D Davies, two comments responding to Jon Pike

I, in fact, don’t think that there are “tragic dilemmas”, if this is to mean anything other than that there are situations in which one wants to have one’s cake but also (tragedia!) to eat it. There are questions of fact, upon which it is possible to be right and to be wrong, and with the perspective of six years, it is actually pretty easy to see who was right and who was wrong. I must confess that all this talk about “tragic dilemmas” looks an awful lot like relativism to me, and I know how much you hate that.
--- 

"However, one mark of crass consequentialism is to ignore the possibility of tragic dilemmas, yes?"

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”.

[I didn't realize at the time how off he was. I should have been much tougher. A tragic dilemma is the choice between food for your children or cancer medicine for your wife.]

My comments Deleted by admin

D2: “Firstly, I still maintain that “tragic dilemma” is exactly as I describe it, and consequentialism is correct here; psychological feelings of regret don’t actually indicate any important underlying moral reality, and as far as I can see, your argument here consists of the epithet “crass” and nothing else.”

That’s a defense of morally logical sociopathy. A good general should not be cavalier about sending 10,000 men to their deaths even if its the logical thing to do. Measure twice, cut once; remember the stakes. He should know the panic and fear of battle not as idea but as memory. And it would do Brad Delong and Dani Rodrik a world of good to work in a factory for a year, not as supervisors but on the line, doing the same thing, making the same motions like clockwork 50 minutes out of every hour 7 hours out of every day of the working week. Sympathetic understanding has a purpose and experience is a heuristic.

None of this is a defense of the Decents, but there’s no reason to be crass. Sometimes you choose to let people die. Sometimes if your oldest friend the junkie is begging you for help for the 12th time, you walk away and leave them to die, or save himself. Or you tell the population of a country that your people may sympathize but the world being what it is, your county can not intervene. On the extreme of sensibility it makes no sense to mourn the lives of those you never had the chance to save because you became a violinist and not a heart surgeon. Playing sad songs won’t help. The opposite of the crass is not the maudlin. Most people going for sainthood are narcissists or adrenaline junkies, but some of them do important work.
 I’m with Conor in #'s 105 and 110
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D2: "A good general should not be cavalier about sending 10,000 men to their deaths even if its the logical thing to do" 

I just don’t agree, stripped of the aesthetic terms like “cavalier”. We judge generals on what they achieve, and at what cost, not on how they felt about it at the time.

(or more comprehensibly, perhaps, you might worry about a general who didn’t emote sufficiently about sending 10,000 people to their deaths, but it would be because you would be worried that he might make a bad decision in another circumstance where it wasn’t the right thing to do[1] . Having an extra moral evaluation of the general based on his subjective feelings being appropriate or not is aesthetics, not ethics).

[1] I think it’s a lot less confusing to say “the right thing to do” when the context is consequentialism – “logical” seems to bring in all sorts of irrelevant implications.

“aesthetics, not ethics.” 
Ethics is the aesthetics of social activity. I posted this next bit in a comment at CT 5 years ago: 

A few years ago I was unlucky enough to get a shard of steel in my eye twice in one year. Both times I went to NY Eye and Ear Hospital to have the splinters removed. The second time the procedure was performed by a resident under the supervision of an attending surgeon. The resident was a young and attractive woman, born in this country. The surgeon was an eastern European immigrant. The young woman was intelligent and professional, but emotionally somewhat blank. She spoke without affect. She did what she needed to and then went to her supervisor to get him to sign off. He asked her if she was sure she’d removed everything. She seemed a little surprised at the question, and he decided to reexamine me himself. “It’s his eye” he reminded her, and then explained that what she assumed to be a rust stain might still contain particles that could cause future damage. He repeated the procedure, and I went home. 

To the attending surgeon I was a person and to the resident I was an idea. When he asked her that question I know he had felt an empathetic shiver for what might happen to me if she had been wrong. How do you measure that shiver? How do you define its worth? How can it be taught?
 That’s not aesthetics.
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To Kevin Donoghue,
 [his comment removed as well]
An actual robot instead of someone who acted like one, would not be morally culpable for the mistake. That’s actually why liberals try to invent mechanisms to solve problems. Harry Brighouse and G.A Cohen both search for ideas that serve the function of removing the weight of moral responsibility. "The problem, for Cohen, is that we lack such technology.” 
I think the problem is that such logic leads to (reinforces) the ethics and aesthetics of the human pseudo-machine. The young doctor’s sensibility, her aesthetic, preceded whatever ideas she had about her proper role. Liberals tend to think in terms of rules and laws rather than obligations, since obligations are sloppy and contradictory, but this leads to an atrophying of the actual sense of obligation. “It’s fine that I’m greedy, the rules keep me in check!” It’s binary; a real machine ethic. And in the long run its numbing to both the imagination and the intellect.
 All totally ancillary to the thread but I think at this point that’s David Kane vs pretty much everyone.
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Quoting H. Brighouse as linked above

"The problem, for Cohen, is that we lack such technology. We should not pretend that we have such a technology, but nor should we pretend that the search for it is futile, or that the lack of it means that the organizing principles of our own society are more appealing than they, in fact, are."

Before such "technology" there needs to be trust. Laws are non-contradictory hard points in a linguistic and social field of contradictory/non-mutually exclusive obligation. Those obligations, not rules of behavior, are primary. Reading "Legitimate Parental Partiality" was a strange experience, in the same way reading Daniel Davies' responses here were. As I wrote above: "To the attending surgeon I was a person and to the resident I was an idea. When he asked her that question I know he had felt an empathetic shiver for what might happen to me if she had been wrong. How do you measure that shiver? How do you define its worth? How can it be taught?"

How do you measure the full function and complexity of intimacy not as idea but as sense? The word does not even appear in the Brighouse's paper. And the opposition 'freedom vs equality' makes no sense to me since its founded on an individualism I find abhorrent. The terms as I was raised to understand them are 'Freedom vs obligation.' To what degree are we constituted as social beings, as in fact a collective? A community of vibrant, dynamic, stability is the result of multiple overlapping, conflicting social obligations, negotiated verbally, silently, intellectually, physically, by adults. This exists first in action, in performance, not in idea. The experience of bonds is not synonymous with the idea of them. If it were we wouldn't need Tolstoy. The young doctor was incapable of performing engaging or even imagining a "thick description" of her own life or her relation to me, her patient. G.A. Cohen allowed himself social relations in his life of master and servant that I would not accept. And he chose to act in such a way so as not to give his children a more complete understanding of this society but a leg up to success in it on its own terms. He rationalized behavior I was raised never to accept. Cohen's actions are the byproduct of his mode of thought, the young doctor's actions likewise. Mode as sensibility and as primary. 

Laws and ideas are the necessary, practical, vulgarization of the complexities of experience. I do not think I've misunderstood Cohen or Brighouse or anyone else in saying they are focusing on the oversimplification and calling it the root.

