Thinking About Groups

Loved this! Does Levy talk about employers? I would think that as a matter of practice they’re the groups that sit most prominently between citizens and the state. And it seems like employment law might be an interesting archive to read for negotiations of this tension.

Does Levy talk about employers? I would think that as a matter of practice they’re the groups that sit most prominently between citizens and the state.
I don’t know if Levy does, by Elizabeth Anderson has a really neat book out, her recent tanner lectures, on just this topic Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It)

(The Libertarian view is represented in a reply by Tyler Cowen. It’s pretty weak, and I’m not a Cowen hater.) I am also working on this topic, though more narrowly. Alas, it’s still in progress.

Perhaps John touched on this, but because it’s a Holbo post, and so I got tired part way though and had to skim (surely, this is 2/3 too long, I hope we can all agree) I’m not sure, but really, the issue with kids isn’t _just_ that it’s not enough to be let out when you are 18 (though that’s clearly not enough, especially if you have no resources) but also that you might be deformed – often developmentally, if you were not allowed to go to school, like the Amish or some others, but or say, or more abstractly – but in the extreme, even physically. Groups want freedom – and that’s both understandable and desirable – but when it’s freedom to do oftentimes irrepairable harm to kids (often the freedom most actively sought!) it’s not so clear that it’s good to give it to them.

It’s nice to have some overlapping consensus about something, so I always make my posts too long to ensure that.

This is where we need a “vote up” button, but I’d feel a bit funny, since the reply itself should, to be consistent, be made into a long paragraph.

er, Bravo. (I think.) You might have to think this through a bit further for me, because – ill-informed (and not very bright) as I am – my enthusiasm for your infracanine test is hampered by two thoughts.
One is that some of those who most need to apply this test will not in fact do so, which may lead to a quotation from Franklin which I happily lift from Wikipedia: “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” (I must read the original, to find out which were the perfect societies he was referring to.)
And the other is that I am not clear if this helps with the problem of having the means to assert one’s freedom of association, though this may be an aspect of the first thought; and maybe both pure and congruent liberals will claim you will get it.
Sorry if these are red-herrings.

Thanks for the reminder of that post, Chris – I remember reading it, but will check it out again. (If I am remembering correctly, it’s slightly to the side of my own current interests, but surely worth going back to.) Also a good point about trans-national organization or associations (with Churches – especially the Catholic Church, being the traditional example, for good or ill, but lots of others, too.)

Besides subnational versus transnational groups, I think there might also be a significant difference between organizations upheld by the state (corporations, for example; families, in some jurisdictions) and groupings which are not. States do make sovereign, totalitarian claims to everything within their boundaries, but not all individuals observe or believe in those claims.

It is almost as if real liberals are characteristically skeptical and hostile to formulas of purity.

Everyone believes themselves the underdog, even when in the dominant coalition, because coalitions are varied and variable, while to be in a dominant majority is to not think about being dominate but just the natural state of affairs. While we can be the majority in some sense, we are all a minority in some other, and want to believe our opinions are the majority even when we realize they are not.

Excellent post John. I disagree with your (and Levy’s) middle of the road approach, but I ordered the book nevertheless.

I used to think along the lines you mentioned: pure liberalism has limits –you shouldn’t be able to sell yourself into slavery– hence you can consider what we call now “civil rights” just a patch to liberalism, on the path to overcoming its limits. Nothing to see here, move along.

I now think that that’s a mistake, that the “patch” is an incoherent assault on liberal values which in the long term is poisonous to society. It’s poisonous for the beneficiaries of affirmative action, who will always have the cloud of doubt about their merits over their head. It’s poisonous to the supposed “losers” of affirmative action, since it builds up resentment (whether justified, or, more likely, unjustified) and you never know how such resentment will blow up.

It is also deeply incoherent: Asian Americans are denied admission in a racist manner in the name of racial justice. There are many good –i.e. not based on unjust discrimination — reasons why certain fields have different distributions of groups, and shoehorning that distribution into approved proportions in likely to lead to a poisonous atmosphere.

Does that mean that we just need to suffer egregious instances of private abuse from and against groups? No, it doesn’t!

We can still patch-up liberalism. We just need to abandon the search for abstract principles for the balancing the supposed faults of liberalism with the supposed benefits of “congruence.” In other words, treat the patch just like the patch that it is: put reasonable time limits and perhaps reasonable result limits to any law that is supposed to patch liberalism.

You think that due to abhorrent historical (usually state sponsored) abuse some minorities will likely suffer social Jim Crow-like abuse, for a debatable period of time? You’re probably right! So we treat the situation like an emergency situation, which requires emergency-like departures from liberalism.

The advantage of this approach is that you are free to consider the particulars of the emergency situation, you are not forced to design, once and for all, an abstract, coherent, principle of “social justice” which simply does not exist. Additionally, if the state gets the emergency law wrong –as it most certainly will, in one way or another– the society does not have to deal with this failure forever, as the time limits will kick in.

The disadvantage of this approach is that you still have to consider abstract rules about what constitutes an emergency situation, what is a reasonable time or result limit of the emergency. But this should be much, much easier than figuring out, a priori, all the possible oppression dynamics of groups that can make up their own rules, and that operate in an environment of other rules, designed by a mistake prone government.

(I’ve made my case in the context of civil rights because that’s where the case for “congruence theories” is the strongest. In other contexts it’s much easier to make my case)

I think the most relevant issue concerning the right of association is being passed over thus far in the discussion: As it currently operates, society and the state work to involuntarily disassociate citizens from potential groups: through employment, housing and economic development, and through mass marketing and entertainment. We have a “bowling alone” problem.

Perhaps there’s a flaw with the premis that we are looking for some equilibrium state: a “balance” between competing individual rights (association vs. privacy/speech/equality) and a rule that will help us find and maintain a balance. That sets us up to consider valid instances of limiting the right of association, but blinds us to the pervasive and harmful instances in which this right is already being effectively suppressed.

