A Note On Harvey Mansfield's Manliness

Here's one of the maddening things about Harvey Mansfield's Manliness, which isn't at all a tract: he often says idiosyncratic things. He's a big conservative philosophic brain in Harvard's school of government, steeped in the great books, a prolific writer, totally fluent in a number of languages and revered by his students. He's been called "the smartest guy at Harvard." Unless he's operating by some cryptic code decipherable only to the congregation, some of what he says seems to an ordinary guy like me arbitrary nonsense. A recent example--I'm 4/10ths through his book:

(at 40% on Kindle edition)  ...Nietzsche conflates Socratic reason with Francis Bacon's science; he contends that classical rationalism intended for the *understanding* of things extends seamlessly into modern rationalism aimed at the control of things for the increase of human power....

I get this so far, but have no idea whether Mansfield endorses this or merely gives an account of Nietzsche's thought. If it's the former, I'm struck by his use of "conflates," which suggests a confused lumping together of disparate things. From the "endorses" perspective, this line of thought must be wrong since we can see science as a discrete mode of inquiry into the objective nature of material reality that holds no necessary political agenda and ideally seeks to make no value judgments. 

Science is separable from other rational modes of inquiry, say philosophy, which also try to understand what we think about the world and how we come to think it, and say, applied philosophy, including the social sciences, which seeks to evaluate human issues across a spectrum of concerns, which seeks to improve our lot, and which is inherently normative.

A final note here: we can recognize the desire to understand things, to control, if possible, some of them for human betterment, without succumbing to the illusion Nietzsche diagnosed that everything is subject to discernible laws open to our understanding and control and, so, tameable, subject to our power. That may have been a romantic hope at the beginning of and part way through enlightenment science, but is now understood by most thinking people as a naive humanism. The point is to see both the promise and hope of rationality and deliberation in science and non science while seeing the vast darkness that lies beyond rationality.

Mansfield continues....Theoretical man who believes that nature is comprehensible implies that knowledge is your guide and will make you, nay, all men happy-- and thus paves the way for modern science and for modern socialism...

Again it's unclear to me whether adoption or mere reiteration. From reading his book, I'd put my money on the former, which includes the latter. Anyway, as we see the world today, who is this theoretical man? Who believes that knowledge will make all men happy? And why do any such seers and believers pave the way for modern science and socialism? (Certainly this last assertion is pure Mansfield.)

Again, the confusing use of "conflation" in the first quote makes trouble for me in the second quote. I can see the lineage from the enlightenment to seeing the universe as subject to accessible clock-like mechanical laws to philosophy, say Hegel-the idea of the idea inexorably moving through history, and to applied or materialist philosophy, say Marx and Marxism as "scientific socialism" or "scientific materialism" to a telling conception of "theoretical man," to a belief that knowledge and application of "scientific materialism" will make all men happy-"..each according to his need." 

But, and it's a huge but: how on any view of this:

do we see today the prominence of such theoretical men, save for outlier Marxists here and there? 

(Which isn't to take away from the power of Marx's analysis of material interests as a prime mover of social action, a deep insight separable from his predictive belief in the iron laws of necessary historical development.) 

and an even bigger but: how does the illusion that knowledge will make all men happy, whomever might still believe that, pave the way to modern science? 

There is clearly "better living through chemistry," which comes with destructive trade offs simply in the nature of how science proceeds; but how in the world does modern science get to be essentially characterized by any form of deluded Utopianism, as I read Mansfield to say?

An Argument Against Robert Nozick

So I'm talking to a libertarian friend and I think from looking at some things, I've worked out, actually *learned* is more like it, a deep contradiction in the analysis of Robert Nozick that I'm going to trot out here. 


Either this is a telling argument against libertarianism or I'm missing or mistaking things.


....Larry, I tried this out, with a lot of help along the way, on someone I know. So If you don't mind I want to try a different tack with you, turning on the difference between aptness and legitimacy.


Nozick argues that independents are to be forcibly incorporated into society. Even if their rejection of it is their right, they pose a danger to what they reject (thus on a utilitarian basis decreasing the happiness of those accepting society by increasing their fear.) They can live in society obeying its laws or be dealt with by the monopolizer of force if their rejection leads to law breaking and worse. Since ought entails can, there is no moral duty to do the impossible. On this basis, the state does not lose legitimacy by that forcible incorporation: it is impossible to deal with the independents otherwise. In one way of understanding this, that incorporation comes down to the sheer power of the state compared to the relative powerlessness of the independents. 