Also of course on crassness and generals: as I've said often the military is run on an ethic of authoritarian piety not republican virtue. So in a sense it's a general's duty to be crass. And that's why fraternizing -friendship- is forbidden across ranks. Formalized distant relations are an emotional and therefore a practical requirement. An example of a mechanism based on realism not idealism. A military sensibility is a military requirement but needs to be held in check by civilian control. Either way the check on "partiality" is not reason but another and conflicting partiality, either of someone else in an opposing role -cf. prosecution and defense- or in the same person. A fully functioning mature moral agent is the agent of a divided consciousness and a consciousness manifest as a form of individual experience not "understood" as "idea." You could say that to some degree a person in the military is required to be less than a fully functioning moral agent, but at the same time he is or should be required not only to follow civilian command but to respect it. And respect is understanding.
Notes on notes. sloppy.

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2017, a career soldier explains what Oxbridge philosophers cannot. 

So you want to be a career soldier? Good for you. But remember that the longer you stay in uniform, the less you will really understand about the country you protect. Democracy is the antithesis of the military life; it’s chaotic, dishonest, disorganized, and at the same time glorious, exhilarating and free — which you are not.

Smart run-down of the response to the Goldstone report @ Arabist

The results are interesting regarding Ahmadinejad but not entirely unexpected, unless you trust the NY Times, Tehran Bureau, USAID, and the American "Reality Based" community of idiots. The preference for restored diplomatic relations is not surprising at all; I'd be surprised if it were the reverse.





Link from AA

Kehinde Wiley at Deitch, Emory Douglas at The New Museum
The poster matches one from the family archive I gave to MoMA.

Players vs Slackers again. That is, slacker culture as represented by the culture of and around The New Museum and Deitch and players by the black representation of blackness in relation to that. Also popular and commercial culture in relation to self-styled serious culture and entertainment in relation to art, and LA/Miami in relation to New York, or at least Manhattan. From there it gets much more complex and the allegiances twisted since the slackers and the Panthers are defined by a modernist sense of sincerity and seriousness. But the slackers have all the indulgence but none of the risk. They got no skin in the game. Modernism as hope vs Modernism as nostalgia, the latter not even as memory.

What makes Wiley's photographs interesting is the performance of the men. In the one picture where his sensibility is unaccompanied, a reclining nude facing away, all that's left is reference and pretension. In the works face forward it's the faces and then the figures that hold the page, as some actors hold the screen.
Both Wiley and Douglas are overpowered by their collaborators, Wiley perhaps against his plan, but all are overshadowed by something else.

Again elsewhere

The right to curiosity is more important than the right to speech. It's a better more solid foundation to the law, even though it covers the same relation.
But the argument Fish is making, or merely reporting, is more complex than its adherents know. It's not curiosity they're bothered by but specifically "unbounded" curiosity. They would say that curiosity needs to be framed and that they are arguing in defense of a frame. Examining their fears (religious arguments are all based on a concern for community) you can understand their logic. And you can take it even further: isn't all curiosity framed? History re-contextualizes our assumptions, "framing" them better than we could or did. Our grandchildren will see frames where we saw freedom.

And what about that sort of enquiry that engages framing in its processes? Learning the violin is enquiry framed by the cultural knowledge of the instrument. Learning to write "well" requires a form of curiosity about language, about the frame itself. The narcissism of Ayn Rand is evidenced in her lack of interest in the frame and consequently she's a lousy writer. The same arguments, morally simplistic or not, made by a better writer would have made a better book.
Fish is hazy/lazy in his presentation because he's aware of the problem, like the priests, but also doesn't know how to phrase it in a way that would satisfy [his own?] secularism. So I'll do that for him. Is curiosity best represented by the desire to invent new musical instruments, therefore new individual things, marking their maker at least in his own imagination as similarly distinct, or by learning to play any instrument well? Is curiosity best represented by the inventor or the musician? The inventor is the one theologians worry about. The danger of individualism is that it produces a herd of independent minds, each preoccupied with "self-expression," but inarticulate. And if expression is connected to machine knowledge then that articulateness is asocial; the primary relation is between a person and a mechanism, not between one person and another. The problematics are all there in the present and in American history. Observer or inventor? What's the model for secularism in the 21st century?

How do we recognize difference? How do we recognize individuality? If everyone's an individual how can we even compare. Slackers vs Players. Slackers as inarticulate individualists, players as articulate performers, playful conformists. Who the fuck do you think I take more seriously? Individualists are all alike.
So fucking obvious.

Thus the Renaissance conception of humanitas had a two-fold aspect from the outset. The new interest in the human being was based both on a revival of the classical antithesis between humanitas and barbartias, or feritas, and on a survival of the mediaeval antithesis between humanitas and divinitas. When Marsilio Ficino defines man as a “rational soul participating in the intellect of God, but operating in a body,” he defines him as the one being that is both autonomous and finite. And Pico’s famous ‘speech’ ‘On the Dignity of Man’ is anything but a document of paganism. Pico says that God placed man in the center of the universe so that he might be conscious of where he stands, and therefore free to decide ‘where to turn.’ He does not say that man is the center of the universe, not even in the sense commonly attributed to the classical phrase, “man the measure of all things.”

It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

…The humanist, then, rejects authority. But he respects tradition.

Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" in Meaning in the Visual Arts

“Humanism- Most generally any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and optimistic about the powers of unaided human understanding.”
Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

Blackburn goes on to discuss the Renaissance, but not well. He’s wrong on the history, but then history isn’t really his concern. Panofsky was a historian and a secularist. And he was a cosmopolitan. Blackburn is not.

"GalaBiR" is back.

"If the anthropocratic civilization of the Renaissance is headed, as it seems to be, for a 'Middle Ages in reverse'... " Panofsky

Note taking SE:

But Calvino specifically did not offer a thick account of anything. He was a conceptualist, he created a clean model of a thick account. As with Scialabba, a defense of the idea of literature is not literature. Calvino, like Borges, like Kafka, is a writer for model makers, not for writers. As Mann said of Kafka: "Almost too perfect."

The timing as well. "Machines are clean, people are dirty." See below, from yesterday. The proof of literature is in the performance, not the idea. Diderot's Paradox was recommended to me years ago by a French art collector, but I only looked for it recently. My mistake. He's a modeler too, a smart one, but a failed performer. Connect the transition from Calvino's early collection The Watcher and Other Stories, to his later fantasies, and the same from The Bicycle Thief to Miracle in Milan: the modernist/formalist escape from politics, ideology contra ideology. To see the world as a Platonist is to pretend to be outside it, knowing without perception. We only know the ideal through the fiction of its presence. etc. etc. The transition, the narrative arc, from the intellectualism of idea to the intellectualism of thought as activity in context and time, continues apace. It's amusing that every time I make a comment, the person who deletes it, whether Henry F. or Bertram or whoever else, actually drops by for a visit. And some of the other comments on the threads are actually pretty good: struggling to come to terms with the obvious.

Drop Dobbs
It's stupid.