Really, we should continue to understand liberalism as a revolutionary, utopian force: we don’t want balance, we want progress! So instead of a balancing metaphor, we can employ a flow chart metaphor: step 1: liberalism dissolves the oppressive associations of church, guild, and feudal lord with the acid of individual rights; step 2: amid a flowering of liberal freedom, the liberal citizenry gets stuck in an atomized hedonism that promotes environmental catastrophe, economic injustice, and social isolation; step 3: communities that pass the purity test employed by the liberal state are encouraged by society and the state.

So the role of the state would be to continue to transform ourselves from step 1 through step 3. We still have some of the same problems of distinguishing which groups should be left alone and which ones repressed, but we would have a more comprehensive and honest* accounting of our decision making, I think.

*Honest because the state can never be a neutral arbiter of individual rights; it’s always a force of social engineering. So better to be forthright about what the state is doing and why.

Very interesting and I must reread. Nonetheless, I think that the thought experiment and the dialogue would be improved if Neibuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society is taken into account. I will not attempt to summarize Neibuhr’s argument here, but offer a tidbit to build interest. Why, Neihbuhr asks, do good, decent Christian people support government actions (and, per the argument above, the actions of intermediate actors) which are immoral without perceiving any problem or contradiction?

Or maybe I can!

Contra the parenthetical dig, it seems to me Rawls is pretty good on this. Cf the “fact of pluralism”, and the correlative “fact of oppression.”

“Let’s lump. Anything that might be a locus of loyalty or ‘identity’, above the individual level, below the state level.”

Good grief.

“Let’s lump together all physical systems larger than an atom but smaller than a galaxy and see whether we can construct a coherent theory out of them. Didn’t work out? Too bad but twas worth a try.”

One thing I have tried to point out many times is that ‘individuals’, per se, don’t exist. We’re all part of the ecosystem. We have a sense of being separate, of ending at the skin – it’s an existential reality but it isn’t essentially true.

Sorry John, but the Devil made me do it: What we’ve got here is a lumping commentariat.

Good Lord! Is that bad.

JH, fair enough for classical mechanics, but notice that mechanics doesn’t describe physical *systems* as such, rather it abstracts away each system’s internal structure. I don’t think this approach works very well for your purposes.

I don’t intend to denigrate your post. If anything, you are doing the denigrating yourself:

“There is a lot to distinguish in this lot, but let’s not. Let’s lump.”
“Continuing on cartoonishly … there are citizens and there is the state”
“If you seriously want to scrap the US Constitution in favor of some kind of neo-feudal system”
“All pretty vague? Yes, quite.”
“In what way does my abstract framework help in the least? Well, probably not much.”
Humility is commendable but when an analysis announces itself as “cartoonish”, why take it seriously?

Just – sorry I will stop, promise – but that thing about families and individuals – sure families can be oppressive etc, but the reason we have families is that literally everyone used to part of someone else’s body once (and yeah, the ecosystem, etc, but also, part of another body).

I was once was involved in a conversation with a professor, I won’t go into details, but it made me realise that he had literally forgotten he used to be a baby once (let alone a foetus etc). So now whenever I hear a professor talking about individuals, I look at them with a jaundiced eye, as you may understand.

Now – as we have reached the wonderful question if individuals “exist” – or not? – let me show up with one of my favorite Cartoons:

It’s a dude somewhere sitting in a room and above his head is a big Cartoon Bubble and in the bubble there are the words:
”Seeing that our senses sometimes deceive us, I was willing to suppose that there existed nothing really such as they presented to us; And because some men err in reasoning, and fall into Paralogisms, even on the simplest matters of Geometry, I, convinced that I was as open to error as any other, rejected as false all the reasonings I had hitherto taken for Demonstrations; And finally, when I considered that the very same thoughts (presentations) which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects (presentations) that had ever entered into my mind when awake, had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be something; And as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the Sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.

the reason we have families is that literally everyone used to part of someone else’s body once

the trouble with this as a general argument is that it applies to animals (and plants!) that clearly don’t have “families” even if they have ancestors. So, there must be something else going on here.

Matt, I’d been meaning to read that Elizabeth Anderson book: I’ll move it up the list.

One other thought, since the conversation is lively. I wonder if some of the tensions Levy describes parallel or perhaps duplicate problems within the self. One might put the tension in terms of reasons and desires, and then ask whether investments in particular projects are supposed to be justified on the basis of the grounds of reason (conceived substantively) or because they fulfill particular desires. And I suspect there would be a similar scaling — the bigger and more central the investment to your life, the greater the sense that it needs to be justified in terms of reasons.

And two thoughts following off that. First, I wonder how much of this might parallel Plato scholarship regarding the role of the spirit in governance of the self and the city. Is the spirit more like reason, governing appetite in ways largely similar to those reason itself does (I think this is probably what Plato thinks) and thus susceptible to largely the same structural norms as reason, or is it more like appetite, confronting reason alongside appetite as a thing that needs to be governed? And then second, John, your point about victimology strikes me as analogous to a certain kind of anti-repressive practical deliberation: one where agents embrace particular desires particularly because they seem transgressive. But once this model dominates, then there’s a tendency to see transgressive desires everywhere, and every act of embracing them an assertion of one’s autonomy. So agents present to themselves desires that are really barely transgressive, or not transgressive at all — I want to watch a whole season on Netflix right now! I want to eat three Big Macs! — as transgressive precisely to justify their pursuit.

Thanks for reading!

loved this post, and didn’t think it a word too long.

OK, this is the second person to suspect me of ignorance as to where babies come from.

Funny. I seem to recall similar accusations (neglecting family, childrearing & etc.) in discussions of liberalism at the Valve way back in the days of yore. For some reason, people love to criticize liberals by supposing that they don’t understand the process of how adults become adults. I’m not sure why that is.

John Holbo @ 45 (08.21.17 at 11:42 am)

Somehow you are holding the thing upside down and backwards, Val.

