Archive for the Deep Thoughts Category
Disney Hall in LA
I have written two theses on the topic. Published an article that directly deals with the issue. I have also published material that indirectly deals with it. I have read through Kirsteva, Foucault, Haraway, Turkle, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Schrag, Jameson, Kellner, Harvey, van Huyssteen, Marion, Taylor, and on and on. I never once synthesized any clear idea of what it means to be “postmodern” or to form a “postmodern” community.
Perhaps it is because I think that Habermas is correct: postmodernism is a stage in late-modernity that sees many of the critical aspects of modernity taken to their logical end. His perspective, as with Schrag and perhaps even Rorty, is to find a different way of being and acting that does not disolve into postmodern aporias or incommensurability. For Schrag it is through something he called a transversal praxis and for Habermas it is through communicative discourse. Neither of these are postmodern at all, but thoroughly mdoern becuase they are thoroughly critical and still hold to the idea that there is a reality to know apart from and prior to a human engagement with it. In other words, they are pragmatic when answering the problems modernism creates for itself.
My reading of postmodernism is that it is a fun discourse for people who have the resources and time to engage it, but it suffers from a critical anemia when it comes to action. Postmodernism is, as I have read it, primarily a method for deconstructing current forms of knowing. Yet it fails on the ground that it offers no counter method for re-building. Now Mark C. Taylor in Erring tries to offer a synthesis of sorts at the end, yet I still ask myself what that actually looks like. This is not material for the resource poor who are seeking compensation in otherworldly rewards that are non-contingent on the reality in which they live.
My continued problem with various forms of the “emergent” conversation is the focus on “being” postmodern as if we can clearly identify some kind of postmodern identity that is not bound to confusion, fracture, and utter lack of synthesis. This might be nice for narrative deconstruction, but it does not fit well with people who are just trying to get clean water, dealing with the death of a loved one, or who feel alone in the world.
So if anyone can tell me what a postmodern community or a postmodern person looks like, I am all ears. But I think that what you will find is a modern person being modern in the very essense that they are being critical of current structural assumptions of identity and community. For to be critical is to be modern.
“Google is the answer to the problem we didn’t have. It doesn’t tell you what’s interesting or what’s important. There’s still more in the library than there is on Google.”
There are consistent libertarian objections to both Democrat and Republican philosophies of governance. The primary objection is the notion in principle that autonomous individuals have universal self-ownership of property and rights. It is the idea that if I earn the right to possess something, I am the sole owner of that property. This also includes social behaviors such as gambling, marriage, smoking pot, religion, education, etc.
It is not to be confused with the typical understanding of conservatism which masks self-ownership of property (contra socialism) with often severe constraints on social behavior such as marriage, recreational drug use, sexual behavior, etc. Republicanism fails to provide libertarian principles in terms of social behavior, while Democratism, albeit its more limiting role in social behaviors, follows more socialist principles in terms of how wealth is distributed according to how ownership is defined. There, the state and not the individual owner, has the responsibility to distribute wealth acquired by the masses.
I have come to the conclusion that my own political disposition comes closest to equal-opportunity left-libertarianism which maintains a limited role in social behaviors and customs, while it balances limited state interference in the distribution of property and wealth and social responsibility to uphold the common good through equal opportunity to acquire resources for all. What problematizes all forms of libertarianism, however, is how natural resources that are not the property of any agent are fairly distributed.
Equal-opportunity left-libertarianism argues “that one leave enough for others to have an opportunity for well-being that is at least as good as the opportunity for well-being that one obtained in using or appropriating natural resources”. Thus it makes the most sense since it is a disposition that specifically targets those who are resource poor in order to give them a fair opportunity to compete for resources. Not to be confused with a socialist distribution of wealth, however, the question is how can we govern ourselves and maintain the balance between equal opportunity and equal competition to acquire resources among those whose lot in life is not something chosen. That is to say, some are born into environments that are resource rich and others are born into environments that are not as rich or resource poor. How can libertarianism, even left-libertarianism, ensure equal opportunity in the midst of such clear inequities that autonomous choice has nothing to do with? This is where I shall list a couple of key problems.
