The State Of Nature and The State Contrasted In Alan Bloom’s Closing Of The American Mind

 Original quote From Allan Bloom’s Closing Of The American Mind

….Anarchism ... arises as soon as politics and laws are understood to be repressions, perhaps necessary, but nonetheless repressions of our inclinations rather than perfections of them or modes of satisfying them….

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My Original Question:

Why does anarchism arise from this?

Asking not arguing.

How is law to be understood as perfecting our inclinations or as a mode of satisfying them, when law stops us doing what we’re inclined to do?

I don’t get that.

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Fuller Text Provided:

….The first reaction to the self’s maladaptation to society, its recalcitrance to the rationality of preservation and property, is the attempt to recover the self’s pristine state, to live according to its first inclinations, to “get in touch with one’s feelings,” to live naturally, simply, without society’s artificially generated desires, dependencies, hypocrisies. This side of Rousseau’s thought that arouses nostalgia for nature came to the United States early on, in the life and writings of Thoreau. Recently, joined to many other movements, it came to full flower and found a wide public. Anarchism in one form or another is an expression of this longing, which arises as soon as politics and law are seen to be repressions, perhaps necessary, but nonetheless repressions of our inclinations rather than perfections of them or modes of satisfying them. For the first time in the history of political philosophy, no natural impulse is thought to lead to civil society, or to find satisfaction within it. Yet those who first drew the distinction between nature and society (which obviously means society is of human making, not in any way natural), thought that the preference would immediately be and without hesitation for society. As a matter of fact, the distinction was made in order to emphasize how desirable society is, how fragile man’s existence naturally is, and thus to extinguish those passions based on imagining that protection comes from nature or God, that rebel against civil society. Man, if he is sensible, separates himself from nature and becomes its master and conqueror. This was and still is the predominating belief of liberal democracies, with their peace, gentleness, prosperity, productivity and applied science, particularly medical science….

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My Further Questions And Comments

Something here is just a touch unclear to me, apart from not seeing how here my second question is answered. I do see now how Rousseau’s idealization of the natural man, which rejects political authority and laws, can be seen as anarchic.

I don’t see in this page the answer to my second question, only the assertion that raises it.

Bloom says, I think, Rousseau’s romanticism marks the first rejection in political philosophy of the idea that our natural impulses lead to civil society and our fulfillment within it. 

Those who counter posed the state of nature and the state, meaning the latter is man made not natural, had thought our immediate preference would always be the state and our satisfaction within it. 

The distinction is meant to exemplify our precariousness in nature 

and to drive out those “passions” that have us “rebelling” against our life in the state, which is to say, civil society. 

Sensible men put their stock in the state, detach themselves from nature and master it, “conquer it,” the predominant belief in liberal democracies, with their litany of benignities. 

So two things:

1: My second question still stands: in civil society don’t we repress, suppress our natural drives to conform to its laws and conventions, rather than satisfying them within it?

2: My slight unclarity, is Bloom gently twitting liberal democratic benignity or unreservedly praising it? He seems detached from his description of it, as if mildly mocking it. But maybe I’m mistakenly reading that into it. 

And:

I imagine/remember an answer to my “second question:” our drives are fulfilled and satisfied to the highest order by civilizing them, on the idea of the erotic perfecting itself in our highest actions, say sex ennobled in marriage or our  highest action, doing philosophy.

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Interpreting The Parable Of The Prodigal Son In The Midst Of Mooting Merit v Diversity

 

Here is my interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son inspired by my answering a friend who sees the parable as informing the issue of merit against diversity, the latter accomplished by racial hands up.

The exchange was provoked by these words from Heather Mac Donald:

“Racial preferences have been almost impossible to dislodge because their human costs are usually hidden. College admissions officers don’t inform rejected student applicants that they were turned down to make room for diversity admits. An HR office does not tell job seekers or the company’s own employees that they were not hired or promoted because they would add nothing to the company’s diversity metrics. The rejected applicants may suspect that they didn’t get a desired position because of a racial preference, but they can rarely be 100 percent sure.

