The approach that is being taken on this subject seems both morally and tactically wrong.
Tactically, it seems to me that renewed skepticism in theory won\’t be of much help. It will produce more interest in the theorists, without producing any in the theories. That\’s because the cash value of a theory is in the loyalty it produces among reasonable people. This is accomplished by making one\’s theories understandable. Sadly, this is not a goal that many theorists share.
Morally, it seems wrong to be in the business of \”generating interest\”. Theory, if it is sound, should have intrinsic value. Theory ought to be accessible to those who are curious, but there\’s no need for grandstanding.
my efforts on a cultural theory of the HUMANE CONDITION skids away from \”theory\” and embraces concerns of paradigm and praxis….. it is praxis where we will exercise our wit and wisdom, and if we are forunate in our wanderings and wonderings, we will find some sketchy paradigms…
An excellent piece. Incidentally, the cultishness inherent in \”theory\” was brilliantly dissected by Erasmus. So it goes way back. It seems to be related to people\’s need to be seem as deeper, more profound – and hence higher, more important – that those around them. Erasmus detested it, and offered a diagnosis that remains pertinent.
First of all, it\’s impossible to discuss with everyone about high Culture.
It\’s necessary to be part of the high society to understand what is this!
You must read about Nietzche and you will understand what this visionary man said about the western world would become.
When we see in nowadays the hip hop culture dominating the USA and some people like \”Eminen\” I think that we will have the same opinion about the future of the world that Nietzche discovered.
The greek and the romans produced a sofisticated world that do not exist more and we are obligate to heard something like \”Eminen\’ s music\”.
article: \”Moratorium about Nietzche\” (intellectuals\’ opinig).
Excuse me, I am sure that I am not the right people to discuss about Nietzche, because I did not read every book of Nietzche but, it\’s very difficult to understand Nietzche because he weren\’t so rational in his analisys about the world.
Probably, Nietzche were a romantic and visionary at the same time, that saw, so many problems in the western world created by the christianism (not by the Lord Christ but by the christian culture and religion).
Nieztche probably wouldn\’t be romantic about the possibility of western democracies live side by side with the non democratic countries, that are the majority governments on the earth like in the African continent or another regions.
Probably Nietzche believed that it\’s necessary the use of power in the international relations because it\’s not possible to have a task about conflicts between democracies and dictatorships.
I think too, that Nietzche didn\’t belive in the possibility of rational politics choose in so many situations like terrorism.
The Stronger government should be the Nietzche response to the \”terror\”.
I am SO GLAD that Nick Cohen found the time, and had the integrity, to write his splendid review-essay on Paul BERMAN\’s Terror and Liberalism. It is about time that those of us of the \”thinking world\” woke up to the fact that much of what we imbibed in our early years was honestly (Orwell would say \”decently\”) intended; but was profoundly mistaken. The burden of Paul Berman\’s excellent and timely (I hope!) book is precisely that the road to Hell is a primrose path of \”good intentions\” — and that among those \”good intentions\” was the refusal to credit the vile relationship between on the one hand the Baathist regimes (of Syria as well as Irak) and their apparent theological and political opposites Al Ichwan-al- musslameen (The Muslim Brotherhood).
The strictly Fascist roots of BOTH these movements should oblige \”liberal leftists\” to revise their all-too-hasty acceptance of \”multiculturalism\”. (Incidentally, those finding it \”unfair\” or \”racist\” to state such things, should ask themselves a few serious questions of realpolitik — e.g. just WHERE did all those highly-trained torturers of the S.S. and Gestapo go, apart from South America, after the Second World War?? Which countries needed highly-trained \”secret police\” to maintain the absolute power of their dictatorships and which — just by the way, loathed the Jews — ?? Try Syria, try Irak, try Egypt — Nasser\’s state police was virtually run by former members of the German torturing elite.)
