A very high percentage of what takes place on the internet is not discourse and has little or nothing to do with public affairs.

Ryan Cooper

Free speech, like any public good, requires regulation.

Siva Vaidhyanathan

How free speech overwhelms democracy

all the above, here, with more of the same.

addendum

The humanist against vulgar universalism
Arendt to Scholem, in Arendt, The Jewish Writings. 

To come to the point: let me begin, going on from what I have just stated, with what you call "love of the Jewish people" or Ahahath Israel. (Incidentally, I would be very grateful if you could tell me since when this concept has played a role in Judaism, when it was first used in Hebrew language and literature, etc.) You are quite right–I am not moved by any "love" of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life "loved" any people or collective–neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love "only" my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this "love of the Jews" would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. To clarify this, let me tell you of a conversation I had in Israel with a prominent political personality*  who was defending the–in my opinion disastrous–nonseparation of religion and state in Israel. What he said–I am not sure of the exact words anymore–ran something like this: "You will understand that, as a Socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people." I found this a shocking statement and, being too shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: The greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love toward Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that?–Well, in this sense I do not "love" the Jews, nor do I "believe" in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.

We could discuss the same issue in political terms; and we should then be driven to a consideration of patriotism. That there can be no patriotism without permanent opposition and criticism is no doubt common ground between us. But I can admit to you something beyond that, namely, that wrong done by my own people naturally grieves me more than wrong done by other peoples. This grief, however, in my opinion is not for display, even if it should be the innermost motive for certain actions or attitudes. Generally speaking, the role of the "heart" in politics seems to me altogether questionable. You know as well as I how often those who merely report certain unpleasant facts are accused of lack of soul, lack of heart, or lack of what you call Herzenstakt. We both know, in other words, how often these emotions are used in order to conceal factual truth. I cannot discuss here what happens when emotions are displayed in public and become a factor in political affairs; but it is an important subject, and I have attempted to describe the disastrous results in my book On Revolution in discussing the role of compassion in the formation of the revolutionary character.

*This "personality" was Golda Meir, then foreign minister and later prime minister of Israel. At Scholem's urging, Arendt deleted her name and changed the feminine pronoun when the letters were first published. -Ed.

"I have never in my life 'loved' any people or collective."
Universalism is for law; law is impersonal. Love is intimate. Mixing the two is barbarism, of one sort or another.

Why not: a tag for Brighouse, a well-meaning pedant.
Mark Thoma in 2013, going on as usual after his wife's death, and then tweeting (approx) "It's too much. I can't go on" before going on, not mentioning it again. He deleted the tweet.

Note the uptick since 2000. Should I telegraph that it's not in pedantry but in awareness?
Change is slow.

Sandy Levinson

When I demurred, suggesting that his election would simply be catastrophic and that there was no reason at all to accept it graciously, the reasonable question was asked of me: what did I envision as the alternative? Taking up arms? A military coup? Or, as I have written several times, a secessionist movement led by Pacifica and New England (plus New York) that would reasonably state that they had no desire any longer to be part of a country that would place a sociopath in its highest office. All, to be sure, sound either fanciful or out-and-out dangerous (or, to some, lunatic). But exactly why is it less dangerous or lunatic to accept without question the legitimacy of a Trump presidency?

Leiter

America, the Dunning-Kruger nation
Yes indeed. And for thirteen years, I've been covering it under the heading "the less they know, the less they know it."

Quiggin: Recognizing racism

While tribalism (roughly, an identity politics of solidarity with “people like us”) need not, in principle, imply support for racism (I plan more on this soon), the distinction is a fine one, and has broken down completely in practice. There are at least two reasons for this:

• Political tribalism throws up demagogic leaders like Trump, Farage, and (in Australia) Pauline Hanson, whose appeal relies, in large measure on their rejection of political correctness, that is, on their willingness to appeal openly to racism. 
• The centrality of migration to current political debate, inevitably bringing race issues to the forefront. 

For the same reasons, it seems clear that overt racism is going to be a significant part of politics for the foreseeable future. Individual demagogues like Trump may (or may not) flame out, but the existence of a large base of support for overtly racist policies and politicians is now evident to all, and the agreement that kept this base from having its views expressed in mainstream politics has now broken down.

In response to this it’s necessary to recognise racism as a substantial, if deplorable, political tendency. First, and most obviously, that means abandoning euphemisms, explicitly naming racism and, even more, naming people like Trump and Hanson as racists.

"the long list of failures at Crooked Timber on questions of race" One more for for extra comedy

Three posts from the last week by Brighouse, and one linked.

1-Making a classroom discussion an actual discussion

In this post I mentioned a time that I had my small (21 person) discussion based class recorded, and then watched the video with several colleagues (and 3 students I invited who were actually in the class). Someone observed, pretty quickly, that the discussion had a kind of ping-pong feel. The students were all willing to talk (event the student who told me in the previous class that she was ok with being recorded as long as she didn’t have to speak in the discussion), but they were all just talking to me.

linked: How could a research university systematically improve undergraduate instruction?

Regular readers know that I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about improving the quality of teaching and learning in universities like mine. I believe that instruction in research institutions is suboptimal. What I mean by suboptimal is something like “quite a bit less good than it could be without large investments of time energy and attention”.