You’re holding it wrong. I’ve wondered where Steve Jobs came up that explanation — should have known it’d been from philosophy. As for the OP itself, and Val’s take on it, it seems to me that the detachment of the individual from the mother/other, no matter what one thinks of the individual as philosophical category, is well documented in both psychology and folklore. The allegiances, group affiliations, cultural identities, etc., that adhere to the fully developed individual, etc. apparently do so by a process of accretion and rejection, the elements and processes of which are eternally (it seems) under debate. Rationality in the Cartesian sense comes rather late to the individual’s self-awareness, if it comes at all, and while useful, is never, I think, fully satisfying as an explanation of who we are, who they are, or what our duties are to each. Hence all the -ologies which have arisen to help our doddering and half-blind old philosophy across the divide. Good luck to them one and all as the sorting goes on.

Z: “I believe the exact same anthropological features that serve as foundations for the individual rights of the Bill of the Right also inspire the constant impulse of the American society to socially destroy Black people.”

Again, just curious, but is that also true of France, or is it really specific to America, and if yes how come that both France and the US have adopted liberal democracies based on individual rights (sure there are differences between them but also fundamental similarities)? Or would you disagree with that characterization? I’m not trying to dismiss your objection (might it have something to do with Horkheimer/Adorono’s Dialektik der Aufklärung?) but it seems to me both overly broad in its claims and curiously narrow in its application.

Z @61

I’m not an American, so I suppose I can’t talk for them, but my understanding is that part of the deep malaise that is effecting America comes from it not being one people, that there is a very deep divide corresponding roughly to the two sides in the civil war. I’m very suspicious of what I like to term “inappropriate collectives” and the distortion it can lend to thinking. This doesn’t mean that I think that methodological individualism is always appropriate (in economics I think it is a big part of the problem), but that I think ignoring crucial heterogeneity (again with examples from economics) is an even bigger problem.

Z @ 62 (08.21.17 at 2:26 pm)

We are what they made us. Shouldn’t Saul on the road to Damascus fit into the discussion somewhere here? Or philosophy itself? Or if you prefer Buddha to Plato, meditation? (without the roshi’s bamboo stick, of course, given our need to abstract away those pesky cultural identity-specific associations.)

TM @58: Quebecois have a much stronger vertical trait than do typical Anglo-American. This correlates with a belief into metaphysical differences, and so typically correlates with religious xenophobia among European countries.

TM @ (currently) 65: Not true at all of France. American social psyche is differentialist in nature, French social psyche is (predominantly) universalist. Make no mistake, that doesn’t make the latter better in any sense than the former: universalist people are by and large as xenophobic as differentialist people (or more) but they don’t obsess on quite the same thing.

Z 71: You haven’t answered any of my questions but in light of what you *have* responded, I’m not sure I want to know the answers any more. What a load of essentialist projections.

One last, concerning Quebec: in social value surveys, Quebeckers describe themselves as more individualistic than either Anglo-Canadians or USAians. The US-Canada comparison was the topic of the 2003 study Fire and Ice by Michael Adams, which showed (http://77list.com/image-9_Michael-Adams_fire-and-ice_2.html) – unsurprisingly – far more variation betweeen US regions than between Quebec and the ROC plus New England, although as mentioned Quebec stands out on the indiviuality axis. Not that pesky empirical observation would ever count as an argument against the wisdom of pop psychology.

@Z
the congruence view of society does not mean the same thing at all to someone who has a fundamentally horizontal apprehension of society (as the typical French would) and to someone who has a fundamentally vertical apprehension of society (as the typical Swiss would), to someone with a fundamentally universalizing view of community (the typical Arab) and to someone with a typically differentialist view (the typical American). So if you want to seriously discuss how a congruence approach would affect individual rights, you need to specify if congruence is happening in a society people view horizontally or vertically and in which it is community or difference that structures the society.

W/o meaning any disrespect, where are you getting this stuff? Can you drop the name of a classic or contemp. work of social science (broadly construed) or social theory that proposes or argues for these distinctions (or have you done so already and I missed it scrolling through the thread)? I have little to no idea what a ‘horizontal’ vs a ‘vertical’ apprehension of society is supposed to mean. It can’t refer to attitudes toward hierarchy, b/c my impression is that ‘the French’ (if we’re going indulge in sweeping generalizations) are far from hostile to certain kinds of hierarchy (as someone who is part of the French academic system is presumably fully aware).

This discussion seems to come with a surprising number of universalizing objections that the questioners seem to want to just raise and leave hanging.

“One thing I have tried to point out many times is that ‘individuals’, per se, don’t exist. We’re all part of the ecosystem. We have a sense of being separate, of ending at the skin – it’s an existential reality but it isn’t essentially true.”

How is it that ecosystems exist in a way that is essentially true in a way that individuals don’t? That sounds like saying that electrons exist but atoms don’t. Or cells exist but bodies don’t. It seems likely that all sorts of things exist AT DIFFERENT LEVELS OF ANALYSIS. It is perfectly fine to suggest that a particular level of analysis is inappropriate for a particular problem. But that isn’t the same as just acting as if different levels of analysis don’t/can’t exist. It turns out that individuals really do act individually, and that groups really do act groupishly. It seems weird to try to deny that, and really weird to try to dismiss it as so obviously untrue as to need no further explanation.

“Just – sorry I will stop, promise – but that thing about families and individuals – sure families can be oppressive etc, but the reason we have families is that literally everyone used to part of someone else’s body once (and yeah, the ecosystem, etc, but also, part of another body).”

This seems like an unproductive level of abstractive parallelism. Is patriarchy justified because we all have fathers? Is violence justifiable because we all have to be forcibly cut from our mother’s umbilical cord?

“I believe the exact same anthropological features that serve as foundations for the individual rights of the Bill of the Right also inspire the constant impulse of the American society to socially destroy Black people. If I am right, then yes, the exact same relations between individuals, groups and the state that produced the Bill of Right also produced Jim Crow yet, and I don’t know how I could put this more forcefully, we should not analyze one phenomenon and the other in a unitary way, we should on the contrary recognize their common origin but their different expression.”