The offstage nature of these tradeoffs allows preference proponents to deny that diversity decisions entail a zero-sum calculus. In 2019, a U.S. district court judge upheld Harvard’s racial-admissions preferences after a lengthy trial. In her opinion, Judge Allison Burroughs insisted that race is only a positive factor, and never a negative factor, in Harvard’s admissions process. Such a claim is specious. 

The only reason that institutions implement racial preferences in the first place is that there are not enough qualified applicants among non-Asian minorities to achieve a racially proportionate student body or workforce under a meritocratic selection system. Hiring a diversity candidate under a preference regime almost always means not hiring a more qualified non-diverse candidate. The former’s gain is inevitably the latter’s loss.”

Me: (his comments apparent in the points I answer)

The older son wasn’t necessarily more “capable” if that’s measured by talent. There is nothing in the parable about which son was more talented. It’s just that one did what he was supposed to and the other was a blatant wastrel. And the parable doesn’t say the older son got nothing or nowhere. It says he got all that his father could give him. Its theme isn’t unequal treatment even though the older son may have thought so. It’s redemption, the generosity of grace and forgiveness and the depth of filial love. In fact, the parable as I read it makes no mention of the elder son’s final reaction to his father’s explanation for the celebration of the prodigal’s return:  

“It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”

The parable’s analogue to what HMD asserts about diversity trumping merit is off kilter and betrays a misunderstanding of the story.

Whether both sides, I assume they’re the racially admitted and the more meritorious rejected, can be convinced about the rightness of diversity trumping merit is beside any point. SCOTUS, as I noted, is likely to settle the issue. 

Sweet La-La Land by Robert W. Campbell, Not Noir But Rather Human Black Hole

   

Some choice bits from the end of Sweet La-La Land 

Hooligan went out and gathered up Canaan and Whistler. The two cops walked Whistler back through the alley to the highway, one on each side. It was like escorting a dead man. There was no feeling of life in him. He just shuffled along, staring at the rain falling in front of him as though that were all there would ever be in the world again. The strange persistence of the rain. 

…

They were huddles together on the broken catwalk on the pitted roof, under an evening sky going sulphur yellow form the pollution that hardly ever left the air, like the last two survivors of a city destroyed by nuclear holocaust.

…

“How about Bitsy? Where’s Bitsy?”

“He’s in jail.”

“Whaaat?”

“He done it.”

“Done what?”

“Done it to Mimi on the roof. Later on they proved he killed Moo and that woman from Magdalene House too,” Roach said.

“That lady what came around with the hot chocolate and the big nigger.” (Latter is JoJo)

…

“How could they all come together in the same place at the same time, so that all the terrible things that could happen happen?” Bosco asked, his hand laying on a copy of Oedipus, After Sophocles. “Sometimes you hear about them finding a body somewhere and you think that’s the picture, but it ain’t the picture. It’s just the trailer.”

….

“Hey,” said Bosco, “the worst corner of hell is home sweet home to some poor soul.”

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Finished the book. Hopeless tragedy is the key phrase. As I said, not noir but rather a human black hole.

Systemic Racism, Glenn Loury And Lara Bazelon

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD6aoUCQ21w&ab_channel=Bloggingheads.tv

My response to someone:

I thought this was an interesting exchange though at about, if I’m recalling right, the 46’ mark give or take, right up until the very end they veer off issues of systemic racism and problems with the administration and substance of  American criminal justice. They spend the last 1/3 or so on purely personal issues to both of them, especially Loury, who comes across in much of his previous troubled life as a human train wreck such that one cringes, or at least I cringe, listening to it but can’t turn away.

Anyway, Bazelon’s case for the existence of systemic racism is weak and by and large, or at least often, she conflates it with her critique of the criminal justice system writ large, ie affecting all who come into contact with it regardless of race, white, red, yellow, black and brown. She doesn't seem to realize that her analysis is more class based than race based. 