It's wrong because its a mistake; it's attacking the person not the ideas. Better for people to go on his show, or invite him on theirs -Maddow, Olberman- on the condition that he reciprocate. Humiliate him in public. Actually, TV liberals are better than pundits. Maddow has Buchanan on her show. But the people behind Drop Dobbs are also those who write about the right wing without being willing to engage them personally. Right wing sites should be flooded with responses from the nominal left, but they aren't. Every liberal pundit should be demanding debates on any subject at any time, on republican turf. but they don't. Are they afraid of losing? Of catching a contagious disease? If the public faces of the right are intellectual cowards holding opinions without facts. why not force them to fight or run, and show them for what they are?

The liberal elite is more interested in ideas than people. If communism required that everyone join the priesthood, and conservatism is founded on the inevitability of moral failure (and concomitantly its celebration), modern liberalism as idea is founded on the search for rational mechanisms that remove us from moral responsibility entirely, replacing god and language with a logical machine. Machines are clean, people are dirty.

bread and circuses

Duncan Black

There are certain ethical boundaries, mostly obvious, that one doesn't want to cross. Journalists shouldn't be tasked to write puff pieces about major advertisers, for example. But there's nothing wrong with journalists thinking about and being acquainted with what the marketing side thinks sells, either to readers or advertisers. There's nothing wrong with trying to give the people what they want. Now I'm not confident that doing so will necessarily make for a product that I think is better, but I also don't think there's any reason to cling to recently established norms which are neither appealing to readers nor particularly helpful with respect to informing them.

There's something wrong with wanting decisions made for you. There's something wrong with wanting to be told who to vote for by your priest or your newspaper. Mine, from elsewhere:

And in fact technocracy is founded not on adversarialism but collaboration. The contemporary drive for the professionalization of every field of knowledge, and of the press, is founded on collaboration; as if it’s all for the best if we all serve one cause, whichever cause that may be. The principle of divided government is based on the realist assumption that each branch will defend it’s own prerogatives, its own self-interest, and that the result will be dynamic tension. But what if self-interest is founded in servility instead of pride? There’s a logic to that too. Is servility a model of behavior for citizens of a republic?

Successful democracy requires that we as individuals temper our own interests with those of our peers, but not that we cave to them. At the same time it requires that the assumption regarding the interests of the masses (meaning all of us in our vulgarity) is that we're greedy for gossip and dirt: that we want to know what others don't want us to. Successful democracy requires both self-interest in the vulgar sense and personal integrity, which are related but not identical. Integrity is connected with pride, which is not indifference to others but an expression of an interest in how others see you. No society democratic or other can demand integrity, and the press like the academy is now in the position of serving its own self-importance, while reinforcing popular passivity.
Cultivate sophistication and let the serious take care of itself.
As I've said a thousand times, Atrios, serious and unsophisticated, continues in a long line of American know-nothings. But he's stumbling towards something more complex.

The expressions on the faces of the nobles.

Rubens and assistants, Wolf and Fox Hunt, ca. 1615–21, oil on canvas
96 5/8" x 148 1/8" (245.4 x 376.2), Metropolitan Museum, NY

"Morning"
"Hup"
"What's the schedule today?"
"Varnish on Philip IV... More work on the Hippo in #3. And Jan, you're behind on the fox hunt... Jan?"
"He called in. He's sick"
"Oh Jesus, the old man's gonna be pissed. Send someone down to Snyders', maybe he can give us a hand...
NOW!"
"On it."
"...Lazy fuck"

Joshua Reynolds, The Honorable Henry Fane, with Inigo Jones and Charles Blair, 1761-66, 100 1/4" x 142" (254.6 x 360.7) Fane seated between Jones on the left and Blair, standing.

The best British painter is Holbein and the best composer is Handel. The golden age of British painting can't compare with the art of the continental Renaissance. When I ask American art historians for the name of the most important artist in any medium from any period in the English speaking world they never mention Shakespeare, but when I correct them they don't argue. Specialization is myopia.

I've begun to enjoy things I didn't used to: prosaic qualities in painting. I love that I recognize the overfed arrogance in these characters. They're so recognizably British -buffoons, schmucks, both, or something in between: Boris Johnson. I like them but I pay more attention to the women, mostly actresses or similar who married well. And if they're smug or self satisfied they've earned it, one way or another.


Gainsborough, Frances Duncombe, and Grace Dalrymple Elliott (details).
Both at the Frick. The Reynolds is at the Met.

Paradoxe sur le Comédien

As usual, the Republicans lead

"The member of Congress who yelled that the president was a liar during the speech was Rep. Joe Wilson (R) of South Carolina... I can't think of anything like it in recent history."

And if you could we'd all be much better off.

It's not a question of bias or lack of bias but of intelligence and stupidity. The heckler this time is an idiot. A Democratic Representative calling Bush a liar, if he'd later backed it up, would have been doing the right thing and the smart thing.
JMM still believes in the ideal of The Best and the Brightest. He's an expert who hates incompetents. but believes his own lies..

Ideas are not "things"

"Scialabba is mostly talking about literary intellectuals, who don’t overlap all that much with economists."

"The concept of 'civil society' was in the ascendancy after 1989 and was everywhere in the social sciences and political talk by the late 1990s. Livesey’s book argues that the idea has roots in the defeated provincial elites of Scotland and Ireland, as a way for them 'to enjoy liberty without directly participating in the empire’s governance' "

"Civil Society" is not civil society. Oxford is not Sweden: the idea of socialism is not the fact of it. Does the focus on the mean and the mediocre act as reinforcement for the values of the mean and mediocre? If you're a realist about others are you free then to be a realist about yourself? The social sciences should be on guard against the confusion of ideas with facts. Scholars and experts should be willing to ask themselves at any given time what they value, and by and large of course they aren't.

Literature as art is the discussion of values as manifest in actions. That the actions are fictional is irrelevant.

Those who engage culture are always one step behind those who produce it, but at their best they're able to interpret what others only precisely represent. This is the reciprocal relation of artist and critic. Bright people who neither make culture by vocation—since we all do by default—nor choose to follow it, lag behind in understanding both the world and themselves: in a culture of bureaucracy functioning blankly but well. Remember that CT reads Scialabba out of affection and pity. An ex-member of Opus Dei and a fan of Edge.org he's the sort of conflicted romantic bureaucrats feel safe around. He's a melancholic version of themselves. He defends intellectuals who read fiction, not the people who write it.

The idea of socialism is not socialism, the idea of civil society is not civil society, the idea of literature is not literature.

"W. Street"

"W Street was founded to promote meaningful American leadership to end racial conflicts peacefully and diplomatically."

W Street is staffed and advised only by whites.

-"We have to learn to deal with the Blacks even if we don't like them much"
-"We have to learn to deal with the Jews even if we don't like them much"
-"We have to learn to deal with the Arabs even if we don't like them much"

Which of the above was posted on a popular liberal website (later removed without acknowledgment) by a new employee of Media Matters for America?

And again: a pox on both your houses.
Looking for "mechanisms" or fat old men in Hawaiian shirts with degrees in mathematics to manage the habitual méconnaissance of others.