That’s quite a bomb to drop. Can’t we at least have the slightest hint about WHICH anthropological impulse you believe is exactly the same as to serve as the foundation for individual rights and the allegedly constant impulse to socially destroy black people? It seems unfair to make us guess.

“the congruence view of society does not mean the same thing at all to someone who has a fundamentally horizontal apprehension of society (as the typical French would) and to someone who has a fundamentally vertical apprehension of society (as the typical Swiss would), to someone with a fundamentally universalizing view of community (the typical Arab) and to someone with a typically differentialist view (the typical American). So if you want to seriously discuss how a congruence approach would affect individual rights, you need to specify if congruence is happening in a society people view horizontally or vertically and in which it is community or difference that structures the society.”

Gack. Ok, lets say we accept that the congruence approach would be radically different based on those factors. Could you maybe focus on what that might mean for say one of them? I can totally buy that it might be different in different cultures–though I’m typically suspect of anthropology’s thrill in highlighting differences while obscuring far larger similarities. But merely saying “things might be different in different circumstances” doesn’t really get us anywhere.

And I’m not really sure why you can talk about “fictional autonomous individuals” but then allude to communities and groups as if they are not fictional. You seem to want to set up a situation where no one can get “outside”, but if that is true, the communities and groups are every bit as fictional as the autonomous individuals.

All this talk of babies seems rather limiting too. Babies grow up. They mature. They differentiate. They separate. Why should we valorize the high-dependency phase while being dismissive of the much less dependent phases which follow? Couldn’t it be that some associations are for a certain time while others become more appropriate later?

Lupita and TM many thanks, for different reasons.

LFC blog comment are not ideal to communicate bibliographies. Here is nevertheless a brief one in rough chronological order. Tocqueville’s insightful comments on Switzerland (Rapport d’Alexis de Tocqueville à l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques sur l’ouvrage De la démocratie en Suisse de M. Cherbuliez,1848) and Weber’s Protestant Ethic are the grand-fathers of the topic. Laslett, I’m sure you know already (Household and Family in Past Time,1972). C.Nakane’s (Kinship and economic organization in rural Japan,1967) and ( Japanese society,1970) are classical studies of vertically organized societies. Then L.Dumont (Homo Hierarchicus,1971) and (Homo Aequalis,1977) plus M.Gauchet’s insightful commentary on them (De l’avènement de l’individu à la découverte de la société,1979). Then H.Le Bras (Les Trois France,1985) and E.Todd’s magisterial (L’invention de l’Europe,1990). T.Ertman (Birth of the Leviathan,1997) is good for the institutional side of the story. Finally Anstone et al. (Family Demography, Social Theory, and Investment in Social Capital,1999) and Duranton et al. research paper (Family Types and the Persistence of Regional Disparities in Europe,2008) are interesting research papers, one on the theoretical side (close to the OP), the other on the quantitative one. I have not read Fischer (Albion’s Seed,1989) so I can’t claim it is relevant but among books widely read in the English-speaking world, it seems among the closest.

OK, last one, if that is not too presuming on the hospitality of the host
John @72

Obviously it’s completely uncontroversial to say that ONE way to create power and authority is through free exercise of freedom of association.

Woe is me, I’m going to argue against a statement which is obvious and completely uncontroversial.

First a methodological point, statements about societies are rarely interesting in pure quantifier form, as they tend to be either obviously false (all power is always and everywhere created…) or obviously true (there exists at least one instance in which power…) so (of course) I understood Levy’s statement to assert some statistical common or typical property of liberal pluralistic society. For this appropriate statistical understanding, I disagree. I contend that this statement – to be crystal clear the statement that the psychological stages through which an individual goes are “I am free to associate, so I associate, we together decide to associate under some rules, we appoint a keeper of rules, she got social power, social power has been created” – is true (in the statistical sense) for some specific liberal pluralistic society. In others, it is essentially never true (never in the statistical sense) so it obscures more than it illuminates. Things may go precisely in the reverse order (and in others yet through different stages). For instance, individual may first and foremost experience authority, obedience to which is then the constitutive nature of belonging to a given group, and exercise of freedom of association comes last as the experience of belonging to the group. Now, it may seem strange to think that “I obey rules, so I belong to a group so I am free to associate” should be called freedom of association – isn’t it exactly the opposite? – and that is precisely my point: for some people (but not many English-speaking ones), Luther’s freedom of the christian is accurate psychology and yes, they call it freedom too.

It might seem abstract, but it is very mundane. You don’t bow to the sensei because you joined the Judo club, you joined the Judo club when you bowed to the sensei.

Sebastian H, your post is long and if I may politely suggest, rather full of straw people. But just to clarify one thing if I may – no-one is asking you to “valorize the high dependency phase” above other phases. I – and some others here, I think – are merely asking you (and John Holbo) to stop ‘valorising’, and universalising, the perspective of the adult, white, professional, university educated, (probably American), man.

That is not a universal viewpoint. Other people may see the world differently. That does not necessarily make them wrong. (This is sometimes called standpoint theory)

It’s pretty much unassailable to assume that anyone who sees the world differently than you is both wrong and irrational, since by disagreeing with you they confirm your thesis. So not much point in arguing with you guys, in other words.

“Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.”

No more that I don’t have time. Anyway I take your point – should not engage with the post if don’t have time to read it properly.

Z, if your critique is that the counterpoint between individual rights and a congruence leveling of individual expression doesn’t play out the exact same way in all societies, I’m sure that Levy would agree. But would you agree that it plays out that way in Western societies on some level (perhaps ALOT in the US, less in the UK, and even less in some other countries)? Assuming that it is a useful lens to look at things, might it be useful to tease it out in the societies which it is already particularly describing before trying to decide to what extent it applies elsewhere?

“I’m genuinely surprised by the “allegedly”, but aside from that, I was referring to the strong differentialist strain in American political and social thought as well as practice, which has made progresses towards first political equality then economic equality among White Americans contingent on the exclusion of same of Black Americans.”

