Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Long War

VS THE PLASTICISTS:

Comprehensive or Constitutional Politics?: Two broad political inclinations underlie and complicate our political practice and language. (John G. Grove, 5/09/24, Law & Liberty)

Comprehensive politics, therefore, elevates particular substantive outcomes over procedural rules and institutions. Political activity is to be judged by the extent to which aggregate social conditions match the preconceived vision of the Good Society. Procedural norms, constitutions, rights, divisions of power, and the rule of law can easily hinder this pursuit. At best, therefore, they are accorded a secondary status as constraints on the primary activity of politics.

Moreover, comprehensive politics may also transform procedural commitments into ideals to strive after. Democracy (itself a procedural practice for selecting governors) may morph into “Our Democracy”—a package of desired substantive policies and social outcomes that ought to be protected, even against the will of voters. Commitment to a constitution may slip into a pursuit of the never-fully-attained “ideals” or “Spirit” of the Constitution. A belief in equal treatment under law can morph into a quest to create by conscious choice a more comprehensive human equality.

While comprehensive politics starts with a dream of what could be, constitutional politics starts with what is: the actual people, institutions, and authorities of any given society. Rather than focusing on a constructed vision of the whole to be evaluated and adjusted, it sees aggregate social conditions as the byproduct of multiple sources of authority, ones which often pull in different directions. To protect that kind of plural society, governance must also be the product of multiple sources of authority that have found consensus.

Human beings may be capable of changing over time, and such change may come largely from their social circumstances, but those circumstances are so infinitely complex—and the human capacity for understanding so limited—that they cannot be explained by single, purposive causes, or consciously manipulated to attain certain desired ends. The planner, innovator, revolutionary, or counterrevolutionary who attempts to do so may succeed in destroying fragile institutions and destabilizing social order, but he rarely winds up with the society he set out to build.

Constitutional politics, consequently, presents political activity as a process of settlement, and a seeking after consensual order, acceptable to the various parts of society. Politics has neither the ability nor the moral authority to function as the conscious creator and molder of society at large. But it may establish procedures for living peacefully and productively together in a particular place. This notion of political activity allows for a great variety of other nodes of authority to flourish that need not all point one way.

The core Anglospheric insight is that Man is not plastic. You can’t mold him into your preferred shape.

One Economy to Rule Them All

BY THEIR HATRED OF NEOLIBERALISM SHALL YOU KNOW THEM:

A Nobel Polemicist: a review of The Road to Freedom by Joseph Stiglitz (Samuel Gregg, 5/09/24, Law & Liberty)

At this point, I wondered how much Stiglitz has actually read of Hayek and Friedman. I know of no text where they called for rule-free and regulation-free markets. Significantly, there is just one reference in Stiglitz’s footnotes to something authored by Hayek.

Yet one need only open books like The Constitution of Liberty to find Hayek, for example, pointing out that “a functioning market economy presupposes certain activities on the part of the state.” In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek even says that the “wooden insistence on … the principles of laissez-faire” did immense harm to the market liberal cause. So much, then, for unfettered markets.

More generally, anyone who has read the corpus of Hayek’s work knows that he wrote extensively about the laws and legislation best fitted for societies that take justice and rule of law seriously. That is the whole point of Hayek’s mammoth Law, Legislation, and Liberty. Stiglitz himself concedes that books like The Road to Serfdom show that Hayek was “aware of externalities” and “the need for government intervention when there are externalities.” But how can Stiglitz square this concession with his declarations that Hayek was committed to “unfettered markets”? The answer is: he can’t.

In fact, the debate between free marketers and interventionists is not about whether there should be regulation. The argument is really about what is the best way to regulate markets.

Is it through a combination of macroeconomic policies, specific interventions into particular economic sectors, the application of wide-ranging regulatory codes to economic transactions, and ongoing wealth redistributions through large welfare states and progressive taxation? Or: are markets better regulated through protections of property rights, adherence to rule of law, contract enforcement, commonsense health and safety regulations, a basic safety net, stable money, and the dynamic competition that promotes consumer sovereignty over and against vested interests like established businesses and their political allies? This is a key dispute between dirigistes like Stiglitz and those who believe in markets, and Stiglitz’s presentation of the latter’s position is a caricature.

This, however, is dwarfed by Stiglitz’s astonishing claim that the “free and unfettered markets advocated by Hayek and Friedman and so many on the Right have set us on the road of fascism.” I find it hard to believe that Stiglitz does not know that fascist regimes have historically been characterized by widespread regulation, endless interventionism, and corporatism: in short, the opposite of free market economies.

Republican liberty is the impediment to the Left/Right vision.