Thinking to the rule is both the founding principle and mirror image of teaching to the test. The weaknesses commonly acknowledged in the latter are all there in the former: unacknowledged. Why?

Addendum to the post before last. [here]
What's really offensive about Brighouse is that he shares his premisses with Thatcher, but he takes them in the opposite direction. She once famously said "there's no such thing as society" and Brighouse would agree, but add that therefore government is all there is to bring moral order to anarchy: outside of written law all is chaos. His reference to a common understanding of the conflict "between the family and equality" reminds me again that academics are now technically expert at manipulating preconceived notions, but willfully devoid of imagination.

If Brighouse would look again at social life itself instead of Rawls' or whomever else's books, he would notice that the conflict is not between family and equality but between obligation to family, obligation to community and beyond that, obligation codified in law to the state. He begins by collapsing family and the individual and then eliminates community altogether.

Brighouse' is the socialism as idea of bookish Public School boys in a country of yobs, which has nothing at all to do with the socialism as fact of Scandinavian moral imperatives commanded first not by law and the state but by opinions and the people at large. The moral/linguistic structure in which Brighouse operates is a direct product of the British class system; and unwilling or unable as he is to contextualize the perceptual roots of his logical fantasies he's clueless. I can't begin to describe how stupid this is. And all in all as far as the British Isles are concerned, if not Stockholm, I'm with the yobs.

Liberal Zionists point approvingly, to Avnery, probably for the first time. Helena Cobban and others, as linked below, do not agree.

Prof. Harry Brighouse, "philosopher," in comment 30 of this post.

....during the run up to the establishment of the NHS, the option of banning private care was considered quite seriously, even by Bevan, and was rejected on several grounds, including that any proposal including it would get smashed by the doctors. The BMA was obviously a key force to making the NHS work, and its acquiesence had to be bought. Bevan famously responded to someone who asked how he was going to silence to opposition of doctors: “We’re going to stuff their mouths with money”.

This (stuffing their mouths with money) is not an option here and now. Nor, obviously, is preventing people from buying private care. (I’m in favour, for various reasons, of allowing people to buy private care, but agree with engels that there are reasons to prohibit it; John is wrong to imply that there is nothing wrong with rich people buying care for themselves—indeed, one thing that is wrong is that they could be buying it, instead, for people who are less well off). What worries me, though, about John’s response to engels, is that his repsonse may prove too much. I don’t think there is a cost-saving and moderately fair option that is consistent with the prevailing US political consensus. All the good options are too foreign, and that is one of the reasons that reasonable reform is almost certainly out of reach.

I've done this before, but HB sets it up perfectly here. Speaking in terms of an ideal of moral action it follows from the above that I shouldn't buy a bunch of grapes for myself without buying another for the homeless man outside the store. Fair enough, but following that ethic to its logical conclusion -and logic in these discussions is the point- I shouldn't cry for the death of my parents without crying for every person with an obit in the paper. My father used to talk with derision about the revolutionary in the Czar's dungeon who worried that he was getting more than his fair share of sunlight (the origin of the story is here) but to Brighouse and his ilk equal concern is equal concern. Read the introduction to "Legitimate Parental Partiality" by Brighouse and Adam Swift [pdf],  and consider the absent terms: "friendship," "intimacy," "love." The piece is synecdochic of its field; as I've said before the liberalism that tries to find or form non-contradictory truths in the world of experience is perverse.

Egalitarians believe that goods should be distributed much more equally than they are at present, but they also recognize that there are principled limits to the pursuit of distributive equality. Fully to realize a fair distribution would involve the sacrifice of other values that properly constrain egalitarian ambitions. Some barriers to the realization of equality reflect the value of respecting prerogatives people have to favor themselves. Even G.A. Cohen, whose egalitarianism is unusually pervasive and demanding, says that:

...only an extreme moral rigorist could deny that every person has a right to pursue self-interest to some reasonable extent (even when that makes things worse than they need to be for badly off people). I do not wish to reject the italicized principle, which affirms what Samuel Scheffler has called an ‘agent-centred prerogative’.....2

It is also widely thought that people have morally weighty prerogatives to act partially toward particular others. Indeed, the permissibility of partial relationships between individuals is a touchstone of liberal – including egalitarian liberal - thinking. David Estlund presses the point against Cohen, developing a series of cases of incentive- demanding motives that result in inequality but draw only on altruistic concerns -- where the other whose interest is being pursued is near and dear to the incentive-demanding agent.3 

These relationships appear inegalitarian in deep ways. The parties to partial relationships may exclude others from the mutual benefits their association yields and have special responsibilities to one another that give them the right, and sometimes the duty, to further one another’s interests in ways that may interrupt equality. Scheffler calls this observation (when made in an appropriately hostile manner) the ‘distributive objection’ to special responsibilities: ‘the problem with such responsibilities is ...that they may confer unfair benefit. ...special responsibilities give the participants in rewarding groups and relationships increased claims to one another’s assistance, while weakening the claims that other people have on them’.4 Indeed, participants in these protected relationships benefit twice over. They enjoy the relationship itself, and they enjoy the claims that it enables them legitimately to make on one another, to the exclusion of those outside the relationship.

The standard terms of opposition are partiality and equality. But partiality is a function of proximity: this is obvious, yes? And intimacy is proximity literally up close. But Brickhouse is incapable of using the terminology of human emotion even to describe its function and therefore its value. Most of us can not love intimately a thousand people. Believe me, it's been tried. But rather than accept and understand the conflict between two powerful "goods" (even the terminology implies commodity) Brighouse following the pack tries to construct an ideal balance. He wants the "right" answer. He wants the "truth." The best way to deal with the facts as opposed to ideas -and here's where Eliot's appreciation of James comes in- would be to describe both intimacy and law as positive and opposed forces. Instead of "partiality" say "friendship" and allow for its authority.

At a certain point it becomes a question not of right or wrong, not of absolutes, but of what we as a community choose to value; the balance itself is less important than how that choice is made. Brickhouse calls himself a philosopher rather than a professor of philosophy because he views philosophy as form of logical argument, and logic is considered close to formal science (so philosophy is more like chemistry than literature). But his logic sees the individual as constrained by community when another logic, equally valid but less reductive, sees the individual by necessity not constrained but engaged, as both member and function of society.  And Brickhouse can't even imagine how this could be so. He's unwilling to see friendship with all its moral weight both as constitutive and destructive of society because he has an ideological commitment to an abstraction reducible both to individual ideas and the idea of the individual. He's so full of shit his eyes are brown.

It's annoying having to listen to all the Kennedy crap. Wiser to bury him without the excess but that's not possible. Reagan, Bush, and even Clinton killed more people than he did, but Kennedy was responsible for the death of an American citizen, a white woman not convicted of a crime; his behavior following was both atrocious and criminal and he got away with it because of his family. All this is very easy to understand, which is why it riles the Republican base.

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Helena Cobban on Avnery and Neve Gordon. And AA on Hobsbawm.