You cannot argue or \”come to terms with\” or \”reach a compromise\” with Fascist political and theological mentalities that have no place in a civilized society. The bitter irony of poor deluded Chamberlain\’s \”I have in my hands a piece of paper signed by Herr Hitler\” and the other travesties of \”peace in our time\” are as nothing compared with our present predicament today where a world-wide effort interconnected by \”free-lancing\” networks of Islamist Fascist organizations is daily using the technological achievements of the democratic West to attempt to bring about its downfall.
If there is \”Globalisation\” today — it is a globalisation of multiple atrocities taught, or indoctrinated, in the madressas of Pakistan and, until very recently tolerated in the name of \”Free Speech\” by many Western governments. Let us hope that the Wake-Up call of Berman\’s book is heard – and not merely by the former \”liberals\” (who are — innocently — partly responsible for bringing us to this pass!).
Robert WILCOCKS, Professor Emeritus of French Literature, University of Alberta, Canada.
re: \’Political Islam in the heart of secular Europe\’
I understand and agree with many of the basic ideologies raised in this article pertaining to the value of secularism in a world where the political and the religous are so intertwined that they have become synonymous. However, are we not encouraging more fundamentalism, more reactionary fever by further subjugating the rights of certain individuals. To illustrate my opinion, I refer to the case (as mentioned in the previous article), of the decision by secular governments in France to ban the wearing of religious symbols within schools.
The first thing that needs to be understood is that the only people who stand to be truely affected by such a law, are the more traditional practioners of religion. Those who wear the turbans, the crosses, the yumulke or the veil. Whilst I have spent the majority of my life as an athiest living in a seemingly \”secular\” Australia, I understand the feelings of persecution and further alienation that this would lead to. Feelings that as we all know are the breeding ground for indivuals such as the \”home grown London bombers\” who recently attacked the rail and bus network.
Is it so hard for the rest of us to comprehend the importance of such symbolic objects and garments to individuals? It is not the clothing, the veil, the jewelrey of an individual that will set him or her apart from society, that will make him or her take arms. It is opression, rather, a lack of sympathy and understanding of another\’s background and more to the point it is anything that perpetuates a fear of difference.
Your Recommended Reading list fails to include a book that is more relevant to the topic of moral relativism and more carefully argued than the three you have included. I refer to \”Morality and Cultural Differences\” (Oxford University Press, 1999) by John W. Cook (yours truly). The theme of the book is in general sympathy with your essay, but it presents the case in greater detail and shows how to avoid moral scepticism. It also addresses in great detail the (false) claim that anthropologists have proven that moral relativism is true.
The article \”One Man\’s Fantasy\”, to which you linked as \”The Coerciveness of \’Family Values\’\” was unintentionally illuminating:
Two excerpts:
1) To be fair, the report claims to be an update of Daniel Patrick Moynihan\’s 1965 essay on \’\’The Negro Family\” in which he prophesied that weakening family bonds, and, especially, absent black men were dooming a generation to poverty and worse. Black intellectuals pilloried Moynihan at the time, and he spent years deflecting charges that his sweeping judgments amounted to intellectualized racism.
Forty years later, many of his critics believe he saw the future more clearly than they did. \’\’This guy was actually calling for social policies that would focus on the black family, and he was impaled for it,\” Rivers told me yesterday. \’\’The chickens have all come home to roost.\”
2) During one of the gay-marriage debates on Beacon Hill, a friend who is raising a child with a same-sex partner asked me a memorable question: \”Why do black ministers think my family undermines their families? Telling people how to live is what preachers do, but why does their vision of family have to demonize everyone else?\”
Re \”How to Make a Revolution in Historical Linguistics\”
This article is peculiar in that it lacks any examples of he sort of thing it implicitly criticises. Perhaps Merlijn is afraid of being sued.
Anyway , regarding this sentence:
\”To help you on your way – suggestions for modern languages might be Irish, Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Basque and Hopi\”, I would like to know why these languages have been singled out, particularly Irish.
PaulP – If I am to be sued, the courtroom would be pretty crowded, as the examples I criticize are all over the place. I should emphasize that I am not criticizing any single individual, or group of individuals. I\’m thinking of furbishing the article with footnotes to make clear just what I\’m talking about at each single time (any point of criticism has been documented in print elsewhere, by me or others).