One Economy to Rule Them All

ALL JOE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

When the Left thought free trade meant peace (Alex Middleton, 5/10/24, The Critic)

The received wisdom, Palen suggests, is that the late-twentieth-century triumph of free-market thinking was a right-wing achievement, with its origins in the interwar decades. This consensus has cracked in the face of challenges from other, newer, equally formidable strands of right-wing anti-globalism. Put simply, the dominant economic cosmologies of our time have been defined by battles within conservatism.

Palen proposes to explode these myths. He says that things look very different if we go back to the 1840s, to Manchester Liberalism and to the political ideologies associated with Richard Cobden. With its overlapping commitments to free trade, peace and anti-imperialism, Cobdenism heralded a century and more of free-trade globalism being led — intellectually — by left-of-centre thinkers.

Socialists, communists and liberals were united by a conviction that free trade could, and would, promote democracy and justice. They also believed that it might produce, on the one hand, the end of war and, on the other, the collapse of the more pernicious imperial projects.

What the book basically wants to communicate is that the international peace movements active between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries were deeply invested in the policy and philosophy of free trade.

Books

EMOTION ALWAYS MISLEADS:

What would Thucydides say?: In constantly reaching for past parallels to explain our peculiar times we miss the real lessons of the master historian (Mark Fisher, 5/07/24, Aeon)

Thucydides was unusual among classical writers in stating directly what he hoped his readers would gain from his work. He would be content, he says, if History of the Peloponnesian War was deemed ‘useful’ by those who wanted ‘to scrutinise what actually happened and would happen again, given the human condition, in the same or similar fashion’ (my translation). The description nevertheless leaves readers wanting. How exactly such knowledge should prove useful is underspecified, and scholars have long disagreed over what Thucydides expected the utility of his text to be.

Most assume that Thucydides tried to offer his reader a type of foreknowledge that could potentially translate into active control over the politico-historical process. Taken to its extreme, this ‘optimistic’ interpretation reads History of the Peloponnesian War as a sort of ‘political systems users’ manual’, as Josiah Ober put it, capable of creating expert political technicians. Recognising regularities in the historical process, it is thought, should lead to predictive capacity, which in turn allows for political mastery. Proceeding in this fashion, Thucydides takes himself to be training master statesmen capable of solving the fundamental problems of political life.

Others detect a more pessimistic outlook in Thucydides’ stated ambition. They suggest that the lessons on offer are insufficient to produce control over events even if they can help the reader detect regularities in the political process. Unexpected events will often upset our expectations, as the plague did in Athens, and the ignorance of non-experts will often disrupt the translation of technical insight into effective policy. This problem will be particularly acute within a democratic context, where a popular eagerness to apply bastardised versions of such insights may even make matters worse. In this interpretation, Thucydides is ‘useful’ to the extent that he can temper the ambitions of those wishing to impose rational order onto political life. The best we can hope for, it seems, is to minimise our self-harm.

At issue between these two interpretive poles is the basic presumption of applied social science: to what extent can the recognition of recurring patterns translate into effective political policy? Yet, Thucydides was not writing social science as we know it. To the extent that his text articulated anything like fundamental laws of political behaviour, it did so through exemplary instances and carefully curated parallelisms. The Peloponnesian War served as a paradigmatic event for Thucydides: a particular instance that revealed general truths. It served this representative role, however, not because it was typical. Rather, it was exemplary because it was uniquely ‘great’. The war would prove useful, in other words, not because of history’s strict repetition, but by the pregnancy of similarity and the reader’s ability to parse analogies effectively.

Thucydides schools his readers in just how difficult such acts of analogical interpretation can be. A series of carefully considered verbal parallels, or what Jacqueline de Romilly has called fils conducteurs (‘guiding threads’), extend through Thucydides’ narrative like a web, ensnaring the reader in a constant and, at times, overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Sometimes, repetitions point towards important explanatory insights. But they also suggest likenesses that can lead the reader astray. Time and again, Thucydides confounds the expectations he has created. Even upon rereading, one can feel an internal tension between what one knows to be the case and what one is nonetheless led to expect will happen. Whether it is your first or your 15th read, you can still catch yourself thinking: this time surely Athens will win.

The evident lesson behind all of this is that we must learn how to choose the right parallels if we are to judge well in politics. But Thucydides also knew that we did not have full control of the analogies that shape our deliberations, especially in public life. Our analogical vocabulary is woven directly into the cultural fabric, a product of the contingencies that shape collective memory. We choose them no more than we choose the language we speak. (Once again, Marx: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’) Some events, such as the Persian Wars in Thucydides’ day or the Second World War in our own, simply loom too large to avoid, and we are easily held captive by the emotional weight of their cultural significance. Thucydides measured this gravitational pull also in terms of ‘greatness’, a concept that he identified closely with the production of collective trauma.