2- 50 years and one day later…
since the premiere of The Monkees. He posts a video of the credit sequence.

3- An observation and a conjecture about HRC’s health

1. Walking pneumonia is really not a big deal any more. I’ve had it maybe 10 times; it is very annoying indeed, but, normally, like HRC, I have not bothered telling anyone about it. Indeed, whereas she apparently told close friends and family, I sometimes don’t bother (its not as though anyone is going to have any sympathy—“Go get antibiotics and steroids, now, you idiot”). [1] Her failure to tell the world she has a minor ailment is not part of a pattern of secrecy. 

2. Or maybe she doesn’t even have the ailment. Could it be that there is nothing wrong with her, and this is just a rumour spread by her campaign i) to make her seem a bit more like a normal person and ii) to panic people (like the Bushes, for example[2]) who think they can sit this out without having to take responsibility for the deranged performance artist becoming President, and move them into positive action?

Levinson refers to Richard Hofstadter. repeats

repeats  Blyth's irony is the irony of self-awareness.


"If all humility is false humility then Socratic humility, as Socratic irony, is the irony of contempt. Euripidean irony is the irony of our shared burdens, and failures."

Harry Brighouse. Oxbridge philosopher, earnest utopian, friend to analytical Marxists everywhere.

"I suppose Beyoncé is off the table for VP? She’s smart, popular, articulate, hard to dislike."

Being a political philosopher means ignorance is an excuse.
Brighouse

For what its worth, IF Zionists did work with the Nazis to facilitate Jewish emigration to Israel (and I am just going with Corey’s quote from Friedlander — I don’t know the history, so had no idea about this till now) it is very hard to think they did anything wrong. In the circumstances, what could be wrong with trying to get Jews out of Germany alive? It didn’t take a fortune teller to guess that things were likely to go pretty badly.

"IF" in capitals. The post itself is Davies. It's a fucking abomination.
Brighouse may as well be holed up in a cave somewhere reading St. Augustine.

What does it mean to be a citizen of a republic?

Blindness and Insight

continuing, and earlier. More for the archives. Technocracy and Sapir/Whorf. The impoverishment of thought among the apparat, our licensed intellectuals. etc.

Daniel Davies is pathological (the beginning and the first two footnotes)

The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living

I have a piece up on the New Yorker blog, on the same theme as Damien Hirst’s 1991 shark-in-formaldehyde artwork[1], as applied to big banks and their remarkable inability to write contingency plans for what they would do if they needed to declare bankruptcy, despite being point blank ordered by the regulators to do so.

It’s actually in my opinion, the single most toxic aspect of the culture of big banks. Greed and dishonesty are all very bad[2] but they are to a large extent self-limiting processes. Greedy people have loss-averse utility functions, which limits their willingness to risk total destruction for gain. ...

[1] Which is itself apparently in the process of disintegrating and giving off toxic fumes as it does so, a metaphor I considered but rejected as perhaps too laboured.

[2] Pre-emptively: anyone who has been asked not to comment on my threads is still banned. If you are wondering whether your ban might have expired, it hasn’t. If you are genuinely unsure whether you are banned or not, tread carefully. In general the subject of whether I am an apologist for big banks has been done to death and I do find it irritating even when you’re not being excessively personal.

repeats. Davies, with the obvious rejoinder.

A “tragic dilemma”, as I understand it, is a situation in which consequentialism gives a clear answer about which alternative is better, but the answer in question is unpalatable. I don’t see why, in such a situation, consequentialism should be described as “crass” rather than, say, “jolly sensible”.

A tragic dilemma is the choice between food for your children or cancer medicine for your wife.

Parallels, repeats. "It's still no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other." Starting here will end here.

Back to the present. Brighouse. Dilemmas of Educational Ethics

I wrote last year about the Justice in Education project at Harvard, which has developed a series of case studies posing difficult moral questions concerning educational decision-making. Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay have just published a brilliant volume, Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries, containing 6 cases, with 6 responses to each case by a variety of authors – most of them academics (from a variety of disciplines, and including Howard Gardner, Mary Patillo, Diana Hess, Tommie Shelby, Christopher Winship, and Elizabeth Anderson) but also by teachers, administrators, and one legislator.

The first case in the book concerns social promotion. It takes the form of a debate among a group of teachers, some giving reasons why a particular girl should graduate from middle school (appealing to evidence that children who are held back drop out at high rates; that her academic failure is not really her fault because i) her science class, which she failed, was taught by a sub who was, by his own admission, incompetent, for most of the year and ii) her family circumstances essentially made learning impossible); others giving reasons for holding her back (she’s not ready for the academic demands of high school; it sends a bad message to both her and other students if the school graduates students who are known not to have reached the minimum academic threshold needed to pass their classes). It doesn’t require a huge amount of background knowledge in order to generate intelligent discussion. So that was a good starting point, and, in fact, my students came up with good points on both sides that I had never thought about, despite having read the commentaries and discussed the case several times.

The pedant's relation to subjectivity and emotion ranges from cold indifference to pained. "Geek" subjectivity is "Emo". Brighouse has dedicated years of his life to concern over the "inegalitarian" love of one's own children. His posts at CT are divided almost equally between discussions of utopia and wistful obituaries for comedians and music hall performers. Stephen Fry is "the greatest living Englishman".  G.A. Cohen was Canadian, but even if he were English he wouldn't make the cut, and he was perfectly happy to admit it: "I just think that I'm not a morally exemplary person, that's all." I doubt anyone at Oxbridge would ever be considered, and I doubt it's occurred to Brighouse to ask why. In light of that the post quoted above could be considered "progress".