I find this difficult to parse in the context of this discussion. I sort of want to just say “as opposed to what?” More particularly I’m not sure that most of your modifiers are necessary to get where you are going. Do we need “differentialist strain” for example? Because that contrasts with what exactly? Chinese strains for example tend to be much more conformist in style that US ones, but they still are fantastically racist. So do we need “differentialist strain”?

“Economic equality among White Americans”? As far as I know that doesn’t exist, so it can’t be contingent on the exclusion of Black Americans because it doesn’t exist. And political disenfranchisement of various sorts exists all over the world–with cultures that share very little on the dimensions you are describing. Germany famously wouldn’t let third generation workers become citizens until very recently. France has been all over the place with its minority populations (see especially Jews at various times). You seem to be wanting to make a distinction or particularization, but it isn’t clear what you think is distinct or particular. Which is not to say that the black experience in the US doesn’t have distinct and particular points to talk about. I’m just saying that it isn’t remotely clear which ones you think are pertinent. For example do you think that the black experience in the US makes them more or less prone appreciate the traditional liberal values in a way that makes them more or less interested in congruence than non-black Americans? That might be something worth talking about, and it might illustrate the kind of differences that you seem to be alluding to so that we can understand what they are.

Val “Sebastian H, your post is long and if I may politely suggest, rather full of straw people.” While I am long-winded to be sure, that particular post is long mostly because it contains comprehensive quotes which I try to respond to. Which is rather the opposite of strawmanning.

“But just to clarify one thing if I may – no-one is asking you to “valorize the high dependency phase” above other phases. ” Well no. You kind of did that when you tried to make broad statements about people allegedly forgetting where babies come from and forgetting that we all were dependent. As far as I can tell literally nothing in the discussion clearly led to the idea that we didn’t know that babies were dependent, or had forgotten that or some such.

Instead of reaching for the accusation that ‘we’ don’t understand other people’s viewpoints, I feel like it would be more productive for you to explain the viewpoint not being seen in a way that relates to the discussion.

Things like this don’t get us anywhere “That is not a universal viewpoint. Other people may see the world differently. That does not necessarily make them wrong. (This is sometimes called standpoint theory)”.

Ok. So say that’s true (which it certainly is). What is your purpose in raising that fact if you hoard your viewpoint so closely? We can’t really respond helpfully to that. We can say “yes, you’re right but since you haven’t bothered to tell us about these other viewpoints we really can’t engage you so we will turn back to the rest of the discussion”. But then you feel dismissed.

Tell us what we are missing! Don’t leave us in the dark.

@ 90
I’m not opposing “liberal democracy” here, I’m opposing the dominance of the discourse in which you appear to be writing :

“Man [is not understood to be] in nature because he is not seen, is not the spectacle. A constitutive meaning of masculine gender for us is to be the unseen, the eye (I), the author ”

I wanted that quote the other day but did not have it to hand. Isn’t it wonderful? It is relevant although I can see that many, including you, seem confused about what I am saying here, and therefore would not necessarily see why I think it’s relevant.

Another quick point – I have argued here before in defence of our Australian laws, which place restrictions on speech that ‘offends’ people. I don’t know where that places me on your idea of ‘liberal democracy’ but I think it probably illustrates, as has often been discussed here, that ideas about ‘rights’ in Australia are different from those in America even though we might both be described as ‘liberal democracies’. I think you tend to speak as an American, which is not surprising because you are, but again wonder if there may be a problem in universalising your viewpoint. I apologise again for not having time to conduct this debate properly, however although my thesis deadline has been extended once, I don’t think I can keep on extending it, so I’d better get back to work!

Thanks for the reading list, Z. I see that you include works about different societies and it is up to the reader to compare them. If I may, I would like to include a great book to your list, this one by the Mexican anthropologist, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. It is called México profundo, una civilización negada which, for some profound civilizational reason has been translated as Profound Mexico: Reclaiming a Civilization. It describes the indigenous, Mesoamerican civilization as conquered and subjugated, yet alive, which makes a lot of sense to me because I can see it in downtown Mexico City with its sunken Aztec pyramid full of skulls right next to the metropolitan baroque cathedral and I can hear it in my own speech with its Nahuatl substrate topped off with Spanish vocabulary. There is an English translation that you can read online for free if you google it.

Also certainly my own earlier research clearly showed that in the early 20th century Australian census, the ‘normative’ person was an adult male ‘head of household’ and everyone else was understood in terms of their relationship to that normative person.

That didn’t change until the late 20th C (can’t remember the exact date)

Again you may think you have escaped the legacy of history, but can you be sure?

Really truly back to work now

I think there are two problems here. First, both John Holbo and Jacob Levy have written at least a dozen paragraphs without mentioning gender even once and have made claims about ‘humans’, ‘people’ or ‘individuals’ in general, as if those words had any useful meaning and as if women and men had anything whatsoever in common, which could make it possible to make any meaningful statement that would apply equally to both. In fact, of course, it is *not* possible to make any such meaningful statement – after all, the two are as separate and incompatible as, say, Light and Darkness, Purity and Foulness, Virtue and Sin, Innocence and Depravity. Second, I’m afraid that I’m correct in my suspicion that both John Holbo and Jacob Levy are, themselves, men. That is another serious misstep in their reasoning. If what I’m saying doesn’t seem to make all that much obvious sense at first sight, don’t forget that the position that I’m expressing is underdoggy and therefore justified.

I should probably add that Levy and Holbo’s arguments also strike me as hideously straight. There is something unmistakably heterosexual in the way one line follows the other. Don’t ask me why and how, I can just smell it, I always do. The grammatical structure of their sentences oozes such appalling straight privilege and propensity for mixed-sex reproductive activities that I can hardly read them, the pain is so horrid. They should be very, very ashamed for this violence that they have perpetrated against my soul.

Sebastian H, first a general comment: I think you are asking exactly the right questions, thanks for the perceptive comment.