At the Met, after the Frick, I browsed through the catalogue for Marcel Duchamp Étant donnés, and found an image reproduced from Blue Velvet, but I searched the index for "Hitchcock" and found nothing. Beyond stupid, its just embarrassing. A camera is a wooden box with a hole in it to look through and Hitchcock is the archetypal cinematic voyeur/peeping tom.


Duchamp said early on[?] that he dreamt of forcing people to look at his work from only one place and point, I am a camera, indeed. [I'm trying to find an image from one of Hitchcock's early silents.] Lynch has a certain cachet as an experimental filmmaker, and therefore as an "artist." Again, like choosing Vertov over Eisenstein. Duchamp by 1955 especially was an artist in the age of film. He was more than anything a late 19th century artist in the age of film, which explains why he disliked it or at least distrusted it as much as he did. Hitchcock was just on the other side of the same manic/phobic relation to time.

Top: Paolo Veronese, The Choice Between Virtue and Vice, (detail) c. 1580, oil on canvas, Frick Collection, NY. Bottpm: Henri Cartier-Bresson. Alicante (Spain) 1932.

A thought today, at the Frick. I looked up the photograph when I came home and it's even closer than I imagined. You wonder if he was carrying a postcard in his pocket.

Inglourious Basterds, Contradictory impulses each followed one moment and denied the next. Usually his characters are cardboard figures brought close by his attention to the humanity of often less than skillful acting: that's how he's balanced the contradiction between artifice and representation. This time a few are richly drawn and performed, fully human not as actors documented on film but as compelling fiction, beginning with the farmer, and then Shoshana Dreyfus. Melanie Laurent is wonderful and her character is complex and tragic. Christoph Waltz as Landa is a Tarantino cartoon and a great one, but Tarantino indulges so much in his preadolescent Grand Guignol fart jokes that it undermines the tension. He hasn't figured out how to grow up and still do justice to childishness. It was a very difficult movie to watch. My head is still spinning, now mostly in frustration. I knew when I first read the full scenario that he made the movie to have his cake and eat it too, and I was hoping he'd pulled it off. He didn't.

Arabist

Happy Birthday H.P. Lovecraft. I highly recommend the essay on him by the French reactionary writer (and one of my favorites, to be honest – I don't care about his views on Islam) Michel Houellebecq.

The comment made me smile (I don't care about Lovecraft).  It makes a nice counter-example to the American liberal political class and their arguments from predetermined ideas and assumption.

It's good to take the opinions of the opinionated with a grain of salt, but it's better when they find ways to help you do it.  That's El Amrani's understanding of Houellebecq.  It's also there in the self-counsciously haute bourgeois leftism of AbuKhalil. It comes down to an awareness of your own contradictions, even if you'd never admit that awareness in public.

It's impossible for a self-aware adult and anti-Zionist not to know the reality of Jewish suffering, even if he can't defend the choices of the survivors and their descendants. The knowledge that victimizers were once victims can only reinforce the moral opposition to their actions. So it makes sense that AbuKhalil's bluster would never be as shallow as Duncan Black's contempt, nor his contradictions a match to Josh Marshall's hypocrisy.

Polling and Passivity again. Our best and brightest dedicate their lives to finding out what the rest of us think, relieving them of the obligation to examine what they themselves value. Also: Department of the fucking obvious.

"Although art is no longer a part of the religious system, having become autonomous like all other value-systems since the breakup of that all-encompassing system of religion, reinforcing this autonomy with the principle of l'art pour l'art, nonetheless, art even today has set down its own private theology in a series of aesthetic theories, and continues to hold to its highest value-goal, and this, too, continues to hover in the realm of the infinite, be it called "beauty," "harmony" or whatever else. And the ethical demand made of the artist is, as always, to produce "good" works, and only the dilettante and the producer of kitsch (whom we meet here for the first time) focus their work on beauty.

For the esthetic in general as an expression of the supreme ultimate value of a sustem can influence the result of ethical action only secondarily, just as "wealth" is not the main goal but the side effect of individual commercial activity. And "wealth" itself is an irrational concept. It is an almost mystical process, the setting of ethical values: Arising from the irrational, transforming the irrational to the rational, yet nonetheless it is the irrational that radiates from within the resulting form." 

"...religious belief is not required, but at most just that self-evident religio without which there is no desire for knowledge, not even the desire for atheism."

Hermann Broch, "Evil in the Value-System of Art" and "The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age", in Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age

For most of the above you could switch out art for science: Why go to Mars? "Because we need to know." The logical or in art's case formal structuring of a desire which is itself always irrational.

Maybe from now on every time I read Atrios moralize and posture about torture I'll link to this.
Is mediocrity better than it used to be? I don't know.

Is it good that Atrios considers himself a Europhile? is it good that Josh Marshall feels obligated to call himself an "internationalist"?
The discourse of people who imagine their own assumptions about themselves define what they are.
The same arrogance; the same indifference to history (to the facts and the processes) but a little more knowledge: call it progress.

Brian Leiter for the Democracy override dead man's switch.

The arch-technocrat against the troglodytes; as if the failure of democracy weren't as much his responsibility as theirs, or since he considers himself a teacher and a leader much more his responsibility. And unless you're an absolute determinist, it is. By his own logic society like every other fish rots from the head.
---
correction: Leiter sees himself as a member of the elite but specifically not a leader. Technocratic logic as a form of Platonism: an aristocratic interest in true form.

"Personally I am very pessimistic," Miyazaki says. "But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can't help but bless them for a good future. Because I can't tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn't have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making."

This was covered here
It’s called post-humanism, or pre-humanism redux.
What Salmon is referring to is the boy at Starbucks with a coffee bean tattooed on his forearm, a member of the "Barista tribe." 
As I wrote on his page:

It’s the public proclamation of loyalty to a subculture; documenting the need to belong; atomization and the rise of pathologically over-determined imagined communities etc.
 etc. etc. It’s the sociality of baroque individualism.

We now have food geeks as well as science geeks, all with the moral philosophy of Asperger’s patients: so fixated on their mania for [tube amps/Pouilly-Fuissé/Ducati two-stroke engines] that you’d be a fool not to hire them for your [high-end audio store/restaurant/Soho motorcycle salon]. Why be a well rounded adult when you can be an eternal [pre]adolescent and expert, and a happy cog and servant?

"If the anthropocratic civilization of the Renaissance is headed, as it seems to be, for a 'Middle Ages in reverse'... "
Panofsky (1955)
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"They enjoy their anomie as long as they can claim that it's vicarious."
Or they mourn the losses their own logic brought about.

The top image of course is from a movie.

"This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

That Nino, such a stickler for detail.

ration |ˈra sh ən; ˈrā-|
noun
a fixed amount of a commodity officially allowed to each person during a time of shortage, as in wartime : 1918 saw the bread ration reduced on two occasions.
• (usu. rations) an amount of food supplied on a regular basis, esp. to members of the armed forces during a war.
• ( rations) food; provisions : their emergency rations ran out.
• figurative a fixed amount of a particular thing : their daily ration of fresh air.
verb [ trans. ] (usu. be rationed)
allow each person to have only a fixed amount of (a particular commodity) : shoes were rationed from 1943.
• ( ration someone to) allow someone to have only (a fixed amount of a certain commodity) : they were requested to ration themselves to one glass of wine each.
ORIGIN early 18th cent.: from French, from Latin ratio(n-) ‘reckoning, ratio.’