- In order for equal-opportunity left-libertarianism to work, it requires altruistic voluntary behavior from everyone involved. If one is unwilling to donate an un-equal share of natural resources and property to those who cannot possibly attain even a close share of property, there will always be inequity where the greedy suck up resources, and the resource poor are left with no property of their own.
- A general position of pacifism is needed from all participants in the system. The key is to support constant cooperation of all members of the society where benefits are maximized to everyone. This means that the resource rich are willing to share and resource poor are willing to do the same in order to achieve equilibrium. While the resource rich can balance the field of competition through altruism, the resource poor can donate a certain amount of “sweat-equity” to maintain that property and begin to earn their own share equally.
Therefore, bargains and negotiations need to follow game theory in which cooperation requires self-imposed limits on wealth in order to maximize wealth for everyone. The goal is for all to compete fairly for wealth through cooperation in order to earn fair shares of wealth as autonomous agents rather than enable inequity through government handouts and distributions of wealth. But is this possible without external agents of enforcement (e.g. the state)?
This is an ideal world that I think is quite counter-factual to human behavior in general where resources are rich and some people will, by their lot in life, aggrandize wealth to sustain their own well being at the expense of others. This is why a progressive tax system, not typically supported in principle by any form of libertarianism, is necessary in order to equilibrate competition on some scale. The question is what happens to that funding. Does it go back into the distribution of natural resources so that those with less competitive advantage can now earn their share of property? Or is that wealth put in programs that enable people not to compete fairly through cooperation and thus enable them to acquire an unfair share of wealth?
This is where I argue that the former option is better and welfare is, by its nature a bad thing. A flat tax should stimulate people to take pride in constructing environments where all persons cooperate with each other to maximize benefits and distribution of good and property. What needs to be enforced, however, is a limit on the self-aggrandizement of wealth when people who were once resource poor now suck up as much as they can perpetuating inequity and mitigating the opportunity of others to succeed.
So how can a society enforce equilibrium through cooperation without the state assuming ownership of the property? This is another way of saying that we cannot assume that autonomous agents will give a damn about their moral obligation to their neighbor even though a recognition of moral obligations to others is precisely what is needed for equal-opportunity left-libertarianism to work. That’s where the real debate should be and neither Obama, nor McCain directly asks that question or provides an answer for it.
However, Obama’s idea of equal opportunity maintained through progressive taxes in principle arguably comes closer to it in the end. The current financial situation should be proof enough that we cannot blindly trust the wealthy to donate resources in order to equilibrate the opportunity for the resource poor to compete. Even if this is in dispute, and it should be for obvious reasons, all can agree that the G.W. Bush presidency has been the greatest affront to autonomous liberty, rights, and reason that we should hope never to see again in the history of this nation.
Ben Witherington is beginning a series of stimulating posts called “The Architecture of the Postmodern Mind“.
There are two passages to which I want to call your attention for my comments here, but the post is worth reading in full if that is your cup of tea or if you have no clue what the hell postmodernism is anyway (and I think this also applies to many of the Emergent persuasion as well since the term is often overused in my judgment; an argument you can find here and here).
“Post-modernity, sometimes called After-Modernity neither involves a flight from reason back into faith, nor a rejection of reason in favor of faith, but rather an attempt to get beyond the impasse.”
Three things stick out:
1) The idea that many postmodernisms (I am using the plural here for reasons you will see below) are an “attempt to get beyond the impasse” between reason and faith is not that convincing. It is stronger to say that postmodernisms are actually patterns of thinking that deconstruct foundational rationality. This does not mean that we have to think of anything in terms of faith, only that the dialectic between two foundational poles does not really exist as we once assumed.