Leiter posts a long quote from the NDPR to mock it
Annals of Strange Reviews for  Books

"From the usually excellent Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (which frequently falls short in this particular area, alas, I am guessing because one can't get serious philosophers to review stuff like this)"

As the Anglophone reception and appreciation of François Laruelle's work grows, it is worth reminding ourselves of the radicality of its ambition to be a thoroughgoing non-representational style of theorising and thinking. Carried out in the name of the destruction of onto-theology, the overcoming of metaphysics, the excess of the Real, or the deconstruction of presence, the attempt to think outside of traditional representational categories and to do so by means of novel philosophical styles or gestures is, of course, typical of much twentieth-century European philosophy, particularly that coming out of France. It may be tempting, therefore, to view Laruelle's writing as simply one further, albeit idiosyncratic in the extreme, example of philosophical and stylistic invention that places its impossible object of thought in excess of thought itself. Yet, as Laruelle has consistently argued at least since the early 1980s, philosophy has never gone, nor can ever go, far enough in its suspension, destruction or deconstruction of representational thought. Notions of radically withdrawn, ungrounded Being, of transcendence or alterity that would be otherwise than Being, or of difference that would detach philosophy and ontology from all logic of foundation or totality and place the very notion of Being itself under erasure simply do not, for Laruelle, go far enough. For in the end such notions remain conceptual and representational if only because they represent being as withdrawn, as difference in excess of ontological foundation or ground. For Laruelle, any kind of ontology, be it differential, negative, or given in the mode of an exacerbated apophasis, does not and cannot do justice to the radical immanence of the Real.

My recollection is that Michael Rosen coined a label for stuff like this.

The paragraph is easy enough to understand.

Google says that Laruelle is the promulgator of a dogma he calls "non-philosophy". Ray Brassier is a fan (and Leiter up to now has had no problem with him). All of this records philosophers' attempts at prescription when description is the only option left. If all philosophy is merely literature, at least philosophers are serious about it. According to Graham Harman Jerry Fodor thinks he's a better writer than Shakespeare. Now some philosophers are concerned with "experience" and others write novels.

"It's no secret...". The link's a discussion of Ludlow. The case goes on. Also more on Leiter and Carrie Jenkins. I'm still getting hits for my screen shots of the Leiter Events page that was taken down when he threatened to sue. It's all the childishness of people proud of their own maturity.

Another example of Emo intellectualism.

I am going slightly out of depths with this post, traversing into the territory of yet-to-be-formed thoughts, which could either be speculations or reflections; responses, or idiosyncratic musings. Part of it emerges with the experience I’ve had so far working ethnographically, and from my previous research encounters and readings; but the other part is deeply contemplative, troubling even. Here, I wish to work with another concept that can be read along with ‘subalternity’ as I discussed in the last post – that of ‘margins.’

Therefore, I would like the reader to be aware of the tentative nature of the thoughts expressed in this post, and the assumptions that guide them, and the delicate nature of the interventions that I make.

I began to think of margins more concertedly after I attended a lecture by Pnina Werbner recently, where she spoke about political revolution in the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements in 2011, and the aesthetics of effervescence and despair. She spoke of how such movements needed to be backed by politics so as to materialize the changes that guide them in the first place. Despite apparent failures, she argued that such movements do have an impression on the world: narratives, strategies, and so forth, which steer and shape protest politics in the world. While I am in agreement with her argument, I do think one element that was left relatively under-theorized – and one I think is crucial – is that of the margins of such politics.

I use the term ‘margin’ in a very specific sense in this post. In the first sense, I use margins to denote a space created by social and political forces, but with an important caveat that the social forces I am talking about can be broadly characterized as counter-hegemonic forces. Margins, while hierarchized, are not simply peripheries to an imagined center (I am also skeptical of ascribing a direct spatial link, which I explain below).

Earnest inarticulate stumbling and 15 uses of "I".

related: Two discussions of empathy: for, and against.

Brassier

The pre-modern worldview that lasted several millennia and spanned the transition from poly- to monotheism, is one in which the world and human existence are intrinsically meaningful. (I say “is” rather than “was” because this worldview continues to persist today, even among educated people.)

Irony is not a modern invention.

Like most people, I am very heartened by the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, and Lybia, and have nothing but admiration for the courage of the protestors who have risked life and limb in the attempt to transform a situation that had become intolerable. I find the attempt to characterize these revolts as manifestations of the desire for Western-style capitalist democracy, and thereby enlist them as ideological victories for neo-liberalism, rather preposterous, and I hope that whatever mode of government comes to supplant those of the toppled dictatorships, it will not simply be the brand of corrupt oligarchic ‘democracy’ that the US and Europe so cynically promote.

Bourgeois revolts viewed from the intellectual bubble economy of the library.