As for the languages – Irish was in the back of my mind because of a rather hilarious (and totally innocent) attempt at connecting Irish to Finnish. Finnish, Hungarian and Lithuanian because questions of linguistic origins are tied up with matters of national identity here in a way which is both beneficial (at least, historical linguistics is a living discipline in the countries in question) and hazardous to research. Basque, because Basque is famously without linguistic relatives which has led people to try and connect it to just about any language on the planet (and beyond as well, I\’m sure). Hopi just because interesting and far-reaching claims have been made about that language in the past.
1. Nick Cohen has consistenty and brilliantly shown that failure to keep a grip on libertarian/humanitarian first principles results in lefties acting no better than the worst of the right. He argued for the iraq war so that an oppressed, brutalised people could be freed from dictatorship. That those who launched that war had infinitely murkier motives (particularly those connected to Haliburton) doesn\’t change that, nor the fact that it has resulted in
protracted and deadly attrition.
2. Inkey Dave – are you some kind of a joke? If not, would you ever go on outta that !
Merlin – language change isn[t properly causal, you say, but teleological. That sounds like flipping Greek to me. Don;t you mean evolutionary, or \’improperly causal?\’
Thanks for your kind reply. If anyone is looking for a potentially very interesting linguistic flight of fantasy, how about the link between Irish and Ethiopian? Apparently Ireland was converted to Christianity by Ethiopian clerics. This is proved by the fact that early Irish bishops had croziers that had the same T-shape as those used in the Coptic church. Or so \’tis said. These divines must have left some lingusitic influence surely?
The approach that is being taken on this subject seems both morally and tactically wrong.
Tactically, it seems to me that renewed skepticism in theory won\’t be of much help. It will produce more interest in the theorists, without producing any in the theories. That\’s because the cash value of a theory is in the loyalty it produces among reasonable people. This is accomplished by making one\’s theories understandable. Sadly, this is not a goal that many theorists share.
Morally, it seems wrong to be in the business of \”generating interest\”. Theory, if it is sound, should have intrinsic value. Theory ought to be accessible to those who are curious, but there\’s no need for grandstanding.
my efforts on a cultural theory of the HUMANE CONDITION skids away from \”theory\” and embraces concerns of paradigm and praxis….. it is praxis where we will exercise our wit and wisdom, and if we are forunate in our wanderings and wonderings, we will find some sketchy paradigms…
peace, david inkey unpoet@aol.com
An excellent piece. Incidentally, the cultishness inherent in \”theory\” was brilliantly dissected by Erasmus. So it goes way back. It seems to be related to people\’s need to be seem as deeper, more profound – and hence higher, more important – that those around them. Erasmus detested it, and offered a diagnosis that remains pertinent.
About: \”What is elitism?
First of all, it\’s impossible to discuss with everyone about high Culture.
It\’s necessary to be part of the high society to understand what is this!
You must read about Nietzche and you will understand what this visionary man said about the western world would become.
When we see in nowadays the hip hop culture dominating the USA and some people like \”Eminen\” I think that we will have the same opinion about the future of the world that Nietzche discovered.
The greek and the romans produced a sofisticated world that do not exist more and we are obligate to heard something like \”Eminen\’ s music\”.
article: \”Moratorium about Nietzche\” (intellectuals\’ opinig).
Excuse me, I am sure that I am not the right people to discuss about Nietzche, because I did not read every book of Nietzche but, it\’s very difficult to understand Nietzche because he weren\’t so rational in his analisys about the world.
Probably, Nietzche were a romantic and visionary at the same time, that saw, so many problems in the western world created by the christianism (not by the Lord Christ but by the christian culture and religion).
Nieztche probably wouldn\’t be romantic about the possibility of western democracies live side by side with the non democratic countries, that are the majority governments on the earth like in the African continent or another regions.
Probably Nietzche believed that it\’s necessary the use of power in the international relations because it\’s not possible to have a task about conflicts between democracies and dictatorships.