2) The article dovetails epistemology with politics in a way that muddles the reality that postmodernism is not some monolithic discourse, but that it is an arena that contains multiple and often conflictual strains of discourse. If we are to link politics with epistemology, it makes sense to look at the interplay of Foucault’s knowledge/power synthesis which is again different than what appears to be the case that Witherington presents.
“Post-moderns are tired of tribalisms of whatever sort. They think that in a world fast becoming a global village, such narrow thinking cannot possibly show the way forward, much less show Jesus’ way forward.”
3) I agree that in theory postmodernism tries to mitigate tribalism and concomitant fideisms, but that in the process, it continually lacks a pragmatic edge that calls knowledge deconstructed this way into action. DeBord and Baudriallard are two poster children for this relative anemia of discourse. The problem with globalism is that even as it conjoins psycho-social, cultural, economic, and political boundaries that were previously unable to be breached, it contains in its processes break off groups that resist its influence. In recent years, the sociology of religion has revealed the de-secularization of the world. In many regards there is a more radical heterogeneity of ideas that react to globalizing forces. It is like looking at one stream flowing in a consistent direction, but that shoots off clearly defined eddies that flow in reverse of it. Globalization fractures boundaries even as it joins them as, I believe, Malcolm Waters has argued.
4) I am not convinced that postmodernism is properly understood as a temporal phenomenon which requires the definitional criteria of “after” modernity. It seems far more plausible to argue that it is a full realization of the inherent flaw within modernity to be self-critical and recursive in an effort to find a foundation with reliable and predictable precision. If reality and the knowledge of it is constructed by so many quanta that escape foundational metaphors to define them, deconstruction has been the method to resolve the ambiguity. It eschews foundations by seeking them out and realizing that they cannot be assumed. This is a thoroughly modern praxis.
5) I am not sure what a “postmodern” is. The association of the term with a specific identity does not make much sense since it is, as I have said, a heterogeneous kind of discourse that by necessity escapes identification, certainly with a person. I do think that Kierkegaard built a valuable bride to understanding a postmodern constitution of the self primarily in the notion that a self is that which is grounded transparently in its Other, namely God. The self is a relational being that is formed in its relationship to God metaphorically as in a Moebius band. The self is constructed in a foundation that by its nature escapes epistemological foundations. Loder and Neidhardt offer a fascinating construction of that notion of the self in The Knight’s Move which Loder clarifies further in The Logic of the Spirit.
As I argued in my Th.M. thesis at Princeton, postmodernism makes room for pragmatism as the foundational principle for knowledge and ethics. This avoids a fideistic reactionary stance that fractures even as it resists relativism that dissolves ultimately into nihilism. As I wrote in 2000:
“Rather than knowledge being conceived in relation to a rigid foundation, there is a move to knowledge being conceived in view of the relationship between things. With the modern epistemology, knowledge of an object is conceived according to the object’s relationship to a formal ground that is necessary and certain. When we remove such a necessary and certain ground and show that it is not necessary and certain we can do one of two things: we can try to find a ground that is necessary and certain as Einstein, or we can be content with the absence of any such ground thus relying solely on the relationship between objects and the relationship we have with those objects as Derrida has explored. It is this latter option that we see operative in thinkers who appeal to postmodernism and more importantly, what we see operative in postmodernity. This epistemological shift is such that The relationship that we have with the thing we relate to is the key for our understanding what it is that we are relating to. Thus, relationality becomes the foundation for knowledge - a flexible foundation that renders our conclusions fallible and tentative.”
As I have told others, I think that Calvin O. Schrag’s argument in The Resources of Rationality is required reading before we being to assert specific instantiations of postmodern thinking in practice since postmodernism in all of its forms seems to render action quite anemic in its wake of deconstruction.
Communication
Misconstrued epistemic assumptions structure interpretations of discourse and can thus infer meaning in a harmful way.
Until these assumptions are tested and deemed to be substantial, avoid reactions that catalyze misdiagnoses of a situation that lend themselves to incendiary and destructive consequences both to the observer and to the situation in question.