Philosophy as trolling. Gerald Dworkin reviews Mearsheimer's Why Leaders Lie

Here is Mearsheimer’ definition. “Lying is when a person makes a statement that he knows or suspects to be false in the hopes that others will think it is true. ”(16) I think this is quite close to the definition that most ordinary people would give if we think that “in the hopes” is roughly equivalent to “intends.” But, as one might guess, each and every part of it has been challenged as either unclear or not necessary by philosophers who work on the definition of lying.

Making a statement? Was there lying involved [in] Operation Mincemeat, the scheme by the British to deceive the Nazis about the Normandy invasion, by planting a dead body with a fake letter in his pocket, off the coast of Spain. Planting a statement is not making one.

Does one "plant a statement" in "hope" or with "intention"? Pedantry: art for art's sake.

...What does Mearsheimer have to say about the morality or[sic] lying? After defining utilitarianism as the view that “lying sometimes makes sense, because it serves a useful purpose” in contrast to the “absolutist” who thinks lying never makes sense, i.e., is never justified, he goes to to state his view. ...

Matters are not helped by the fact that he is making a distinction between utilitarianism and the moral dimension of lying. The latter is beyond the scope of his book. But utilitarianism is almost always thought of as a particular type of moral theory. I think I understand what is going on here. For Mearsheimer, utilitarianism is just a way of thinking about things in terms of whether they produce certain useful results for the liar, or those whose interests he is promoting.

"I think I understand what is going on here." Playing dumb as rhetorical trope. He stays with it throughout.

...If he only used “makes good sense” as a way of saying “produces useful results” this would be fine. But in the first quote he says Kennedy was “right” to lie. This sounds like a moral claim; the ones he was going to avoid.

Playing word games.

I think it is fairest to Mearsheimer to think of making (good) sense as always meaning making good strategic sentence, i.e., likely to lead to benefits for the nation they lead.

As if the book were a manuscript found on a beach, words on paper by an unknown author. Dworkin wants to pretend there's no context, but it's too late; he's introduced Mearsheimer already as "a distinguished political scientist".

...Mearsheimer’s definition of a lie--making a knowingly false statement in the hopes others will think it true--makes the hope/intention of the liar to bring about a certain consequence in the mind of the hearer--a false belief--an essential component of a lie. So any explanation of the wrongness of the lie will have to rely exclusively on that intent to bring about a certain consequence of the lie. The wrongness of the intent is a function of the badness of what it tries to bring about--false belief. Why is false belief bad? Because we need true beliefs to promote our welfare and avoid harms. This is the explanation given by utilitarianism considered as a moral theory.

Now this theory may, in fact, be the correct explanation of the wrongness of lying. If so, the definition plays a proper role. But, if an alternative explanation is correct, one which gives no, or much less weight, to the intent to deceive, then the definition will have ruled out examination of an alternative explanation.

What might be such an alternative explanation? One which argues that lying is wrong independently of whether the lie is intended to change the content of the hearer’s mind. It is wrong because the speaker is inviting the listener to take the speaker as presenting the content of the speaker’s mind. He is being truthful. He is authorizing the listener to take his statement as an expression of his beliefs; not necessarily their truth-value. In fact, this authorization still holds even if, by some chance, what the speaker believes false turns out to be true.

...Such a theory is presented in an important new book by Seanna[sic] Shiffrin, Speech Matters.

Seana Shiffrin, Speech Matters, Princeton, 2015

Many philosophers start to craft moral exceptions to demands for sincerity and fidelity when they confront wrongdoers, the pressures of non-ideal circumstances, or the achievement of morally substantial ends. But Shiffrin consistently resists this sort of exceptionalism, arguing that maintaining a strong basis for trust and reliable communication through practices of sincerity, fidelity, and respecting free speech is an essential aspect of ensuring the conditions for moral progress, including our rehabilitation of and moral reconciliation with wrongdoers.

Moralizing pedantry and anti-politics. She argues that lying is not protected free speech. And of course "moral progress", and "rehabilitation of and moral reconciliation with wrongdoers" are goals, not truths in themselves, so we're back to some form of utility, the utilitarian value of honesty and truth.

"How do I look, dear?"
"Fat and depressed."

Somewhere on this page I have a youtube video of Jim Carrey in Liar Liar.

Like Brighouse, no sense that our relations to friends, family, and strangers, are different by default and by necessity. No sense from Leiter that Shiffrin's moralism relates to Beyerstein and thus to what Leiter links to here, to mock.

First, at the very beginning of their relationship, John placed J.C.’s hand on John’s (clothed) groin while they were watching a movie in a dormitory room. J.C. now contends that the sexual contact was unwanted. John denies that the contact was non-consensual, and contends that it was simply the first step in their sexual relationship. Among other things, he notes that the two of them had sexual relations for the first time the very next day, and that they continued to have such relations for most of the next two years. He also contends that J.C. afterward recounted the episode in a humorous manner to friends, although the university would not accept his evidence of that fact.

Otherworldly abstraction leads to pedantry and moralism. Not all pedants are moralists; that solves nothing.

Shriffrin refers also to "sincerity", (I quoted the blurb, but checked the book).
We're back to the distinction between law and lawyers.