But would you agree that it plays out that way in Western societies on some level […] it is a useful lens to look at things, might it be useful to tease it out in the societies which it is already particularly describing before trying to decide to what extent it applies elsewhere?

Oh yes, I agree. That was the object of the last three paragraphs of my original comment @54 and again in my last paragraph @70. It’s fine to look at particular cases first, after all C.Nakane did not nothing else in Japanese sociology (but with a polar opposite point of departure). It’s just that one should not mistake “thinking about groups” with “thinking about groups in the Anglo-American world” (again, not an objection to what Levy and John are doing, just a mise en garde) and in particular mistake general philosophical and general game-theoretic arguments with universal arguments (if you want a concrete example, take Schelling’s appalling game-theoretic analysis of segregation). I would make the same critique towards Nakane had she entitled her book Sociology.

“Economic equality among White Americans”? As far as I know that doesn’t exist

You are right but you are not reading me fairly: I did not claim political or economic equality existed among White Americans, I specifically wrote that progresses towards political equality (universal male suffrage, equality before the law…) and progresses towards economic equality (8-hour day, social security, subsidized housing…) were contingent on the exclusion of Blacks. Which they were.

Do we need “differentialist strain” for example?

You are asking exactly the right question (and your subsequent exemples of China, France and Germany are precisely on the right track as well). I absolutely believe that you do need a specific differentialist strain. As I wrote earlier (obviously) every human being, every society and every people have imagined significant differences, reasoned about them and obsess about, exclude, oppress or exterminate others based on them. Yet they do not do so in exactly the same way. Characterizing the differences precisely would require much more than blog comment (but I did give about 15 references above) and would be OT but to take just one clear difference which is pertinent to the OP, whether members of the out-group are believed by members of the in-group to be fundamentally able to join the in-group or not has enormous differences in how the xenophobia plays out. People operating under the first mode tend to be more tolerant of differences (because the other is an other, so it is OK, even expected of him to be different) but tend to enforce longer and more brutal patterns of separation. American absolutely totally believe (historically and as a group) that there will be two distinct categories – for them, Black and White – in society in a way that Chinese, French and German people don’t. People in Europe used to know all that, if not in their mouth at least in their bones, when Protestantism and Catholicism were living ideologies in which people actually believed.

For example do you think that the black experience in the US makes them more or less prone appreciate the traditional liberal values in a way that makes them more or less interested in congruence than non-black Americans?

I wouldn’t frame it in this way, but that is again a great question. What I would say is that if one is interested in how the liberal value of equality (say of rights and political participation, if one does not want to go further) may be implemented in a congruent way (or for that matter pure freedom way) in the American society, then one should face head on the fact that this idea, in actually existing reality, has never came separately from the “value” of excluding Black people, so that social dynamics will not only tend to exclude Black people from actually existing congruence or pure freedom initiatives (as happened in most of American history) but also tend to destroy the value of equality when Black people are included (as I believe is happening now).

Val’s comments could at times be clearer but I can’t fathom why Holbo would interpret her as expressing opposition “to liberal democracy in all its forms”.

SH 91: ““Economic equality among White Americans”? As far as I know that doesn’t exist”. Darn right it doesn’t.

Babies are citizens.

One thing that occurs to me reading the first post carefully, is that there is actually not a lot of difference between a voluntary association and a government – surely they are both in some sense “groups”. It is just that a government covers an entire territory – i.e. Krugman calls a government “an insurance company with an army”, but isn’t a government just a “group with a territory”?

I find the topic in general confusing, but then I thought – isn’t there something fishy with the whole concept of a group in this sense. What is the defining feature of a group? Can a group exist with nobody in it? Can you change all the people in a group and still call it the same group? Isn’t a group a very spongy concept (because within every group there are almost always conflicts – open or concealed) and the nature of the group can be quite changeable – think about NRA now and NRA two generations ago. I’m not sure I’m comfortable talking about things when I don’t know what they are.

You start with an individual-and-the-state frame (normatively and legally). Then, in thinking about groups, you make one of two moves. The ‘pure’ theorists construe groups as, basically, individuals. The ‘congruence’ theorists construe groups as, basically, governments.

Trying to emulate your concision, my point (again, not an objection) can I think be summed up in an examination of your use of then above. There are dozen other moves people can and do make. Groups as basically master/servant, groups as basically brothers, groups as basically divinely elect few… Is there any theoretical or empirical reason why, when thinking about groups, we should limit ourselves to the specific alternative “group as individual vs. group as government”, even if our point of departure is the normative and legal frame of individual/state? Doesn’t that artificially narrow the kind of answer we are able to find, and worse the kind of question we are able to formulate?

p.s. on Z’s biblio @81

While I’ve certainly heard of some or many of these, the only one I’ve read is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and that was quite a while ago. I think it’s perhaps off on a tangent in terms of Z’s list and approach, but don’t hold me to that view. ;)

LFC @119 The approach of Weber (and indeed Tocqueville) in terms of cultural or religious temperament rather than in terms of class explains why they deserve a spot on the list, even as great ancestors (but there is a direct and clear intellectual line from them to Dumont and Gauchet).

Stephen @116

Sure, I’m precisely advocating the comparatist approach you use: in the USA, it happened in a certain way, elsewhere in a different one.

So what is it that makes progress contingent on exclusion in the US, but not so elsewhere?

Above, I gave a tentative answer: the particular form of differentialist American thought and practice (which imagine the social world as a constellation of fundamentally different and separated groups). Such a vision is in great tension with the idea of political equality (and even more so with the idea of social equality) and it appears that in at least one country, the solution of the contradiction was to declare equality permissible among one large group as long as an another was excluded.

But I think one should be modest. If it is indeed true that there is an interesting typology of xenophobia (last time you and I discussed that here in the comment section of CT, during Allen’s seminar IIRC, I seem to remember you were in fact doubtful of this proposition), then surely noticing that fact (or firmly establishing the negative, if that’s more your thing) is already an intellectual progress. Then, we can wonder if it correlates with other form of socialization, then perhaps start to look for a causal mechanism.