I think too, that Nietzche didn\’t belive in the possibility of rational politics choose in so many situations like terrorism.
The Stronger government should be the Nietzche response to the \”terror\”.
I am SO GLAD that Nick Cohen found the time, and had the integrity, to write his splendid review-essay on Paul BERMAN\’s Terror and Liberalism. It is about time that those of us of the \”thinking world\” woke up to the fact that much of what we imbibed in our early years was honestly (Orwell would say \”decently\”) intended; but was profoundly mistaken. The burden of Paul Berman\’s excellent and timely (I hope!) book is precisely that the road to Hell is a primrose path of \”good intentions\” — and that among those \”good intentions\” was the refusal to credit the vile relationship between on the one hand the Baathist regimes (of Syria as well as Irak) and their apparent theological and political opposites Al Ichwan-al- musslameen (The Muslim Brotherhood).
The strictly Fascist roots of BOTH these movements should oblige \”liberal leftists\” to revise their all-too-hasty acceptance of \”multiculturalism\”. (Incidentally, those finding it \”unfair\” or \”racist\” to state such things, should ask themselves a few serious questions of realpolitik — e.g. just WHERE did all those highly-trained torturers of the S.S. and Gestapo go, apart from South America, after the Second World War?? Which countries needed highly-trained \”secret police\” to maintain the absolute power of their dictatorships and which — just by the way, loathed the Jews — ?? Try Syria, try Irak, try Egypt — Nasser\’s state police was virtually run by former members of the German torturing elite.)
You cannot argue or \”come to terms with\” or \”reach a compromise\” with Fascist political and theological mentalities that have no place in a civilized society. The bitter irony of poor deluded Chamberlain\’s \”I have in my hands a piece of paper signed by Herr Hitler\” and the other travesties of \”peace in our time\” are as nothing compared with our present predicament today where a world-wide effort interconnected by \”free-lancing\” networks of Islamist Fascist organizations is daily using the technological achievements of the democratic West to attempt to bring about its downfall.
If there is \”Globalisation\” today — it is a globalisation of multiple atrocities taught, or indoctrinated, in the madressas of Pakistan and, until very recently tolerated in the name of \”Free Speech\” by many Western governments. Let us hope that the Wake-Up call of Berman\’s book is heard – and not merely by the former \”liberals\” (who are — innocently — partly responsible for bringing us to this pass!).
Robert WILCOCKS, Professor Emeritus of French Literature, University of Alberta, Canada.
>Name: Barney F. McClelland
>Date: 18/09/2003
>Comment: Dear Mr. Jacobs,
>And, of course, slavery never, ever >existed in the Muslim world and those >pesky Armenians and Kurds probably >had it coming to them!
Did u just call the Armenians pesky?
Shame on u indeed.
re: \’Political Islam in the heart of secular Europe\’
I understand and agree with many of the basic ideologies raised in this article pertaining to the value of secularism in a world where the political and the religous are so intertwined that they have become synonymous. However, are we not encouraging more fundamentalism, more reactionary fever by further subjugating the rights of certain individuals. To illustrate my opinion, I refer to the case (as mentioned in the previous article), of the decision by secular governments in France to ban the wearing of religious symbols within schools.
The first thing that needs to be understood is that the only people who stand to be truely affected by such a law, are the more traditional practioners of religion. Those who wear the turbans, the crosses, the yumulke or the veil. Whilst I have spent the majority of my life as an athiest living in a seemingly \”secular\” Australia, I understand the feelings of persecution and further alienation that this would lead to. Feelings that as we all know are the breeding ground for indivuals such as the \”home grown London bombers\” who recently attacked the rail and bus network.
Is it so hard for the rest of us to comprehend the importance of such symbolic objects and garments to individuals? It is not the clothing, the veil, the jewelrey of an individual that will set him or her apart from society, that will make him or her take arms. It is opression, rather, a lack of sympathy and understanding of another\’s background and more to the point it is anything that perpetuates a fear of difference.