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/06/02/the-aims-of-higher-education-problems-of-morality-and-justice/

"I imagine CT readers will be particularly interested in CB’s excellent chapter on philosophical defenses of the humanities,..."

http://blog.edenbaumstudio.com/2015/05/eric-rauchway-real-liberals-fight.html

People are more complex than their ideas. Preferring people come what may, regardless of their ideas and opinions, is anti-intellectual or vulgar, but following their ideas and their contradictions, their tastes, the preferences that defeat intention, the gamut of their and our behavior and our record of behavior, is the only model of intellectualism we have. The rest is formalism and technics, and in pure reason the conflation of one with the other.

Ideas are flat; people are not.

Brighouse, out of the past: "I would say, in fact, that the first amendment tradition has a terribly distorting effect on American public discussions of free speech."

Google it. I don't have the patience. Please, God, give us an end to the intellectualism of priests.

http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/05/how-to-handle-terrifying-ideas-a-modest-proposal-for-college-reform

Posted elsewhere. Typed into a mobile.

I came here via an approving link from an academic philisopher (Leiter) who nonetheless has concerns over the "harm" following Waldron, of hate speech. "I know it when I hear it" seems to be the logic. All I can hear is cognitive dissonance. The author here is known for arguing that some people should do us all the favor and not vote; I doubt he was referring to any members of the Bush family, since even George W is the product not only of one of the most prestigious preparatory academies, Andover, (fellow alumnus David Graeber) but also both Yale and[!] Harvard. And now he's writing on a libertarian website. My favorite bit of libertarian wisdom comes from Peter Thiel, who opines:

"I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Freedom of speech is the inseparable counterpart to freedom of inquiry. Citizens in a democracy have the obligation to be informed in order that they may govern. The freedom of the individual serves the freedom of the people, the self-governing community of equals. Individualism for its own sake is anathema, though with a wry smile. There's no democracy without irony, just ask a lawyer. Better that than the dictatorship of the self-righteous. And really, is there any other kind?

Fucking idiots. Search for Jason Brennan on my page. [here] I made the same obvious points on his posts at the Princeton Press blog.

Related, on the contemporary academic definition of "knowledge" that would include the above, and so much else. The last comment, by commenter T, on D Davies' absurd post. DD: "Bankers have had their day under scrutiny." He ignores the fact they've come away unscathed.
http://crookedtimber.org/2015/05/26/libor-for-the-universities

“Between the 1960s and the early 1980s, higher education began to serve a more diverse population of students, with many students having greater work and family commitments. At the same time, faculty interest in teaching declined as colleges and universities increasingly emphasized their role in producing new knowledge through research and scholarship. We began asking less of our students during this period, and their performance fell to meet our expectations. The good news, such as it is, is that the steep decline arrested itself in the early 1980s.”

https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/its-about-time-what-make-reported-declines-how-much-college

Brighouse's indignant defense of Davies is hilarious. Rationalists rationalize.

The confusion of reason and knowledge. Discussion of the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin is not a discussion of and does not result in knowledge. Political and philosophical formalisms, "I have come to the conclusion that anarchism is true" (Robert Paul Wolff) Jon Elster's claim to be a scientist, Rawlsian liberalism, economic "science" etc. The "research" model of art-making. The poetry of high purpose.

We're all more complex than our ideas. If you don't accept that, you're headed for a fall.

Various and sundry, the old with the new.

Eric Rauchway: Real liberals fight fascism

The New Deal gave Americans not only the material capacity to fight fascism, but faith in American institutions.

see recent, on Wickard etc, and Kolko.
repeats, Rauchway defines liberalism:

If Kramer’s report is accurate, you can see why the Columbia faculty got frustrated. They wanted Bollinger to offer a traditional defense of academic freedom, which goes something like this: Academic freedom predates free speech.

...I can think of three reasons Bollinger might have said this, instead of offering the traditional defense of academic freedom.

(1) He doesn’t know the history and sources of academic freedom. This seems unlikely, though that phrase “surprised and bewildered” is worrying.

(2) He knows the history and sources of academic freedom, but he thinks it uncongenial to assert them in this anti-elitist day and age.

Real liberals don't read Foucault.
Richard Yeselson: Is Cosmopolitan Communitarianism still Possible? Was it ever?
Bertram and Farrell answered years ago
Bertram on Martha Nussbaum's Not For Profit

However, the central idea of the book, that receipt of a certain type of humanities education is necessary for people to acquire the capacities for empathic imagination that (according to MN) are necessary virtues of democratic (and indeed global) citizenship strikes me as (a) obviously false and (b) insulting to those of her fellow citizens who haven’t been the beneficiaries of such courses. Those given a more technical education are described as “useful machines” as early as p.2. There is very little empirical support adduced for any of the causal claims in the essay which tend to rely on more or less a priori arguments from various educational and psychoanalytical thinkers that Nussbaum likes. 

Farrell on Gambetta and Hertog's Engineers of Terror

Their preferred explanation lies in the combination of a particular mindset given to simplification, monistic understandings of the world and desire that existing social arrangements be preserved, with key environmental factors (most importantly, frustrated professional aspirations due to a lack of opportunities). Interestingly, Gambetta and Hertog suggest that the same mindset which drives engineers in the Islamic world to become terrorists, may lead to the marked tendency of US engineers to adhere to strongly conservative political views. This is the kind of topic that lends itself to the worst kind of uninformed pop-journalism academics, but as best as I can tell (I’m a consumer rather than a producer of the statistical literature) Gambetta and Hertog are extremely careful about their analysis, and up front about the limitations of their data.