Neither Brain Leiter nor Peter Singer seems to know what the word means They're not alone [Leiter puts it in scare quotes without really questioning the use.] If either of them thought about it a bit they'd see why people worry about the implications. Insurance companies have set amounts they are willing to pay per service and per contract, but there is no "rationing" in Canada, or France, or England: there is no set amount government is willing to pay for any given person over the course of their lives. And the decision to end care is based on current information and common sense -as defined by the people involved- not contract or profit.

Ask why people are upset, don't assume they think about things the same way you do. And if one of you is wrong don't assume its always the non-"expert."

WaPo's Mouthpiece Theater, which was designed as a response to Stewart and Colbert, was the product of a misunderstanding. Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza strained to be subjective because they spend most of their life pretending to be objective. Stewart and Colbert don't try to be objective, it's impossible. They try to be honest.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Heal or No Heal - Medicine Brawl
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

Stewart on CNN in 2000

CALLER: I was wondering, is it hard to make political jokes and not be on, like, either side?
KING: You can't be for either side.
STEWART: No, that's not true I mean I think you -- most people can't hide their political.
KING: I think you're a Democrat, Jon.
STEWART: I think that's probably correct. I think I would say I'm more of a socialist or an independent but, yes, I mean, no one would ever I think watching our show think that, boy, that guy is just leaning so far right.
KING: But you would knock the Democrats...
(CROSSTALK)
STEWART: Oh, sure.

There's also some discussion of judgement and timing, of reading and misreading, of making mistakes before an audience. Performance is empiricism: judging action and reaction, judging the connect and disconnect between ideas and behavior.

Many of the people who ridiculed Milbank and Cillizza have no better understanding of what went wrong than they do.

"I've said a bunch of times that elite journalists oddly cling to authority rather than expertise..."

Geithner is an expert, Summers is an expert, and the people who advised Clinton to "end welfare as we know it" were experts. "The Best and the Brightest" were experts. Know-everythingism is the know-nothingism of the American elite, and the rest of the world is left to cringe, cross their fingers, and pray.

So, continuing from the previous post: Duncan Black's expertise doesn't make him any more curious or observant, just as Josh Marshall's moral seriousness doesn't make him any less a knee-jerk nationalist and racist. Zionism is Garveyism for Jews, but Jews are white enough that it's taken very seriously.

The rightward turn in American economic policy began with Carter, not Reagan. Clinton was to the right of the contemporaneous conservative Prime Minister of Canada and Gingrich complained that Clinton had usurped Republican policies. Some thought should be given to the possibility that the Republican party and base moved to the right because they had no choice: they defined themselves not on policy but opposition. Liberals did somewhat better, defining themselves in terms of social policy not economic policy and allowing at least some logic to their choice to keep the name.

Murdoch as I've pointed out many time by now, gave us both Fox News and The Simpsons. TPM and the rest of new liberal media owes its existence to Fox. If it weren't for Murdoch none of them would have even heard of I.F. Stone. Still, none of them come close.

If our popular political press were as honestly vulgar as our entertainment press we'd be safer, but they take themselves too seriously and put us all at risk. The popular press consider themselves experts, and they are, but their expertise is journalism, and journalism is a trade, nothing more.

Technocracy champions expertise. As a child of academia it's founded on collaboration, not adversarialism: trust the experts to manage others' discord. And the press considers itself our managers while real experts are aghast. Still, American experts as the above makes clear—whatever their protests—are Americans first. And our experts love The Sopranos. They enjoy their anomie as long as they can claim that it's vicarious.

Here's popular left-liberal intellectual Rick Perlstein on the CIA

“The Company” had long exploited the imperative of operational secrecy to avoid accountability for its failures (like neglecting, in 1973, to anticipate Egypt’s invasion of Israel).

In the past, left-liberals worried less about the CIA's failures than its successes.

And here's some tasteful but sophisticated mainstream left-liberalism from 1965, that's no longer mainstream, tasteful, or left-liberal:


Times change.

Sometimes it's just depressing how stupid these people are. The complete lack of capacity for introspection. 

I was going to mention the following yesterday morning, but decided not to. Later in the afternoon I shared an accidental drink and a short conversation with a woman from Seoul, and the discussion drifted to culture and politics. In March 2007, when it was released in the US, Atrios linked twice to the webpage and the NY Times review of the Korean allegorical monster movie The Host: "Because what's the point of blogging if you can't plug stuff that members of your extended family star in." 

The heroes of the movie are burned-out survivors of the student uprising in 1980, considered South Korea's Tiananmen, and the villains of the piece are the US and Jimmy Fucking Carter. Atrios' wife I'm sure is aware of this, and I have to assume she made it clear to him, but maybe no. Or maybe it just didn't interest him much. Either way there's a direct link between his cluelessness or indifference to cultural complexities of any sort and his inability to respond or do more than add to the banalities of Benen and Bartlett.

Briefly:
Thinking about Sasha Baron-Cohen and Woody Allen as Jewish comics and as Zelig. Allen begins visibly a Jew laughing at and with/for Jews. Baron-Cohen's Jewishness is used as secret knowledge; he's invisible, the old anti-Semitic trope, while Jews are the one group he hasn't mocked. Also unlike Allen, he takes his religion very seriously. Allen is egocentric but self-deprecating, if only under strictly controlled circumstances. Baron-Cohen under the same circumstances is moralizing and sadistic.

The American right lies about healthcare like American liberals lie about Palestine. But liars don't bother me.



Lying's not the motherfucking problem, a lack of any sense of irony is the motherfucking problem.
The more I read about G.A. Cohen's life and death, the more it sounds like failure, intellectually if not personally. He began with mechanistically complex oversimplifications and ended in equally earnest melancholy. He was a nice guy. So what? I wouldn't care if his work didn't provide cover for so much lousy politics; and culture is politics. Change takes time, and I'm a determinist so I shouldn't be angry, but I'm not a nice guy. Life made me that way.

And it's not the Marxism that's the motherfucking lousy politics its the academicism; the Marxism was bullshit from the start.
If he didn't begin as a Marxist he wouldn't have ended an "ex-Marxist." Marx isn't the motherfucking problem any more than liars are.
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US and International trailers for Inglorious Basterds.

Conor Foley at CT.
Also D2

Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1943


Considering the imagery –the absurdity and the form of the absurdity– it makes sense. The above doesn't apply to all of Pollock's work but to its origins, to what he tried to do and failed, before doing something that succeeded if only as art, and if it did succeed, only just.