Now, to take this one step further, what if a majority in the state want national health insurance. (Getting it increases their happiness.) What position can the minority take who oppose but are perforce required to help fund it through their taxes, or, even more pervasive, the welfare state? Does the state lose its legitimacy by forcing those opposed to support them by making them pay their taxes? Does the reasoning for the forcible incorporation of the independents without sacrificing legitimacy lose its force in relation to forcing dissenters from welfarism without, the argument is, by analogy, losing legitimacy? I'd think that those who oppose welfarism would continue to insist on their opposition but would do so conceding legitimacy. 


So if Nozick is:


as I understand he is, a social contract theorist;


and if he agrees that the basis of social contract theory is consent;


and if he rejects any proposition, as I understand he does, advanced by some that since unanimous consent in any state is impossible the state, any state premised on deep individual pluralism is therefore necessarily illegitimate;


then his notions of consent and legitimacy necessarily brook majorities that hold to policies that he stands fundamentally against.


If so, then what exactly is the core of his notion of  legitimacy, and what does that core do to the illegitimacy of the welfare project you argue against? Arguments pro and con specific policies on the basis of legitimacy run up against the concession of legitimacy to the state even as majority policies breach libertarians' central thesis of deep pluralism not to be trenched upon. And so, finally, arguments against say welfare policy can cite that central thesis, but can't with consistency, I don't think, assert the illegitimacy of that policy. Or can they?


No doubt there are frailties in this reasoning. I'd be happy to see that set out, as you see it...

Thoughts On Unifying Libertarians And Conservatives

Thoughts On Unifying Libertarians And ConservativesMy take on this by Peter Berkowitz's argument for the harmonization of conservatives and libertarians.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/09/15/what_unites_conservatives_128076.html

 What distinguishes say Burkean conservatism from classical liberalism? 

The former wants to go slow--despite the American Revolution--in policy change, be incremental, be concerned about unintended consequences, wants to emphasize traditions for at least two reasons--a presumptive bulwark against radical policy change and the organic continuity of the past into the present, our bonds with out past being the meaning of who we are nationally. 

So on this conception, there is no necessary denigration of government or even the imposition of government in our lives. Rather government working within the imperatives of going slow, being incremental, and respectful of traditions is fine. One could say the emphasis is on the polity as such and not so much on the individual and perhaps harkens to an aristocratic notion of regime, the complete appropriateness of betters ruling lessers. Hence perhaps Berkowitz's shorthand conceptualization of conservatism as virtue. Normatively, tradition yields stability, predictability and so traditional institutions such as, writ large, the state as manifestation of its past and, smaller, the family, the church, local communities, and within those habits of respect, civility, obedience to authority. And other things too.

Classical liberalism is not so concerned with tradition, our organic connection to the past or the nature of the state as such save for what it minimally ought to be. It focuses on the individual. It sees its ideal in individual liberty, in unleashing the potencies of that, of the manifestation of that in the market, entrepreneurial energy, competition, where the role of the state is to set the minimum conditions for allowing that to flourish and to secure it all including securing the state. Decentralization is a watch word here and central planning is anathema as an individual energy killer. More deeply, in this tradition, is a philosophic  commitment to the primacy of the individual as a principled starting point, a natural law commitment to inalienable rights preceding states (which, could be consistent with Burkean conservatism--but I don't know that.) So there is no right in the state to do more than what its minimal role is, which is to safeguard individual liberty and the enterprise it unleashes. Laissez faire, as they taught in grade 10 social studies. And here the shorthand conceptual counterpoint to virtue is liberty. 

I'm uncertain how this all works out in foreign policy. What positions necessarily flow from the starting premises. 

On the social issues side, I can't readily see a harmonization of the two positions. There is no necessary or compelling reason emerging from classical liberalism's starting premises that could be argued to commit it Berkowitz's idea for virtue; and, more, classical liberalism is doctrinally set against aristocratic notions of man and government that for Burke lead to the imperatives of hierarchy, rank, and tradition in the structuring of societies.  

On the law and order side, from the standpoint of criminal law I can see compatibility in criminal law against harming conduct but direct incompatibility on criminalizing non harming but aguably offensive conduct.

On the fiscal policy side, I don't see necessary compatibility or incompatibility but can see tensions between perhaps conservatives' willingness for state regulation to enhance the desiderata of stability and predictability and classical liberals' willingness to tolerate some upheaval, disorder, unpredictability in the unleashing of individual energy. In two words, again, laissez faire. 