Rich Puchalsky in comments at Yeselson's post

The fundamental failure of past left analysis is looking to the working class as the progressive or revolutionary force. It clearly isn’t. The reliable left-leaning classes are the professional and creative classes below the 1%: the cosmopolitanism of capitalism together with the inability to loot that makes communitarianism possible.

We're back to Rauchway's elitism. Few of the comments are as blunt as that one; most are almost as offensive. And though Farrell is intrigued by Gambetta he approves of this

The role of science has been to gauge the limits of the species, with new technologies and extra-planetary environments being used as virtual laboratories for an ongoing thought experiment. If the mainstream novel employs the lens of the commonplace career – birth and education, marriage and divorce, ambition and failure – SF has pursued the inquiry by abducting the human animal and placing it in alien environments.

The cognitive dissonance is painful to witness. How can you have a conversation with pathology?
Rauchway again: When You Can’t Avoid Knowing Grandpa Was a Nazi

Teege’s brief narrative also encompasses also the memory kept by Holocaust survivors and their descendants: before Teege found out about her grandfather, she traveled to Tel Aviv, made friends there, and lived there. Her discovery imposes silence between her and her Jewish friends. She doesn’t know what she can say. Her grandfather might have shot their grandparents.

“There is no Nazi gene,” Teege insists, struggling against the idea that she must bear some guilt for her grandfather. But she clearly feels that guilt. We all inhabit the world the bloodthirstiest conquerors made; only some of us grew up with them, personally.

The author of the book is a Zionist. No mention of Palestinians.
Jason Stanley is interviewed about his new book How Propaganda Works

In How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015), Jason Stanley develops an original theory of propaganda according to which propaganda is the deployment of an ideal against itself. Along the way, Stanley distinguishes various kinds of propaganda and explores the connections between propaganda, ideology, stereotypes, and group identities. Stanley's central thesis is that propaganda poses an epistemological problem for democracy, as propaganda is the vehicle by which false beliefs are disseminated and opportunities for knowledge are closed.

The book's blurbed by Chomsky, as "a novel and significant contribution that should revitalize political philosophy." Propagandists are introducing foreign substances into our precious bodily fluids.

But journalistic forces and manipulation can also act more subtly. Like the Trojan Horse, they introduce heteronomous agents into autonomous worlds. Supported by external forces, these agents are accorded an authority they cannot get from their peers. These writers for nonwriters or philosophers for nonphilosophers and the like, have television value, a journalistic weight that is not commensurate with their particular weight in their particular world. 

…What I find it difficult to justify is the fact that the extension of the audience [made possible by television] is used to legitimate the lowering of the standards of entry into the field. People may object to this as elitism, a simple defense of the citadel of big science and high culture, or even an attempts to close out ordinary people (by trying to close off television to those who with their honoraria and their and showy lifestyles, claim to be representative of ordinary men and women, on the pretext that they can be understood by these people and will get high audience ratings). In fact, I am defending the conditions necessary for the production and diffusion of the highest human creations. To escape the twin traps of elitism and demagoguery we must work to maintain or even to raise the requirements for the right of entry –the entry fee- into the fields of production.

Pierre Bourdieu -and the rest of them- as Jack D. Ripper

---

The gift that keeps on giving.  Brighouse, again (most recently here)

Is having a loving family an unfair advantage? Yes, but the state should allow parents to read to their children while perhaps not to send them to expensive private schools. Behind philosophy qua philosophy -the specious search for truth- the power of the state to give and take away. And of course on education G.A. Cohen disagrees.

Liberalism considers the tension between inequality and fairness, but not between freedom and obligation. The state alone regulates behavior assumed to be base and vulgar. A superior force holds our violence in check. It's a model of Weberian authoritarianism; in a nation of laws there is no need for virtue. Cohen thought so, certainly.

It's difficult to expect a person who lives in a particular social niche to depress the circumstances of himself and his family below a certain level even for the sake of principles that he sincerely affirms.

Holbo on Nazis twice. Were The Nazis Right-Wing? In What Sense Were The Nazis Socialists?

For Holbo as for his wife.

As Waring points out herself, tenure or no tenure, she’s not really at liberty to say what she thinks anyway. That’s a handicap for a writer. Maybe she should write about something else.

A commenter at CT hopes that the choice if image isn't "entirely ironic". Rockwell had a better sense of irony than Brighouse. Look at the bottom right corner of the image.

Challenging some of our most commonly held beliefs about the family, Brighouse and Swift explain why a child’s interest in autonomy severely limits parents’ right to shape their children’s values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children.

A confused mix of idealist individualism and statist moral authoritarianism, bound by the imperatives of non-contradictory logic and the need for "truth." So much for instilling a sense of republican virtue in the young.

repeat. Peter Thiel is right.

I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.” 

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

The Thiel quote originally through Corey Robin (I don't remember where) who (repeats of repeats) doesn't understand the the implications of his own arguments. You can't be for revolution and against disruption. Permanent revolution is Modernist fantasy and capitalism's fantasy of itself.

Democracy is an ideology; virtues are inculcated or they're not. In order for the people to remain free, persons need to be raised into the role of citizens.

Brighouse’s philosophy, like Cohen’s, like all the liberalism of ideas, is deeply anti-social, laced with the melancholy superiority of a schoolmaster of a school for wayward youth. [p.30]

Again and again:

"If her interests have the same value as his, then my interests must have the same value as yours." 