For anyone who doesn't get the reference:

Mystery Science Theater 3000, often shortened to MST3K, is an American cult television comedy series created that ran from 1988 to 1999.
The series features a man and his robot sidekicks who are trapped on a satellite in space by an evil scientist and forced to watch a selection of bad movies, especially (but not initially limited to) science fiction. To keep sane, the man and his robots provide a running commentary on each film, making fun of its flaws and wisecracking their way through each reel. Each film is presented with a superimposition of the man and robots' silhouettes along the bottom of the screen.

Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1943

Regarding discussion of culture and the history of the avant-garde, and anti-historical snobbery: this made me smile. Alastair Macaulay's language is a bit over the top but that's a minor quibble.
The Fine Arts section of the Times has been shrinking over the past decade and the Entertainment section has doubled. A little empiricism goes a long way, and Cunningham was a great fan of Astaire.

VAIL, Colo. — On Sunday evening, after a perfect August day in the Rockies, hummingbirds hovered above the stream that runs beside the path to the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater here. The performance was, after Saturday’s, the second of two International Evenings of Dance organized and introduced by Damian Woetzel, the artistic director of the Vail International Dance Festival. The dancers (some of them European and Asian) had come from all over North and South America.

These evenings (most, not all, of the music was taped) covered a wide span of dance: Brazilian capoeira; Argentine tango; American modern dance from a span of eight decades; and ballet from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Almost anybody would have learned something about dance’s range from watching. Each proved it was not just international caliber — worthy of performance in any of the leading dance capitals — but it also has international significance, with new partnerships and debuts that would please the hearts of fans thousands of miles away. If you watched both evenings, you often saw the same dancers tackling completely different repertory: tonight the Black Swan, tomorrow “Who Cares?”

My particular interest was to see Gabriel Missé, the Argentine tango dancer who so electrified me when he appeared in a single performance in November at Symphony Space in New York. He alone was worth the trip to Vail; his dancing makes me want to apply for the job of dance critic at The Buenos Aires Gazette. A reader advised me last year that Buenos Aires possesses other dancers as remarkable as Mr. Missé; if so, I’m hungry to see them all.

As was the case last year, Mr. Missé partnered the chinny but smoldering and intensely glamorous Natalia Hills; it’s good to see that she is now wearing eyelashes far less colossal, and on Sunday her one-shoulder glittering purple dress, slit to the hip, was a sensation in itself. She and he combine gorgeously. No acrobatic lifts (no lifts at all, if I remember rightly), no high kicks; just two bodies scarcely sundered while dancing in unbroken streams of changing ideas to the music. To watch Ms. Hills twisting rapidly in Mr. Missé’s arms or slowly extending a leg to slide it down the outside of his leg is to feel, again and again, the sensuous and sensual delight of the tango at its truest. ...

Reading or at least reading through Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses. It amazes me that a cultural historian can write from her own tastes without any awareness that that's what they are. Would anyone who wrote a paper describing political machinations and the role of ideology in the world of classical music be taken seriously if s/he claimed that preference for Bach over Vivaldi had no basis in the work itself? Would mockery of that article imply a belief that politics and ideology are nonexistent?

Greenberg had a good eye, and empirically, for a brief period of time, a good sense of what was most compelling in the fine arts. As to the underlying reasons he was wrong from the start. He sensed what and thought he knew why. Caroline Jones has a sense and an argument about the why, in the sense that ideology plays a role, but she follows her preferences regarding art itself as if they didn't matter. She argues that the move towards abstraction in painting was not inevitable, which is absurd. How could figurative hand crafting compete with popular and mechanical media, not only in popularity but in moral authority and force? Is Chaplin no rival to Matisse? She views things in terms of personal ideology rather than impersonal forces but that means as well that she can't imagine Mondrian's appreciation of Pollock as anything but politics. Does that apply to Mondrian's love of Disney's animation as well?

To understand Greenberg you have to understood what he got right as well as what he got wrong. He may have attacked O'Keeffe for her fixation on "hygiene and scatology" but he barely dealt with Duchamp. Why not attack him in the same way? Jones defends O'Keeffe as ideology not as art and in doing so is unable to describe either. O'Keeffe's work is poeticized and flabby. She's not taken very seriously beyond her cult, and she doesn't deserve to be. But to make things more complex, and more interesting, the 'source'  of Duchamp's Fountain may have been a woman. [later refuted]

On health care: as usual the liberal quasi-left is flummoxed by the activist right. You can't argue with irrationalism but you can undermine its position in the minds of its adherents. Liberals would be better defenders of liberalism if they knew what it was they were defending.

Liberals are so convinced of their own rationality that they can't see how much of it is rhetoric, and how much of that is hollow. American liberals have been moving slowly towards sympathy with the Palestinians, but given the facts of the situation over the past 60 years why was this (slow) motion even necessary? 'Reason' obviously isn't reason enough.

I'm linking to this even though the rhetoric is stupid, simplistic, and self-indulgent. My comments have been removed. What the post describes is fascism; unlike Josh Marshall I have no problem admitting that because unlike Josh Marshall I'm not even tempted to defend it. But the author of the post is a bit of a racist and I won't defend that either. The Jews are a people, just as the Roma are a people. And the Jews are Semites. But I wouldn't defend the expulsion of three quarters of a million people from northern India to give the Roma a country of their own. That's the point. And I would never say "The [X,Y, or Z] are a generous people." But yes, of course a bi-national state is the only moral choice, while here at least, liberals are happy to defend a logic somewhere between Garveyism and the dream of Jorg Haider, as long as its dreamer is a Jew. And in Israel even Uri Avnery wants Jews to live alone.

Sansho Dayu (Sansho the Bailiff), 1954, Kenji Mizoguchi. The first shot.

"But I don’t think I’m alone among my cohort in the belief that John Hughes was our Godard, the filmmaker who crystallized our attitudes and anxieties with just the right blend of teasing and sympathy." Yes, you are alone in thinking that John Hughes is "your" Godard. This like saying that Larry King is "your" Foucault. Give me a...potato.

Back to Cohen, briefly. He begins his Tanner Lecture with a discussion of "egalitarians" using hypothetical examples of their arguments and referring to the debate between "freedom" and "equality." So a supposed leftist, who later cedes at least tacitly the empirical ground to Thatcher, begins by ceding reason to the logic of liberal individualism. By any measure the common functional counterweight to freedom as documented in human behavior is not equality but "obligation." But again most Anglo-American academic radicalism, like most academic political thought, like most people's closely held assumptions, can be described fairly as the habitual attempt to justify the holders' preexisting habits and general beliefs. It's safe to say that Cohen was an individualist, so the prime mover, the primary element in his argument was not a collective understanding, language or history or any other of the forms without which the individual is unrecognizable, but the individual actor himself. You can't institutionalize self-awareness. When it isn't considered a proper goal of an active mind, it becomes harder and harder even to imagine what it is. Before tossing out my old copies of the Journal of Philosophy I dug out an essay by Cohen responding to critics of "Karl Marx's Theory of History" (the book) which he by designation treats as identical to the thing itself. Did he add the subtitle "a defense" in the later edition? That sort of rhetorical de-historicizing of his own effort is par for the course. It's clear reading the essay that he's a brilliant engineer of imaginary logical machines; debating accusations of circularity and the social vs asocial and relating statements such as "There is an autonomous tendency of the productive forces to develop" to a child's 'tendency' to grow but not to grow 'autonomously.' Smartly done but nothing more. Reminiscences here and here. He seems to slide from a passive acceptance of historical determinism, which I take as an honorable position but not, passivity being what it is, a politically activist one, and vague but equally passive hope.