Some Thoughts On Michael Eric Dyson's "Think Out Loud"

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122756/think-out-loud-emerging-black-digital-intelligentsia

A few thoughts:

After an interesting start comparing a generation of black intellectuals to the New York intellectuals, including the veering of some from both groups pronouncedly rightwards, Dyson descends to a kind of elaborated baseball cards catalogue of who's prominent these days and who has been, what they've done, with nothing much else, save for some stock comments about the Internet and what modern technology delivers and makes possible. And even in that, as the piece gets increasingly rhapsodic, Dyson stops being self aware of some of the nonsense he's in effect subscribing to:

...The book is no longer exclusively dominant in the realm of black ideas. The black digital intelligentsia flourishes in an epistemic ecology in which the scholarly impulse has been sheared by the cutting edges of new technology and the desire for instant knowledge and commentary on current ideas and events...

So excited is Dyson by the sweep of his way inflated prose--"digital intelligentsia flourishes in an epistemic ecology"--that he can't pause for a moment to note how impoverished it is and what a bane for a culture it is to want "instant knowledge and commentary."

A defensive tone forecasting what's to come is evident pretty early on in this on a past generation of black thinkers:

...We proved that, as with basketball and music, the dominant American thinkers were black. Which brings us to the present...

Paradoxically, the triumphalism, which suggests a continuation of that "dominance," trumpets the defensiveness and foretells a need in Dyson to make outlandish claims, in which, among other things, he assesses mediocrity, competence and better as "brilliance":

....They include, to name only a few, Jamelle Bouie at Slate, Nikole Hannah-Jones at The New York TimesMagazine, Joy Reid at MSNBC, Jamilah Lemieux at Ebony, and the NewRepublic’s Jamil Smith. Brilliant, eloquent, deeply learned writers and thinkers, they contend with the issues of the day, online, on television, wherever they can....

This is like saying the white journalists in the mainstream press or white pundits who appear on television are "brilliant"--surely a  quality to be spoken of sparingly, not indiscriminately as does Dyson--rather than these these white scribblers and talkers being what they are, mediocre, competent and in some instances good and exceptionally good. Dyson's overestimation, fuelled by skin colour, is particularly so in the highlighting of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who a commentator on this thread nails for precisely Coates's  lack of intellectual brilliance. I'd add he's an ok writer, not much more than that. Quoting from what I agree with in the comment:

.....The problem with having Ta-Nehisi Coates as the standard-bearer of the "Emerging Black Intelligentsia" is that he's clearly not exceptionally intelligent...

My abiding criticism of this essay, apart from it being an outlandish catalogue written in inflated  prose, is Dyson's need to claim for black Americans exclusiveness and dominance as truth tellers, thinkers and as measurers of what's right and moral:

...IN 2013, Professor Eddie Glaude, chair of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton, argued  in The New York Times that black intellectuals ought to be “the moral conscience of their societies...

Tyson, instead of blanching at the precious grandiosity of "the moral conscience"--not even just "a moral conscience" will do, welcomes the idea and goes on to say that those he catalogues, who themselves range from the mediocre to the competent to the good and to the very good, are in Dyson's reckoning to a man and woman, as noted, "Brilliant, eloquent, deeply learned." The myth at the foundation of the "Ferguson rebellion"--euphemism for thugs rampaging, burning and looting--"hands up don't shoot," seeing BLM as the cutting edge of something, seeing it and its apologists as "the moral conscience of their societies," eliding BLM's radical distraction from the hard day to day work to improve the conditions of black lives, flying over its illogical conflation of disparate impact as an actuality and "structural racism," these all measure both Dyson's rhapsodic remove from actuality and his flawed skewing in only one ideological direction. For he doesn't engage, or just catalogue, conservative black intellectuals, journalists and media figures. Except for one brief passing mention, noted, he excludes them all from his grandiloquent survey.

The clear inference emerging here is that the foundation for Dyson's overpraise is skin colour. In a nutshell, for Tyson, black is beautiful, necessarily, which is to say, black of an acceptable ideological stripe, is beautiful, necessarily. In a nutshell, for that beauty, Dyson is cheerleader: "Give me a B; Give me an L; Give me an A; Give me a C; Give me a K." Whatta ya' got? Ya got: "...At The Atlantic Coates called Harris-Perry America’s 'foremost public intellectual'...," a spectacularly dumb assertion Dyson affirms.

Short Story: Lester Leaps In aka Heshy Azberg's Canadian Jewish Blues

http://shtetlmontreal.com/2015/08/31/heshys-canadian-jewish-blues/

On Silent Reading

Interesting excerpt on the idea of silent reading, followed by a few comments by me:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122665/silent-reading-doesnt-exist

..............................