Her characterization of her essential issue with Loury is whether racism is now vestigial, a relic of the bygone past or whether it is, in her exact phrase, “baked into” laws that are now on the books. The line between the two is blurrier and less stark than she thinks. For vestigial racism means long past systemic racism’s effects continue and are an undeniable factor in present disparities. Loury, as well as McWhorter, would be the first to say that’s so. 

The functional difference between the two is that “baked into”  means that present laws and institutions have in them components of the past that were specifically rooted in institutional racist intention and racist practices. Loury, I infer, denies that that is an apt wholesale characterization of present laws and institutions and practices, while he might, but doesn’t in this conversation, allow that outlier examples of what Bazelon particularizes—namely, the PIG law in Louisiana and the practice of non unanimous juries—may exist.

She in virtually the same breath notes, by the way, that both the laws she cites have been repealed and that progressive criminal justice personnel were involved in her client’s exoneration. 

Functionally for Loury, vestigial racism means the psychological, economic, family dynamic and sociological effects of undeniable past systemic racism, largely de jure undone by the 1964 civil rights legislation and the eventual erasing of persisting pockets of it like red lining. 

For Loury, a problem with vestigial racism is it’s immeasurable as far as conduct and dysfunction go and that it informs a kind of victimhood pathology that blames it for all manner of disparate outcomes including without limitation public school performance, top tier university admission, a standard deviation less on test scores, all manner of indicia of success, staggering overrepresentation in crime and jail and massive out of wedlock births punctuated by absentee fathers. 

He says whatever the immeasurable factor comes to, the rest by and large is community and family dysfunction, which is essentially from where improvement must come. 

Bazelon agrees with some of this as she notes when clarifying what common ground they share. But then her case for “baked into” is weak since so much of it proceeds from just the one example of her unjustly convicted client, as though such travesties haven’t happened and don’t happen regularly to whites as well. Which then goes to my point that she mish-mashes a general critique of the criminal justice system, which is class based, with her notion of baked into systemic racism. That many of the lower classes are black is racial correlation and not racial causation 

Interesting to note that when they discuss why her client had a gun, she defends his criminal conduct—he needs it to sling dope or he’ll get shot; he needs to sling dope to overcome his family’s poverty. 

But she doesn’t deal with the point Heather Mac Donald makes in reviewing an ideologically similar book by University of Chicago sociologist Alice Goffman, a point that others have made as well: why isn’t this criminal acting out typical of most impoverished black youth; why is it that among her client’s cohort it’s only a minority of them, not the majority, that act this way?  This disparity in who acts criminally and who doesn’t devastates the argument that systemic racism is more the cause than individual choice among those similarly situated. 

She also weakens her case from the get go to the extent she agrees with Loury. She agrees to the extent that systemic racism is, in her words, “elasticized” and “overextended.” But isn’t that what systemic racism is, a pervasive, wholesale feature of a society? If it’s not that, then how is it systemic? 

She gets particularly overly-ideological in downplaying the recent upticks in violent crime by saying they’re nowhere near what the numbers were in the nineties. Loury rightly takes exception to that saying that that doesn’t rebut a 30-50% increase in murders and other felonies in big U.S. cities nor that in NYC increasing crime is at the top of its citizens concerns nor that likely the next mayor will be the more law and order ex-cop Eric Adams. Bazelon blames it on media hype but for me in that she comes off as slightly blasé, which is to say, reality hasn’t yet mugged her.

This doesn’t go to systemic racism but she is weak on touting the virtual abrogation of the cash bail laws. Her reason is that the poor can’t come up with the money: poverty being criminalized is her point By the way, this is an example of her noted conflation. 

But doesn’t she have this point backwards? 

Even granting the presumption of innocence, when it comes to bail traditionally the strength of the case is a big factor. The likelihood of flight  and recommission are big factors. So is the financial inducement to stick around by risking forfeiture of what’s put up as bail security. So are ties to the community. So is the seriousness of the offence. 