The danger inherent in this, of course, is that emotional resonance is often a poor guide to explanatory power.

All Comedy is Conservative Identitarianism

IDENTITARIANISM CAN NOT BE SAVAGED HARD ENOUGH:

‘It should be satirized’: A Q&A on ideological extremism, identitarian infighting and CanLit conformism – with the Vancouver novelist Patrik Sampler (TARA HENLEY, APR 28, 2024, Lean Out)

TH: Your novel is about a pseudo-Marxist, anti-authoritarian performance art group that implodes … The group undertakes “actions” that are entirely symbolic, totally divorced from material conditions — and really from any political impact. Naked Defiance reflects currents in our contemporary culture, and satirizes them in nuanced and funny ways. Anyone coming from the progressive left, and dismayed with the turn it has taken, will find lots to recognize here. You were writing this novel at the height of the identitarian movement. In Vancouver, where I’m from and you live. As far as I can tell, Vancouver went all in on this. What did you see, during the years that you were writing this, as you were looking around at our culture?

PS: I saw identitarianism ramping up and ramping up. The question in my mind was always: When are we going to reach peak identity? I don’t know when it’s going to stop, but I think there’s starting to be some questioning of it now.

There’s always been a focus on identity in Canadian literature, but then it kept getting even more and more specific over time. Whereas it used to be, “I’m going to write a novel about my identity,” it became even more circumscribed — the parameters for identity kept shrinking and becoming more specific … There started to be some fear that if you questioned this trend, then you were going to be ostracized as a writer. In fact, there are writers who experienced that.

I have always just tried to do my own thing and have tried to ignore it. And maybe even have tried to promote my writing outside of Canada, for that reason. But I think a lot of writers felt that writing what they really wanted to say would be risky.

TH: There’s a moment when your narrator provides his exact lineage, and notes that it corresponds precisely with that of the character he is writing about: 50% Ukrainian, 37.5% Irish, et cetera. This is a send-up of that trend, but it also seems to be a comment on what you’ve referred to as “the anti-literary focus on the person of the author,” something you’ve written about in the past. How do you see that trend impacting the Canadian cultural scene?

PS: I questioned my assessment of how prevalent that mode of thinking is — is it really as bad as people say? — so, I wrote an item about this very extreme focus on identity. And when I was researching it, I went and looked at various publishers’ websites in Canada. Are the author bios really all that focused on this very minute idea of identity? If you look at it objectively, I don’t think most Canadian writers are all in on this. But that kind of a mode of being an author really gets highlighted in a lot of the mainstream places.

Where I think it’s impacting Canadian writing is that I don’t think we’re seeing a lot of progress in CanLit, as a form of literature — as opposed to writing being seen as a kind of a platform for a political notion. The writers who are my heroes, people like Robert Walser and Abe Kobo … Robert Walser said that the role of the author is self-effacement. Whereas now we see this strong idea that your writing has to be connected to who you are as a person. I think that’s really a step backward. And maybe it’s disrespectful of the readers.

TH: How so?

PS: Because I feel that it’s promoting the idea that the writing is so closely connected with the author, that it is the author — and there is really no room for interpretation, or having one’s own take. It’s just a platitude, but Andrei Tarkovsky wrote that “a book read by a thousand different readers is a thousand different books.” I feel strongly that we’re being told quite differently here in Canada, in many cases.

Lincoln Republican Liberty

NOT JUST rEPUBLICAN BUT REPUBLICAN:

Exploring Our Ancient Faith (Lucas Morel, 5/05/24, Public Discourse)

So what did Lincoln mean by “our ancient faith”? In his 1854 speech at Peoria, Illinois, what Guelzo rightly calls “the greatest speech he had yet uttered,” Lincoln identified the Declaration of Independence as the source of America’s ancient faith: “If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” That Lincoln turned the humanity of black people into a rhetorical question made clear his concern that America was at risk of losing its claim to be a free country. Lincoln then added that “according to our ancient faith, the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed.” Only by “re-adopt[ing] the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it,” could the union of American states be “worthy of the saving.”

Lincoln’s nemesis, Stephen Douglas, emphatically disagreed. Quoting Lincoln, Guelzo recounts that Douglas employed the “lullaby” of popular sovereignty to “tranquilize the whole country” into thinking “there would be no more slavery agitation in or out of Congress, and the vexed question would be left entirely to the people of the territories.” Most importantly, Guelzo adds that the “real damage came from the implication that ‘popular sovereignty’ was real democracy, that democracy had no bedrock of principle beyond the mechanics of democratic process.” As committed to democracy as Lincoln was, vox populi, vox Dei was never his mantra the way it was for Douglas. Those, like Douglas, who did not see that the equality principle of the Declaration of Independence included all people regardless of race, essentially taught citizens “that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

Homocentric Universe

TO REITERATE AGAIN:

Why science needs metaphor (Tasneem Zehra Husain, , 18TH APRIL 2024, New Humanist)


If science has a native tongue, it is mathematics. Equations capture, precisely, the relationships among the elements of a system; they allow us to pose questions and calculate answers. Numerically, these answers are precise and unambiguous – but what happens when we want to know what our calculations mean? Well, that is when we revert to our own native tongue: metaphor.