...I found parts of this excerpt interesting, other parts puzzlingly discursive. 

I liked the tracing of reading over time from communal and familial to private and solitary. And I liked the descriptions of the dialectic between the reader's inner voice, as the manifestation of the self, and the author's. At times I found Biguenet conflating "silent reading" as a metaphor with it as a phenomenon. And it's just me but I'm not very interested in speculation on the physiology of reading. Other than seeing the fluid interplay between self and writer, as manifest in his text, when reading, I have a clear idea of what silent reading is and that it is indeed silent.

This interested me for among two main reasons:

....So I couldn’t read. My ability to write, though, was undiminished by the psychological trauma of seeing my hometown destroyed. Returning to the city five weeks after the levee collapses, our house uninhabitable, we slept in a daycare center without hot water, where—seated on a twelve-inch-high blue plastic chair with my portable computer resting on a barely taller red plastic table—I wrote fifteen columns for The New York Times...

The first reason is that I've always maintained art provides no solace from afflicting sadness or anxiety. As Biguenet notes, we must be able to subside our selves in order to give ourselves over to another's text. His inability to read after Katrina's devastation is understandable in these terms, even over a long time. Almost by definition, an afflicted self will find no solace in art, I argue, because the afflicted self is the understandably self-consumed self. 

The second reason is the paradox of being able to write but not being able to read as noted as quoted. My guess as to the reason for this is, I'm assuming, writing columns was a job, something that had to be done to meet a deadline and to earn some money, whereas when there was, as I assume, no obligation, no practical need, to read, there is nothing to surmount affliction's block. I can think of times in my life when I was distressed or grieving or heart broken such that art held no sway for me but I could still do my work, which involved reading and writing, among other things. I'd think that If Biguenet was writing columns he could, for example, surmount his affliction enough to proofread them and edit what he wrote.

I imagine against my theory one could cite the instance of writer's block, when the self rebels against sacrificing itself to what's there at hand for any number of reasons. All I can think about that, at the moment, is that writer's block is specific problem within the realm of what one must do, such as writing columns, as opposed to the broad distinction Biguenet describes between being unable to read out of a grieving, afflicted  self and being able to write at the behest of obligation. ...

Planned Parenthood: A Few Thoughts

I want to try to sort out a little some of the issues in the released PP videos.

The controversy is harvesting and selling the partially  formed body parts of legally aborted fetuses.

There are technical issues of not amending abortion procedures to enable harvesting and sale and there are technical issues of non profits profiting beyond cost from the sale of these body parts. 

I want to set those to the side.

The question I want to ask: why the outrage?

From the perspective of pro choicers, which I'm one up to a point, legal abortions in the main don't involve taking a life as such. They deal with an inchoate fetal mass, the parts of which can be put to beneficial, possibly life saving, medical use. 

So is someone eating a salad and drinking wine while discussing either in mercantile terms or in medical--procedural terms lawful harvesting and sale doing something offensive given the context of legal abortions? 

Why? 

When people consensually give up their organs on death or in life for medical purposes, would we be aghast if the legal harvesters and sellers/disposers of these organs speak straightforwardly and without reverence about their medical and transactional processes while eating and drinking? Especially if this less than reverent talk is done in the expectation of privacy. Entrapping people so who act lawfully and think they're off record is outrageous.

I'd think this analogy holds for most legal abortions. I assume the mother has consented to the abortion provider so dealing with the fetal parts. (Absent such consent, I can see there being a different range of ethical arguments flowing from that absence.) If I can consent to what is to be lawfully done for medical good with my removed tonsils, appendix, other organs, whether I'm dead or am alive after surgery, why not consented to dealing with fetal parts? 

What's the difference? 

Of course from the standpoint of those who hold life begins at conception, there's no answering them if their premises are granted.

So the answer to the conflict in arguments flowing from mutually exclusive premises is what the law provides, which generally is an unobstructed right to abort in the first trimester, which right gets grey some time into the second trimester, and which gets further weaker and weaker as the mother moves closer to full term.

For all of that, I can see the outrage for post first trimester abortions, for abortions past the point of fetal viability. Because, then, the tragedy, seen as the clash of two rights, manifest in post first trimester abortions gets acutely joined: the right of a developing baby, a life, so to speak, and the right of a woman over her own body. 

What animates the outrage for post first trimester harvesting and selling is the irreducible sense that a life, a baby, is being killed. It's not the unobjectionable brass tacks, irreverent private discussions about process, medical and financial, as such. It's that talk in the context of that irreducible sense.