>It’s fine to join a monastery, for example. But theocracy is not a permissible form of government.

One reason why it might be acceptable to allow monasteries is that people can leave them, and the guarantee that they can leave them is provided by the government. If even the government, the ultimate authority, is theocratic, there is nobody left to guarantee that people can leave the monastery or the nation – not to mention that such an exit would always be more technically difficult.

One argument in favour of ‘congruence’, which I think others upthread have touched upon, is that most real-life groups that actually matter are nothing like s&m dungeons and (idealised) monastic orders. In real life, people typically belong to groups because they were born into them (ethnicities, religions, nation-states) or because they were forced, for the sake of their livelihood, to belong to them (workplaces), or both. Leaving is possible, but very difficult. State intervention is necessary to at least make them tolerable, *and* to make leaving as easy as possible. If your family, your community or your workplace look like an s&m dungeon, chances are that’s *not* because that’s your favourite fetish. And, to the extent that one has to choose between priorities, the right of some people to enjoy dungeon-like conditions is, IMO, infinitely less important than the right of others to be free from dungeon-like conditions. Freedom is far more diminished in the latter case than in the former: after all, there are lots of other enjoyable things in life that you can do besides being in a dungeon, whereas the whole point of a (non-recreational) stay in a dungeon that you can’t do anything else.

>A rough first cut might be this: the degree of incongruity of your group with liberal norms has to be inversely proportional to its size/power.

I’d suggest that it should be inversely proportional to the practical (not just formal) difficulty of leaving it, and to the practical (not just formal) easiness of *not* joining it in the first place (see above). That’s as far as the level of legislation is concerned. The individual ethical level is a separate matter – if you’re a liberal, you should simply minimise the incongruity of any group that you (choose to) belong to with liberal norms – and no, I don’t think any exceptions for ‘underdogs’ are justified.

Ha! I have finally found a concrete example of what I would like to see.

E.Ikegami argues in my view very persuasively that the development of the idea of the liberal citizen in Japan went through the structuration of artistic publics and the transformation of the value of military honor among the Samurai class into bureaucratic efficiency during the Tokugawa Era (Bonds of Civility and The Taming of the Samurai respectively). If she is right, a resident of Meiji Japan, and perhaps Heisei Japan, would then think about the problematic intermediate social spaces formed by groups by trying to fit them either in the artistic public category or lord/vassal category. So are groups more like artistic publics or more like lord/vassal bonds? Because we “get” these categories. Is there a pure and a congruence view attached to this alternative as well? If not why not? If so, what problems does it raise? Why don’t we explore them as well?

On ‘groups as individuals’ vs ‘groups as states’ – I don’t think that these two approaches can be treated as being even approximately on a par with each other. One approach basically means choosing to ignore the internal structure of groups and the relations between the individuals that constitute them, the other approach is one way of not ignoring them. While not all groups are states, certainly states are one type of group. Only after this comes the discussion of how, why and to what extent different types of groups, including states, may need to be treated differently. Ideals of democracy and liberalism, as well as other (and sometimes diametrically opposite) principles of the organisation of human collectives, can be and have been applied both to states and to other units of social organisation, and the distinction between states and other types of units has been even fuzzier historically than it is now, so there is nothing new or unusual in applying similar criteria to both or ‘lumping them together’. Monasteries are relics of authoritarian and illiberal times, as were, for a long time, patriarchal families within democratic Western countries.

Excuse me, 17th century.

Z@121: thanks, that’s much clearer.

I couldn’t believe that you really meant to say what your words might be taken to mean: that progress towards economic and social equality is only possible if it involves excluding Blacks. Rather, your argument as I now understand it is that, in a society that starts off with a substantial minority who are despised by the rest and regarded as unalterably inferior, progress towards greater equality is only possible if the inferior group are excluded.

That makes good sense for the USA. Whether it applies elsewhere, I’m not certain. Historically, in Europe there have been groups commonly regarded as unalterably inferior – Jews, Gypsies, Protestants in countries where the Counter-Reformation was victorious, Catholics where it wasn’t, Cagots in southern France, Irish Travellers in Ireland and Britain alike – but their existence didn’t stop quite general, eventual progress. I suppose it’s a matter of the relative size of the supposedly inferior group, and the degree of their supposed inferiority.

I can’t remember where I argued that there is not an interesting typology of xenophobia, and if I did I might want to invoke the traditional judge’s escape clause: “The matter does not appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then”. But I would point out that your final conclusion that we can usefully look for correlations and causal mechanisms, while interesting, is only true if you assume that your starting point is also true. If there is no such typology, it isn’t.

J. Holbo @128
Re Tocqueville: ok, that makes sense, thanks.

Something I’m not sure has been brought up yet:

There’s a lot of policy “space” between “pure policy” and “congruence” policy. What about nudges? Public service announcement: “Are you in a cult? Wanna get out? Call 1-800-still-me”. Compulsive public education is a sort of nudge: you can home school, but you still are taxed for public education and suffer loss of efficiency. So, the state has ways of pursuing congruence without trampling over the right of association.

Again, can’t help myself but “troll” (bob @ 106): We’re supposed to be concerned about a individual/state dynamic threatened by groups, but I think the opposite dynamic is equally manifest and more relevant. People don’t want to be oppressed, sure. But people also want to belong to a community. The liberal state is at least addressing the first issue, but ( I would argue) actively suppressing the second.

Furthermore, finding a way to bring (more) people into (congruently liberal) communities is a key aspect of strengthening the liberal state against illiberal groups. You’ll do much better with push AND pull instead of just push (repressing illiberal groups).

“Naturally as a woman trying to participate in an important men’s discussion, I am dumb and have got it all backwards, but in fact I quite clearly said that liberal democracies have both good and bad points.”