Thus, if but for bail reform, an arrestee is denied bail, poverty isn’t being criminalized. Rather a preceding crime is being dealt with in the consequence of its perpetration. If rich people can make bail and poor people can’t, is that a reason to let violent felons out pending trial, including ones who’ve already committed a further crime? If everything income inequality touches is to be foregone, we’re on our way to dystopia. Some poor will always be with us. 

As Loury notes, it’s sheer irrebuttable common sense that if charged felons including repeat offenders are out every time before trial, they’ll likely offend again. And in fact they do. 

They get off substance when they began speaking about the politics of all this. 

On Vaccine Hesitancy And Fake News

 Vaccine hesitancy https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/vaccines-konstantin-kisin

My comment to a friend:

Strong piece.

Thanks. 

Does it convince you that vaccine hesitancy is justified?

I know that his explanation for it is his gist rather than justification but I still easily think the hesitation is irrational.

In other words, despite all the skilful narrative of rushes to judgment, supposed experts being wrong, media pile ons, elite condescension, outright deceit and hypocritical special pleading, I still have faith in objectively coming to terms with much of what he strings together, from the Covington kid, to Jussie Smollett, to the emptiness in much of the hysteria and fake news about Trump during his presidency—since his defeat he’s gone totally off the deep end, to the vindicating-of-America trial of Chauvin. The latest minor stir is the undermining of the received narrative about Amy Cooper, the Central Park dog walker with now disclosed undisclosed new facts. So my point is, everything he says is so; he gives voice to a deep ubiquitous problem. But still there come with time objective counterweights that allow us in to help navigate the hysteria, the duplicity and the rushes to judgment. They don’t displace or even solve the problem but they reside alongside it, sometimes outweigh it and give us a fighting chance.

And so, while I get some of the reasons for the hesitancy— it’s overdetermined—I continue easily to think it’s irrational.

My Most Recent Political Realignments

Note to a friend:

So, my politics tend to realign themselves by a threesome of visceral reaction, standing where I sit and a degree of moral principle. 

My second last realignment came with Clinton H’s email imbroglio. She was so high handed, dismissive, prevaricating, hypocritically smug, holier than thou, sanctimonious and ensconced in her own privilege that she disgusted me with her and all elements of elite privilege endemic to Democrat Party politics. So I moved away from her and the Democrats generally insofar as I had a notional say that mattered—I do know I never did. I tended to drift right, was happy—and I was a former #nevertrumper—when she lost, was thrilled to see her writhing in excuses to rationalize her defeat. I became anti anti Trump. I defended him against foaming-at-the-mouth haters. I turned my back on and became revulsed by liberal elite media—CNN, MSNBC, and their personae. I watched more Fox. I started to become more absorbed in certain right wing positions. 

Now I’ve just gone through another visceral sea change brought on by two main triggers.

One is my complete disgust with post-election Trump, his conduct marked by among other things the transcendence of his ego above all considerations, his ego becoming the slave master of nearly all semblance  of norms, which he was willing to trash in service of himself, his lying and false claims, his willingness to torpedo Republican electoral chances by lashing them to his ego driven desire for more limelight and not be seen as a loser, all complemented by an unhealthy dose of Republican subservience to his post-election efforts. When in office all these tendencies in him were muted by the demands and constraints of his office and by his solid accomplishments. He has now vindicated those less-than-hysterical, ie sober, thoughtful, concerns about him and has soiled his legacy. He has cast his post-election shadow back over it.

The other is the issue of vaccination and less so policy approaches to dealing with the virus. The stupidity of the anti vaxxers and their fetishizing individual liberty at the expense of trammelling the public good has likewise disgusted me and has sparked an insight, too long coming, into the irrationality of liberty-extremism. The issue has become for me microcosmic of various other positions held by the right that place individual liberty on so high a pedestal it becomes attenuated by reason of the thin air. 

One sign of my shift is that my wife and I at long last have a political/cultural issue with which we strongly agree.