Late this past April, Jerry and Michele travelled to India to visit Sarah, Jerry's "ultraspiritual Hinduizing daughter," as he put it. In an email that Jerry sent the day before they departed, he mentioned "[his] journey from parentally induced anti-religionism to anti-anti-religionism to my current pretty pro-religious condition in which spiritual things keep on happening to me." What spiritual things? Well, "like sitting in a subway train and looking at the faces and a voice inside me--not me, exactly, but in me--says: They are all suffering emissaries of God. And I don't smirk."

I suppose I should be kinder but after 20 years of trying and failing to have conversations on all these subjects I'm beyond it.

Shafiq al-Hout, who has died aged 77 in Beirut, was a founding member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), its representative in Lebanon and a larger-than-life figure who championed the Palestinians' right of return to their homeland and a unified, democratic state there for Muslims, Jews and Christians. He was also a strong advocate of armed resistance.

Al-Hout has died a disappointed and frustrated man, his life's work, for the foreseeable future, buried in a divided and moribund PLO and a Palestinian national movement in the worst straits in its 50-year history.

He once wrote: "If I were asked after all these years, after that evil day I was wrenched from Palestine, if I remained convinced of my right to return, I would never hesitate to say 'yes'. It is not just that I will return to Palestine, but Palestine will return to me and to what it once was." He died still believing that, but the past 15 or so years gave him strong reason to doubt that his dream would be realised soon.

He was twice a member of the PLO executive, before Arafat took over from Ahmed Shukairy, from 1966 to 1968, and – appointed by Arafat, who wanted his antagonistic but admired friend inside the tent – from 1991 to 1993. Al-Hout left the executive over what he, like many, regarded as the disaster of the Arafat-orchestrated PLO recognition of Israel under the Oslo accords, and the movement's effective return to the occupied territories under the control and aegis of Israel...

In that great division in the Palestinian movement between the "outside" – the diaspora of the refugee camps and the millions of exiles worldwide – and the "inside"– the Palestinian authority and its constituents – Al-Hout was a devout outsider. He believed that all of Palestine belonged to all Palestinians, in one state. In later years, he remained a member of the Palestine National Council, the parliament-in-exile, but stayed out of politics, writing his memoirs, spreading the word in his articulate and forceful way, in that familiar and formidable deep smoker's growl, usually alongside a rapidly diminishing bottle of Black Label whisky. He viewed recent Palestinian developments with dejection and pessimism, though never despair.

According to liberal thinkers, Scandinavian countries should have drowned in the current economic crisis with their bloated public sectors and a nanny-state mentality that stifles individual creativity.

But the opposite has happened. Sweden, Denmark and Norway, where many people pay 50% of their income in taxes – with some even paying 60% – are coping better than most, in particular better than Britain.

"The outlook for these countries is good," says Christian Ketels, an economist at the Harvard Business School and the Stockholm School of Economics. "They are going to return to normal quicker, and in better shape, than everybody else."

I've rewritten this post. Previously it began with this: "Crooked Timber mourns Jerry Cohen who more than anyone else apparently made it intellectually and also morally respectable for Oxbridge left/liberals to imagine an actually existing Scandinavia." I tossed that off. It was glib and cruel  But actually not cruel enough, because in many ways he did the opposite, making it not easier but harder for Anglo-American college professors at least to come to terms with the reality of Scandinavian economic culture. In the Tanner Lecture (linked below) Cohen begins by bypassing a discussion of the economic logic of Thatcherism to focus on the moral logic of Rawls [see page 272] ceding the empirical and practical and arguing the rationalist and ideal. The argument is an object lesson in academic perversity. I'll continue this later; the rest of the post below is unchanged.

Meanwhile leftist-conservative-intellectual George Scialabba extemporizes on Arthur C. Clarke, also apparently a favorite of Michael Berube.

In one of the posts about Scialabba someone goes on about the 60s and hippies and the rise of inarticulateness and bad writing. As if Cohen weren't also an example. If Scialabba were less interested in encomiums, he'd bring up his hero Dwight Macdonald on academic language. But he's the technocrats' favorite rebel because he's a romantic and as such doesn't threaten them. They're condescending to him and he's eating it up.

Related: I'm curious about Raymond Geuss.
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G.A. Cohen: "Incentives, Inequality, and Community" PDF

My own socialist-egalitarian position was nicely articulated by John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy. Contrasting equal payment with incentive-style payment according to product (“work done”), Mill said that the first

appeals to a higher standard of justice, and is adapted to a much higher moral condition of human nature. The proportioning of remuneration to work done is really just, only in so far as the more or less of the work is a matter of choice; when it depends on natural difference of strength or capacity, this principle of remuneration is in itself an injustice: it is giving to those who have; assigning most to those who are already most favoured by nature. Considered, however, as a compromise with the selfish type of character formed by the present standard of morality, and fostered by the existing social institutions, it is highly expedient; and until education shall have been entirely regenerated, is far more likely to prove immediately successful, than an attempt at a higher

Rawls’s lax application of his different[sic] principle means “giving to those who have.” He presents the incentive policy as a feature of the just society, whereas it is in fact, and as Mill says, just “highly expedient” in society as we know it, a sober “compromise with the selfish type of character” formed by capitalism.63 Philosophers in search of justice should not be content with an expedient compromise. To call expediency justice goes against the regeneration to which Mill looked forward at the end of this fine passage.

Sometimes it's good to be reminded just how stupid Rawls was, and how strong the popular association has become of self-interest and free inquiry [of greed as curiosity and therefore somehow noble] that someone has to spend this much of his time, most of a lifetime, to point out the obvious.
And in the end Cohen still defended sending the kids to prep school; status-seeking and the avoidance of children's embarrassment among their "peers" being more important than an education in the ways of the world.
The rigorously mediocre rationalist criticize the grandly mediocre for sloppy reasoning.

Actions, as decisions in the world, document ideas. In some fields actions outside the field are irrelevant. Philosophy's not one of them (which is why I prefer history).
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Reading and listening to Geuss. Nice to find a professional making my old argument for a history of Justice before a theory of it.

Lemmy (embedding is disabled)
"You came from a fairly sort of middle class background, didn't you? How come you've turned out like this?"
"This is middle class"
and again
and again

On Hawkwind: "A bit more violent than Brahms but that's what it is."

"She was a bookbinder by profession, and then she had an uncontrollable urge one night to take all her clothes off and paint herself blue. Which was probably a throwback to the Roman invasion of Britain -- you think 'woad,' y'know?..."