The opposite of virtue. And a license for the state to impose virtue on those without it.

Brighouse and "Legitimate Parental Partiality"
Rockwell, as artist.
Brighouse and Quiggin, (and again) prefer kitsch.

The Golden Age of Ozzie and Harriet, Ken and Barbie.

update, and repeats, for comedy's sake
comment 79 by engels

Congratulations!
My favourite kid’s comment on a book was GA Cohen’s kids on Jonathan Glover’s ‘What Sort of People Should There Be’ (according to Cohen): “That’s easy, they should be like us!”

Cohen, also in the quoted reference above: "I'm not a morally exemplary person, that's all.”

I wrote a book called If you're an Egalitarian How Come You're so Rich? And the final chapter discusses fourteen reasons people give for not giving away their money when they're rich but they profess belief in equality, twelve of which are, well, rubbish. I think there are two reasonable answers that a person who doesn't give too much of it away can give and one of them has to do with the burden of depressing yourself below the level of your peer group with whom you're shared a certain way of life, and in particular, depriving your children of things that the children around them favor. And also, and slightly separately, the transition from being wealthy to being not wealthy at all can be extremely burdensome and the person who has tasted wealth will suffer more typically from lack of it than someone who's had quote unquote the good fortune never to be wealthy and therefore has built up the character and the orientation that can cope well with it.

What an asshole. And what fucking idiots.

More from Joseph Raz (etc), from the introduction to Value, Respect, and Attachment 

Diversity, I will suggest in these pages, arises out of partiality.

As a Zionist and co-author of a paper titled "National Determination" he has no choice but to imagine every culture as an "intentional community", by which logic France started out as the equivalent of a Kibbutz. He has the origins of culture literally reversed. Esperanto is not the model for linguistic development and intentional communities originate in or devolve to kitsch. The model intentional community is fascist. More:

Most forms of legitimate partiality are more or less optional. We may be required to favour our children or friends, but it is up to us whether to have children or friends.

Most of us are required to have parents. see Brighouse. That and the Trolley Problem (start here).

Below is a repeat, since someone else found it today, and it fits. Beginning with a quote from Ernst Cassirer
---

Perception does not know the concept of infinity; from the very outset it is confined within certain spatial limits imposed by our faculty of perception. And in connection with perceptual space we can no more speak of homogeneity than of infinity. The ultimate basis of the homogeneity of geometric space is that aIl its elements, the "points" which are joined in it, are mere determinations of position, possessing no independent content of their own outside of this relation: it is purely functional and not a substantial reality. Because fundamentally these points are devoid of all content, because they have become mere expressions of ideal relations, they can raise no questions of diversity of context. Their homogeneity signifies nothing other than this similarity of structure, grounded in their common logical function, their common ideal purpose and meaning. Hence homogeneous space is never given space, but space produced by construction; and indeed the geometrical concept of homogeneity can be expressed by the postulate that from every point in space it must bc possible to draw similar figures in aIl directions and magnitudes. Nowhere in the space of immediate perception can this postulate be fulfilled. Here there is no strict homogeneity and direction each space has its own mode and its own value. Visual space and tactical space [Tastraum] are both anisotropic and unhomogenious in contrast to the metric space of Euclidian geometry: "the main directions of organization - before-behind, above-below, right-left - are dissimilar in both physiological spaces." [Ernst Mach] 

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Quoted in Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form.

"Seminar on The Priority of Democracy" Technocrats are philosophical elitists of ideas: mediocre people in search of the best of all possible rules, which in the end are "devoid of all content, because they have become mere expressions of ideal relations, they can raise no questions of diversity of context".
Adrian Vermeule [history here, then here ] is a participant.

...see also M. Foucault, Liberal Fascism.

William Heckscher on Panofsky. From his memorial essay at the end of Panofsky's Three Essays on Style.

Everything in humanistic scholarship, even the (to him somewhat comical) New Criticism, which he characterized with Pierrot's words, "Je sais bien écrire, mais je ne sais pas lire," he considered acceptable, so long as it was not "institutionalized."

In America, it's always institutionalized, or the author is, if only under sedation.

It's absurd how much is lost when the goal of disinterest devolves into a fiction of objectivity.

But if “using rare words and tropes in place of common words and phrases” is a strategy of “deliberate transgression” of the norms of clear prose characteristic of the dominant classes and is opposed to “the hyper-correction strategies of pretentious outsiders,” then Bourdieu is a master strategist. Words such as lexis, allodoxia, chiastic, askesis, espace hodologique, hysteresis, and of course habitus (and, indeed, hysteresis of habitus) are scattered throughout the text.6 That a work of social science should—”unlike the sometimes illuminating intuitions of the essay”—require an effort on the part of the reader is fair enough. Here, however, reality disappears into the hypertrophied rhetoric of the Ecole Normale.

---

It's a footnote, and it's glorious.

Zionists: transforming "antisemitism" from something horrible into something honorable since 1948. #Gaza #FreePalestine
— Steven Salaita (@stevesalaita) July 20, 2014

"academic freedom" and "hate speech", my page, and the latter at Leiter's.