Mathematics is metaphor.

Identitarianism

REACTIONARIES HAVE TO KEEP REACTING:

Is Bari Weiss Embarrassed by the Intellectual Dark Web? (Matt Johnson, May. 4th, 2024, Daily Beast)

However, in the 2018 Times essay, Weiss conceded that audience capture—a phenomenon where public figures are rewarded for producing content that flatters the biases and prejudices of their audiences—“probably helps explain why some people in this group talk constantly about the regressive left but far less about the threat from the right.” Weiss warned of the dangers of aligning with right-wing charlatans who happen to have large platforms. She worried that “cranks, grifters and bigots” might take over the movement.

These concerns turned out to be well-founded.

The IDW name, nowadays, is more of a punchline than a movement—not even used by superfans of its erstwhile members. This is in no small part because many of its core members have devolved into a cadre of virulent MAGA activists, anti-vaxxers, and unhinged conspiracy mongers of all kinds.

The Right exists to amuse normals.

Film/TV

MAY THE TWADDLE BE WITH YOU:

The Birth of Yoda: Manichaeism and the Jedi Religion (Joseph Wilson5/04/24, Voegelin Views)

Jediism now has real-life adherents (whether serious or otherwise) and one modern UK census (2011) revealed that Jedi was the seventh largest religion in that kingdom, dwarfing British Scientology (another so-called “religion” founded by a science-fiction auteur).


In Jediism, world-mythology merges with adventure and fantasy fiction, combining Akira Kurosawa’s Buddhist and samurai themes with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christian allegories. A historical Buddhist master is the most likely model for Yoda. We can only guess which varied influences account for Yoda’s extreme longevity. Biblical Methuselah lived more than 900. Tolkien’s Gandalf lived more than 2000. The historical second-century Buddhist patriarch Nagarjuna lived to more than 700 (according to legend). Padmasambava (Tibet’s “second Buddha”) allegedly dissolved like a Jedi into a rainbow body of light. The oldest attested ending of the oldest attested Christian gospel (the “short” ending of the Gospel according to Mark) depicts Jesus of Nazareth simply disappearing from his tomb with the witnesses running scared.


British Jedis might outnumber Scientologists, but Lucas was not the first savant to forge a universalizing hybrid religion. Yoda’s esoteric roots are ancient. Yoda’s very name may in fact be derived from an obscure Christianization of the name “Bodhisattva” (lit: “Enlightenment Being” a.k.a. one who will attain Buddhahood), distorted in transit to Christian Europe on the trade routes, and preserved among the various Buddhist and Christian scriptures sacred to a different ancient religion: Manichaeism.
Gnosticism and Manichaeism: Religion of Light


Tolkien’s “Catholic myth”, Lord of the Rings, deeply influenced Star Wars. Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf seems to be one of Lucas’s primary models for Obi Wan Kenobi. Paralleling Kenobi’s ill-fated duel with the Sith Lord Vader on the Death Star, Gandalf also died in single combat against an enemy clothed in shadow (the Balrog Durin’s Bane who lived in the Mines of Moria). He was later resurrected and arrived during the crucial battle scene, having been transformed into a luminous white form. His triumphal return to aid the war effort proved decisive at the battle of Helm’s Deep, just as Kenobi’s transcendent Force Ghost proved to be Luke Skywalker’s decisive aid at the Battle of Yavin.


Nonetheless George Lucas’ homage to Tolkien is clearly Gnostic, not Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant. (“Gnostic”, referring to esoteric knowledge, is a somewhat controversial umbrella term for various early Judeo-Christian heresies most of which can be characterized as “anti-materialist”). At the conclusion of Return of the Jedi, the luminous resurrection of three deceased Jedis (Yoda, Obi Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker) differs from mainstream Christianity’s tenet of material/bodily resurrection. It instead conforms closely to Gnosticism’s non-material/spiritual resurrection. The Force Ghost is pure light/energy, not “crude matter.” The overtly Gnostic implications of Jedi resurrection have been known to trouble Christian apologist Star Wars fans. The similarity between Jediism and Gnosticism runs deep.

« Previous Page — Next Page »

You Missed

Music

SONG EXPLODER:

Baseball

WE DID:

Music

GET RHYTHM:

Sport

BEWARE FAILED DADS (profanity alert):

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.