I’m still put viscerally off by what I despised in Clintonia. And so I have moved I think more solidly to the independent centre, giving more room to what was always latent and nascent in me, the politics of the Third Way. https://www.britannica.com/topic/third-way

Ongoing Note To R On Interpreting Literature

My long held view is that novels, novellas, short stories and dramas project worlds and can be seen as integrated wholes. Lyric poetry is an exception in typically projecting a glimpse of something, say a slice of experience, or some things that make up a singular experience. They too can be seen as integrated wholes. 

Where any genre fails in that, it’s a flaw the verges the work on incoherence. Incoherence is btw to be distinguished from purposeful hence artistically controlled ambiguity or ambivalence typically expressed in a fundamental structure of literary art, paradox and its necessary distinguishing feature, tension, emerging from conflict. 

In Michael Oakeshott’s book, Experience And Its Modes, he argues that we organize events into patterns, see experience as patterned that we to try to see whole. A useful metaphor for the result of this effort is “world.” Worlds are marked or bound by what makes them cohere, to which there is no singular answer. It depends on the world. 

So, continuing my view, it’s insufficient for literary criticism just to note events or sequences of events, a comedic plot or a tragic one. In any good work, any self conscious work, worlds cohere. What makes them cohere is a matter of the work. Could be an angry God, could be evil as metaphysical force in the world, could be contingency, could be something in the depths of human nature. 

Identifying the what and the why gets you to the heart of the work. 

Ideas about what drives events and conduct in any particular work can differ for all the reasons you can imagine, which gives literary criticism and discussion endless richness. 

I have noted that Wellek and Warren see the underlying causes as the transcendent stratum of literature, its metaphysical quality, which they encapsulate as “attitude toward life.” And I’ve noted that Frye called these causes or principles themes, “holding the ‘poem’ together in a simultaneous structure.” 

They are hard to discern and state and argue for clearly. They require hard, disciplined work. They require thinking things through to a resolutIonary conclusion. They demand a searching confrontation with the work, plumbing its depths to get to its essence. 

Criticism and reviews that fall short of accomplishing this do exactly that, fall short. Doing it, or trying to do it, is thematic criticism. It’s an exercise that will most engage students as it’s an exploration of what great writers illuminate in their work as to what life is like. 

I don’t say, as you may think I’m suggesting, that a writer sits down and says, “I’m going to write something that shows the world’s futility.” I don’t prescribe or hold to any particular process or presupposition. I just theorize from what I see as the results.

As for poetry, I don’t ask myself, “Why did the poet choose that word?” There’s an arbitrariness to the words chosen, which means that other words might have done just as well. I rather ask, “What work does this word do in this poem given everything else that’s going on? How does it help lead up to, along with everything else, what makes the whole thing fit together, expressible as an idea or ideas that express the whole, IE, what is the poet saying?”

The question of why a poet chooses a certain word, as opposed to the question that should be asked—what work does the word do in the poem?—strikes me as a non- starter. Who know why? Who cares why? The answer can only be unprovable surmise and speculation. But the answer to the word’s effectiveness in the poem is concrete and specific and textually supportable, ie supported with evidence. 

You continue to speak as though interpretation is like a treasure hunt or something external and detached from the work and imposed upon it, often as not to show how clever one is. And as I keep saying, bad interpretations can be like that but they don’t exhaust the exercise, which at its best is a genuine, good faith effort to come to terms with a work and then go to the world with one’s thoughts in the hope of contributing to and enriching the ongoing discussion. Particularly  when in relation to great works, it’s an especially worthwhile activity.

Finally, people don’t normally read to get at a work’s bottom. Nor need they. People normally read for pleasure and often end up with a specific set of responses that they don’t think through. Nor do they pay attention normally to style and technique. That is all fine as the way things are. What I’m talking about when taught leaves students better able to engage what they read and so enter into closer relation with the art that some of our greatest writers and poets have created. Which makes fine even better. 

To reduce what I’m arguing for to getting the moral of a fable or applying only to didactic works is to fail to grasp my point or is self-consciously to evade it.