Do not create an effect through response until you have understood the cause in such situations; the cause itself may be a synthetic structure of such misconstrued epistemic assumptions.
Ms. Palin had a “summit” with some world leaders yesterday. Did you see it? Of course you didn’t.
CNN, which was the pool network for the event, informed the campaign of its decision. The network was then told a CNN producer would be allowed in the room to act as a media representative, just minutes before the photo op was scheduled to take place. However, print reporters and wire services were not allowed to observe the meeting, as they have been able to do at similar McCain events in the past.
However, photographers were allowed in just long enough to get a snapshot. A cardboard cutout would have probably been enough. Maybe even a good graphic designer with the Photoshop skills to make it seem like an actual meeting.
After 29 seconds observing the meeting, CNN and other photographers covering the meeting were escorted out of the room.
Later, McCain-Palin press representatives chalked up the restrictions to a “mix-up, a miscommunication among staff.” The full pool — a print and wires reporter, along with a television producer — was then allowed in to observe Palin’s meeting with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe for 15-20 seconds.
Now let’s not totally blow this out of proportion. Mr. Obama did do a fair bit of grandstanding on his tour of the world earlier this year. The difference is that at least it appeared to have a bit more substance than a less-than-a-minute-long photo opportunity.
Jean Baudrillard wrote about the notion of the hyper-real some years ago in his book Simularcra and Simulations. In that book he argues that our representations of reality - our symbols, artifacts, ideologies, etc. - no longer represent any correspondence to reality, but only refer to other like symbols. In this way, our cultural productions have no grounding in reality at all, but perpetuate unreality itself. What was once supposed to ground our culture in ideals to develop human culture and the notions of truth, beauty, and goodness in the plight of human being itself are now just fairy tales that implode reality itself. As Baudrillard writes:
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
Here we have a simulacrum of a political agent. She is thus far only an image of a political persona. The reality is that her image construction does not seem to be grounded in the reality of her true self. While many of us know this to be true, many of us also refuse to acknowledge or accept that Sarah Palin is a ruse intended to symbolize something that does not really even exist.
Andrew Sullivan has been posting a series of such fables on The Daily Dish. He boldly argues that Sarah Palin has been lying to the public and this is something that has been endorsed and perpetuated by the McCain campaign. It has been further difficult to vet these narrative inconsistencies with reality since the press has had such short access to her in order to pursue her to differentiate fact from fiction on these issues.
Hence, the choice for Sarah Palin is an image without referent - a simulacrum of an ideal that appeals to a specific brand of voter. She is a brand image and nothing more. A ruse intended to get your business. She is an advertisement for a carnival alchemist who can magically heal your cultural ills with a tonic that has no healing properties at all.
We can allow her to continue wagging the dog, or we can vote for something closer to reality since she is a symbol that has no referent at all. One can only move up the scale from there, because she is an image of where real change bottoms out. Sarah Palin is an imaginary construction. Sarah Palin does not exist.
Just watching the NBC Nightly News (it’s background noise every night if I have to play inside with the boys).
They spoke to both a “destiny expert” and a “master of fate” from China. It’s supposed to be a lucky day or something which is why the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games were scheduled for today. It’s all about the number 8.
I want to know how you land that job.
I can just tell people, “You’re gonna die someday”. There, I am a master of everyone’s fate in the world! Cool. Now I would like my payment in American Dollars rather than Yen please.
And I would have linked to more information on either of those “job titles” or “credentials” but my quickie search did not find anything - fatefully perhaps.
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I get nervous at the Christianity section at Barnes & Noble.
I think there are two reasons.
First, I get nervous that someone will peg me as a “Bible-Banger” out to get the newest text to help me “win souls”. Now this is not often because someone will look at it negatively. Some look at this quite positively. Perhaps this speaks to the assumptions others will make on the negative perspective of being said “Bible-Banger”.