Leiter writes a review in the NDPR, "The Harm of Hate Speech"

Jeremy Waldron makes a spirited, if somewhat meandering, case for the legal regulation of "hate speech," one that American scholars in particular would do well to consider. Such regulation is unconstitutional content-based regulation of speech in the U.S., but is common in most other Western democracies. Is there a good reason for the U.S. to be the outlier here? As Waldron notes in passing, in the U.S. "the philosophical arguments about hate speech are knee-jerk, impulsive, and thoughtless", which is at least partly due to confusion about what is at stake. Waldron observes that "hatred is relevant not as the motivation of certain actions, but as a possible effect of certain forms of speech", and thus the real issue is "the predicament of vulnerable people who are subject to hatred directed at their race, ethnicity, or religion"

...Of course, most people are just regurgitators of pablum, vectors of ideological and commercial forces at work in the broader culture, so what they "disclose" is only, in their eyes, a mark of their individuality.

Also my page, on Tushnet

It says something about the decline of this country that a specialist in Middle East Studies writing about Kuwait gives a better defense of free speech than a professor of American constitutional law does writing about The U.S. 

 And of course, Brighouse, against free speech

I would say, in fact, that the first amendment tradition has a terribly distorting effect on American public discussions of free speech.  

...I think there is a very strong case that hateful epithets can be distinguished and treated differently from propositional content, and do not merit protection under “the right to speak what one sees as the truth”.

and Bertram the same

The right frame, in my view, is to think of the state as “we, the people” and to ask what conditions need to be in place for the people, and for each citizen, to play their role in effective self-government. Once you look at things like that then various speech restrictions naturally suggest themselves.

For more by both the above go here (and follow the instructions for sources)

On Salaita, Leiter links approvingly, to this

Wise argues, “What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them.” Of course, this standard is ridiculous: individuals should be free to say personal and “disrespectful” things about others (for example, everyone should be free to say that Wise’s argument here is both stupid and evil, without facing punishment from the respect police). Respect is not a fundamental value of any university, and being “disrespectful” is not an academic crime. But it’s notable that Salaita really didn’t say anything personal about anyone. So here Wise greatly expands the concept, declaring that not only persons but “viewpoints themselves” must be protected from any disrespectful words. I am puzzled as to exactly how a free university could possibly operate when no one is allowed to be disrespectful toward any viewpoint. Presumably, Wise will quickly act to fire anyone who has ever disrespected or demeaned Nazism, terrorism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Since all “viewpoints” are protected, then biology professors must be fired for disrespecting creationism as false, along with any other professor who is found to believe or know anything.

My comments

“Respect is not a fundamental value of any university, and being “disrespectful” is not an academic crime.” 

Salaita: “Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.” 

The post has been linked by a respected academic who agrees with it while also (unmentioned in his link) being a supporter of “hate speech” laws. I won’t offer an opinion on whether or not the quote from Salaita can be classified as hate speech, but I don’t have to because I oppose the laws made to regulate whatever it is. 

The author of this post tries to separate the formal and structural (the integrity of academia etc) from the normative. Not gonna happen. 

The pale of the academic normative is broader than the pale of the common normative, but they shift in tandem. You should leave discussion of academic “freedom” to libertarians and focus on tenure as due process and academic independence—best defined as “once past the post, you’re in”—as better for society than its opposite. Salaita was let in and he followed the rules. Wise hasn’t.

The academy isn't removed from politics; tenure and academic freedom grant those allowed to teach a distance from its consequences. Larry Summers is allowed to say whatever he wants about the intelligence of women. J. Phillip Rushton and Arthur Jensen never lost a job as a result of their opinions on race and IQ. Even John Yoo has a job. Colin McGinn and Peter Ludlow got in trouble for the opposite of yelling "fire" in a crowded building—whispering "pussy" in a private room—but as exceptions to the rule they're of a kind.

Salaita's tweet in context, here.  It takes away somewhat from my use of it as illustration, but since we've gone down the slippery slope from "hate speech" to "trigger words", it still works. As with hate, the trigger is in the mind of the beholder, and if the beholder is prejudged as "victim" and as needing protection, then who or what is the protector? This is where liberal concern becomes a defense of Holly Golightly and Hollies go lightly, the opposite of liberalism.

Arendt, "Zionism Reconsidered"

Not less dangerous and quite in accord with this general trend was the sole new piece of historical philosophy which the Zionists contributed out of their own new experiences; "A nation is a group of people ... held together by a common enemy" (Herzl)-an absurd doctrine containing only this bit of truth: that many Zionists had, indeed, been convinced they were Jews by the enemies of the Jewish people. Thereupon these Zionists concluded that without antisemitism the Jewish people would not have survived in the countries of the Diaspora; and hence they were opposed to any attempt to liquidate antisemitism on a large scale. On the contrary, they declared that our foes, the antisemites, "will be our most reliable friends, the antisemitic countries our allies" (Herzl). The result could only be, of course, an utter confusion in which nobody could distinguish between friend and foe, in which the foe became the friend and the friend the hidden, and therefore all the more dangerous, enemy.

The paradox of needing hate and hate speech to define yourself; the paradox of fascism. The photograph below is a fascist image, and a partial model of the Zionist self-image.

flickr

---
"The pale of the academic normative is broader than the pale of the common normative, but they shift in tandem." Maybe I need to add another circle.