On sunday in the Irish bar, where the owner is an old friend of Shane MacGowan (who drops by when he’s town to play a gig or get his teeth fixed) my friend and I had to put up with a different crowd. Next to us were 5 rowdy aging NYU types, singing along with whatever came on the jukebox. They annoyed me and they annoyed my companion and others as well; I had them pegged and tried to find a way to describe my response to the woman I was with, an experimental psychologist with as I realized a very sharp eye. When the 5 assholes started singing along with “New York New York” it was better to leave than start a fight.
Outside Z explained it. She said they weren’t enjoying themselves singing as a group, each was singing alone at the same time as the others, in such a way as to try to convince them that he was having fun. And we were not the only ones at the bar annoyed by their behavior.

This is the heart of the issue of individualism and community. The Eurodisco cafes in my neighborhood are full of people for whom community is constitutive and this is brought into stark relief when put alongside the individualism of the americans who move in to their neighborhood. The tension is very similar to that brought out by gentrification in working class neighborhoods, where I’ve witnessed plenty of sing-alongs (of “NY NY”) that were just as rowdy and much less annoying to others in the room.
The difference is that in my neighborhood the immigrants have money, and what is developing is a multiethnic bourgeoisie that exists both as community and a place for individuals, though not in the older american sense. I should also add that the neighborhood has a large and growing Islamic community, from Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Palestine and South Asia. I live down the street from a mosque. And although I see women in Abayas and even in niqāb, fully covered, I’ve seen girls in headscarves and spandex and one girl in a headscarf and a t shirt that read “save a horse ride a cowboy.”

Cosmopolitanism sees community as constitutive, even if from the outside. Lberalism sees communty as suspect. And yet liberalism creates artificial communities, with rules and taboos and regulations, that then go unexamined. Reading on in the Foucault Chomsky debate they both begin to sound pretty silly. But Foucault is charming and Chomsky is not.

Interesting to think that the moderate Islamic party in Turkey is considered by many to be more modern than its secular opponents. And from this the logic becomes not one of religion vs secularism but whether a system of order, or language or justice, is seen as a system of questions that one asks of oneself and others, or as system of answers that is handed down by and which one is obliged follow. This is a good essay on community and language and the need of communities to describe themselves on their own terms. That need, requirement, is more important than liberalism itself.
I think this about does it for me this time.
Thanks for the server space.

And this POV seems to be catching on in the pop-culture: Paul Wolfowitz’s Real Problem? He’s too good at math.

Me, I’m skeptical about this, I’m a cui bono? kinda guy. Wolfowitz had an idea and Exxon accidentally made a half-trillion dollars? I don’t think so. And I don’t believe there’s any expertise there in the first place, it’s all bullshit. I bet Wolfowitz isn’t even good at math.

Lauren, thanks for reminding me, that was my mother’s line.
She died last year. A real bitch, but a smart woman.

“But of course in this country philosophers and members of the social-scientific academic community think Peter Jackson and George Lucas are geniuses, without really taking them or “entertainment” seriously. It’s just something you do for fun after reading Rawls or Naming and Necessity.”

!?

Yawn – this is too easy (although in fairness, your generalizations are indeed less grand than some of Saul’s) ….

“Rawls builds a logic out of dreamed-up beginning (a fantasy)”

“we categorize every new experience by way of a process of recognition”

“The rule of law is predicated on the impossibility of pure reason.”

“There is no reason to trust people.”

“The history of modernism will be written as the history of wishful thinking.”

“Rawls wasn’t interested in people, he was interested in ideas.”

“The defense of intellectual professionalization is conservative on its face. It’s hypertrophied foundationalism; the foundation being not an idea as such but the social structure that underlies that idea.”

“If you’re interested in engaging with people who engage the world and others in a questionaing “philosophical” manner, read a novel or go to the movie. Read some history. If you’re interested in professional philosophy the odd are those things won’t interrest you; and the odds you’re pretty god damn dull.”

“Philosophy historically has to do with the relation of ideas to experience, not of ideas to each other.”

“The choice kiddo, is between loyalty to your categories or to your curiosity. I would be ashamed to choose the former. Americans, even one’s who you’d think are paid to know better, tend to choose what they know, as if it’s all they need to know.”

“Astrophysicists are interested in “the final questions” and they want governments to spend milions and millions of dollars to see what’s out (or in) there, because they though they generalize to the whole of humanity, “need to know.” They ascribe psychological meaning to unknown facts and to the fact that they’re unknown. Their search is fundamentally a religious quest and as such it’s absolutely absurd, but no more than anything else”

“Isn’t the purpose of art, or the fixation of art specifically on those things or moments or events that are both “A” and “Not-A”?”

“Academic philosophy, Chicago school economics, and the general professionalization of intellectual life are all BAD SHIT!”

[S]o that it won’t be compromised by history, it is necessary not that the truth constitutes itself in history, but only that it reveals itself in it; hidden to men’s eyes, provisionally inaccessible, sitting in the shadows, it will wait to be unveiled. The history of truth would be essentially its delay, its fall or the disappearance of the obstacles which have impeded it until now from coming to light. The historical dimension of knowledge is always negative in relation to the truth.

This guy wrote a couple of books about it (or something similar anyway). Though his criticism is not limited to just the US scene.

Some of my interests in philosophy are, I suppose, primarily intelectual and technical, but since my main interest is in fairly applied fields, ones I care about quite a lot, I don’t suppose that my main interests are properly described as ‘techinical’ except in the sense that I do want to get clear on what’s at issue. Much like John I think you’ve just got a highly idiosyncratic view of the field.

“How does philosophy as practiced today systematically warp your possibilities and life chances, though, or say that your life is worth less than others? It doesn’t, does it?”

Your argument is about as perfect example of anti-intellectualism as I could imagine. Just admit that your interests are technical and not intellectual and we’ll leave it at that. I don’t expect people to be intellectuals, and I don’t picks fights with statisticians.

Except that no one is, you know, oppressing you or keeping you down.

“There’s less at stake for me than there was and is for women or blacks (or Palestinians) but the issue itself is the same. ”

Well, at least you see there’s less at stake for you. How does philosophy as practiced today systematically warp your possibilities and life chances, though, or say that your life is worth less than others? It doesn’t, does it? So it’s not really the same problem, I’d guess.

I don’t suppose that ‘technical’ philosophy does have much to say about day-to-day problems. But if only such philosophy is worth the name then, well, huge swaths of the history of philosophy is out. If that’s your criterion then I think you’ve got a pretty funny one.

As for the last bit, I must admit that I have not the slightest idea what you’re talking about. I rather suspect you don’t, either.

How about a study of popular culture, Star Trek and the “Borg”? Google, Microsoft, Pseudo-Sociability, and the moral imperitives of geekdom: Individualists are all alike.
Doesn’t interest me much but there’s a book there.