Second, I don’t want to be approached by anyone or hear others talking about what their pastor told them to buy - perhaps in pursuit of being an effective “Bible-Banger”. This is why I never, ever step foot into Christian book stores. Not only have they failed to realize that most of the crap they are selling is crap that confuses Christianity with consumerism, but that the selection is whittled down to a few publishers and titles. And most of the theology in Christian bookstores is crap that whittles Scripture down to a few incontrovertible statements and assumes you are an inerrantist. Of course, I never need to go that far. One look at all the crosses, dolls and junk and I am out the door.
So let me be clear on this: I don’t give a damn what your pastor told you to buy or do last Sunday and I don’t really need to hear about it. I do not want you to approach me and lecture me about religion - ever. It has happened to me before. Just because I am looking at a book by J.I. Packer does not mean that a) I want it or b) that I am looking at it to whittle my faith down to a few incontrovertible statements. So if I tell my wife “Look at this” to a title and we both say, “What a bunch of crap” it likely is, and you were probably not invited to our little party in the aisle. So lay off and keep your dirty thoughts to yourself.
Maybe the real reason is that a lot of Christianity is just embarrassing to me. The devaluation of others who do not think and act just like you is totally contrary to Jesus’ rising from the dead, yet it is assumed to be the only way to go about life. You can’t possibly love your neighbor if your underwear is in a knot over the realization that your neighbor - your Christian neighbor, that - does not relate to Jesus in precisely the same manner as you do.
So if you happen by a Barnes & Noble, and find me looking at a book by Spong and then pick up a book by Hagee, and then The Shack, and then The New Christians, please don’t talk to me or even look at me. I am there to buy something, or go ehhhh, and walk away (as I did with both The Shack and The New Christians) - probably with a coffee in hand.
P.S. Hagee, Meyers, Osteen, and anything supporting the rapture is all utter, deplorable crap anyway so don’t buy it. While I am at it inerrancy is stupid too.
Beliefs are best expressed when they are consistent and make sense with the world.
Atheism makes sense, but is often quite inconsistent.
Fundamentalism often makes little sense, but is very consistent.
Neither atheism nor fundamentalism are therefore very satisfying.
I cannot help but reflect on the often callous and selfish motives of our current political leadership when I read this:
The possibility of indirect expression of respect for the human being is the basis of obligation. Obligation is concerned with the needs in this world of the souls and bodies of human beings, whoever they may be. For each need there is a corresponding obligation; for each obligation, a corresponding need. There is no other kind of obligation, so far as human affairs are concerned.
If there seem to be others, they are either false or else it is only be error that they have not been classed among the obligations mentioned.
And then:
If any power of any kind is in the hands of a man who has not given total power, sincere, and enlightened consent to this obligation such power is misplaced.
If a man has willfully refused to consent, then it is in itself a criminal activity for him to exercise any function, major or minor, public or private, which gives him control over people’s lives. All those who, with knowledge of his mind, have acquiesced in his exercise of the function are accessories to the crime.
And finally:
It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation (”Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations” in Springtstead E. (ed.) 1998). Simone Weil. New York, Orbis. pp. 131-141.)
For Weil this is not just an obligation to feed the physical body with the nourishment it needs to be happy. It is the obligation of all people to practice their obligations to their neighbors. Those obligations are as follows in her book The Need for Roots:
- Order
- Liberty – choice.
- Obedience – consent
- Responsibility – to understand one’s use and relationship to the workings of the whole
- Equality – the same amount of respect and consideration is due every human being
- Hierarchism – a certain devotion to superiors (do not envy)
- Honour – respecting one’s social surroundings, tradition
- Punishment – as a supplementary form of education to re-assert order; not a value of fear
- Freedom of Opinion – a respect for human intelligence
- Security – the soul is not under weight of fear
- Risk – as a stimulant
- Private Property – as an extension of self
- Collective Property – civic cultural ownership
- Truth – mitigate propaganda
Will any of our current leaders both current and prospective see to these obligations? Where do they fall short? How shall we respond if they are not caring for the needs of the soul in this manner?