SECULARISM OR HOMOGONISATION?
Your Recommended Reading list fails to include a book that is more relevant to the topic of moral relativism and more carefully argued than the three you have included. I refer to \”Morality and Cultural Differences\” (Oxford University Press, 1999) by John W. Cook (yours truly). The theme of the book is in general sympathy with your essay, but it presents the case in greater detail and shows how to avoid moral scepticism. It also addresses in great detail the (false) claim that anthropologists have proven that moral relativism is true.
Read your article.Interesting history lesson.
My grandfather said: \”They\’re evil bastards and we will have to take the fight to them or they will run right over us.\”
Does it for me.
The article \”One Man\’s Fantasy\”, to which you linked as \”The Coerciveness of \’Family Values\’\” was unintentionally illuminating:
Two excerpts:
1) To be fair, the report claims to be an update of Daniel Patrick Moynihan\’s 1965 essay on \’\’The Negro Family\” in which he prophesied that weakening family bonds, and, especially, absent black men were dooming a generation to poverty and worse. Black intellectuals pilloried Moynihan at the time, and he spent years deflecting charges that his sweeping judgments amounted to intellectualized racism.
Forty years later, many of his critics believe he saw the future more clearly than they did. \’\’This guy was actually calling for social policies that would focus on the black family, and he was impaled for it,\” Rivers told me yesterday. \’\’The chickens have all come home to roost.\”
2) During one of the gay-marriage debates on Beacon Hill, a friend who is raising a child with a same-sex partner asked me a memorable question: \”Why do black ministers think my family undermines their families? Telling people how to live is what preachers do, but why does their vision of family have to demonize everyone else?\”
History repeating itself?
Re \”How to Make a Revolution in Historical Linguistics\”
This article is peculiar in that it lacks any examples of he sort of thing it implicitly criticises. Perhaps Merlijn is afraid of being sued.
Anyway , regarding this sentence:
\”To help you on your way – suggestions for modern languages might be Irish, Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Basque and Hopi\”, I would like to know why these languages have been singled out, particularly Irish.
PaulP – If I am to be sued, the courtroom would be pretty crowded, as the examples I criticize are all over the place. I should emphasize that I am not criticizing any single individual, or group of individuals. I\’m thinking of furbishing the article with footnotes to make clear just what I\’m talking about at each single time (any point of criticism has been documented in print elsewhere, by me or others).
As for the languages – Irish was in the back of my mind because of a rather hilarious (and totally innocent) attempt at connecting Irish to Finnish. Finnish, Hungarian and Lithuanian because questions of linguistic origins are tied up with matters of national identity here in a way which is both beneficial (at least, historical linguistics is a living discipline in the countries in question) and hazardous to research. Basque, because Basque is famously without linguistic relatives which has led people to try and connect it to just about any language on the planet (and beyond as well, I\’m sure). Hopi just because interesting and far-reaching claims have been made about that language in the past.
Regards,
Merlijn de Smit
Two things.
1. Nick Cohen has consistenty and brilliantly shown that failure to keep a grip on libertarian/humanitarian first principles results in lefties acting no better than the worst of the right. He argued for the iraq war so that an oppressed, brutalised people could be freed from dictatorship. That those who launched that war had infinitely murkier motives (particularly those connected to Haliburton) doesn\’t change that, nor the fact that it has resulted in
protracted and deadly attrition.
2. Inkey Dave – are you some kind of a joke? If not, would you ever go on outta that !
And another thing;
Merlin – language change isn[t properly causal, you say, but teleological. That sounds like flipping Greek to me. Don;t you mean evolutionary, or \’improperly causal?\’
Merlijn:
Thanks for your kind reply. If anyone is looking for a potentially very interesting linguistic flight of fantasy, how about the link between Irish and Ethiopian? Apparently Ireland was converted to Christianity by Ethiopian clerics. This is proved by the fact that early Irish bishops had croziers that had the same T-shape as those used in the Coptic church. Or so \’tis said. These divines must have left some lingusitic influence surely?