This is an interesting illustration of group vs. individual dynamics. Around post 100, you reveal that you had written many comments before carefully reading all of the post. Reading only part of the post seems to have led you to rather dramatically misunderstand the post. To my eyes that sounds like a very individual level thing. If forced to ascribe anything to that I would tend to ascribe individual level things to it like “Val didn’t read all of the post.” If I ascribed group level things to it it would be something like “It is too bad that Val only read part of the post, because it sounds like she might have some interesting insights from different viewpoints, but instead of sharing them with us she misunderstood things which led to weird digressions instead of leading to better group insight.”

You seem to want to make a very high level group attribution. Something like: “People don’t want to listen to what I have to say because I’m a woman”. Through an individualist lens it would never occur to me to ascribe something like that to ‘women’. I perfectly expect that all sorts of women could read the whole post. I expect that all sorts of people of either gender can get confused by Holbo when he is being circuitous (though actually I found him pretty direct for Holbo in this particular post).

Now I fully understand that there are people who inappropriately attribute individual level interactions to groups. So there are indeed a bunch of sexist people who would interpret “Val didn’t read the whole post till she had already commented repeatedly, but what do you expect from women…” But one of virtues of the classical individualist liberal focus is that it argues against doing that.

I also get that it can be draining to be the model minority. And I seriously mean that–it can be draining to have people ascribe “oh that is how gay people do things” to me. But again one of the virtues of the classic liberal individualist interpretation is that it sets a strong foundation for resisting that.

This seems like the kind of case where you would want the attributions NOT to go to ‘women’. Because if you do that you are feeding the problem of the model minority.

Its interesting for me to try to look at this from a more congruence point of view–because that isn’t the most natural lens for me. Or rather it is a lens that I feel I may have developed an allergy to because of being raised in a church with some cult-like characteristics. (And I use the word allergy very intentionally–meaning BOTH that it provokes a strong instinctive reaction AND that the reaction is probably an overreaction). But which congruence is important? Male/female expectations? Some sort of academic expectation about keeping your opinions modest if you haven’t read the whole thing?

And when reflecting on that it gives me a lot more appreciation for the congruence side. Some of it would seem to be about ‘norms’ and such–which I can respect greatly.

Part of my problem with congruence styles is that I don’t properly understand the points where justice come into the discussion for that style.

So I can understand that from a classic liberal you would hear something like: “it isn’t fair to exclude Gwen (an individual who among her many groups is in the group ‘female’) from the academic world (definitely a group) which is allegedly supposed to be about mental pursuits (group definition probably really contentious) based on her group affiliation of female. You should judge her (the individual) for her fitness in the academic world (group) based only on characteristics which are actually pertinent to the group (femaleness not being one of them).”

I think the congruence analog goes something like: Females (a group) shouldn’t be excluded from the academic world (group).

But I have trouble going further without retreating to the individual. We clearly don’t want to include baby females, so maybe I should have said women. We probably don’t want to include illiterate women so maybe I should have said ‘literate women’. But when we start narrowing the groups we get closer and closer to what I see as judging someone as an individual.

And when we start talking groups there gets to be fights about levels of abstraction. We talk about affirmative action in universities in the US as being for letting in more ‘minorities’ (group). But of course we don’t mean most Asian minorities because obviously not. We have to actively discriminate against individuals who find themselves in the Chinese or Japanese groups or else we will have “too many” of them. It seems to me that all talk about rights is highly contingent, but that congruence discussions of rights end up turning into huge fights about which ‘group’ really counts. It isn’t at all clear by the way that congruence concepts really favor minority groups. That is how progressive congruence types market it, but I don’t really see where that comes from UNLESS maybe you see them as building on the foundation of already-presumed-to-be-important individual rights. (Which I think may be where Lupita is going).

I make judgments by my lights because those are the only ones closest enough to me that I can see by them. […] What about this idea that [Americans] have a mental tic of putting groups only in the individual box or in the state box? But if I could help just Americans – and people who think like Americans – to get their heads on a bit straighter about this, I’d take that as a win.

OK, tell me if I got this right. Am I right to believe you are saying “Given that some people – broadly speaking Anglo-American whose socio-political persona is the product of the historical process of individuation under the auspices of liberal political philosophy in the dual emergence among some Western polities of the notion of individual and State – tend to mentally categorize in an individual vs. state dichotomy, let me try to have them think straight about their preferred dichotomy.”

To which I respond, all good and fine, but wouldn’t it help even these people (not to mention others) even more if they learned to realize that other mental framing are possible (say the artistic public vs. lord/vassal dichotomy), that other people do actually think by them, that some dilemma of their preferred dichotomy disappear under alternate framing and that part of their puzzlement at some conundrums stems more form their reflexive assumptions than from the inherent logic of the social world (I like very much b9n10t’s advice @137 to be push and pull, for instance )? Or maybe that is precisely what Levy’s book is doing, at least from a historical perspective (per your 127), and I’m just asking for exactly what he has done.

Just throw a rock at human history and culture and you’ll probably hit something illiberal. Not that it’s not interesting, but it’s not an example of how to make liberalism work.

I think we are making progress in pin-pointing where we differ.

I believe that in this quotation, you equivocate between two sense of “liberalism” and that is precisely this equivocation that I want to tease out. In the first sentence, you seem to use liberal as a historical and culture-specific property, as you seem to be saying that a mental organization of social forms in the two categories of artistic public (in Ikegami’s technical sense of public, but let us assume that it is reasonably close to the usual one) and lord/vassal bond – which I propose we assume for the sake of the argument to be the predominant mode of analysis for Japanese people – would be illiberal. I take that to mean that liberalism, as understood in the first sentence, refers precisely to the point of view on the social world who gradually emerged in the Anglo-American world in a context of the dual emergence of the notion of individual and of the notion of the sovereign state in the 17th-19th century interval, a precise historically and socially grounded outlook on the social world (and a very legitimate use of liberalism, IMHO).

But in the second sentence, by declaring that conducting an analysis using the first illiberal frame would not be an example of how liberalism work, you seem to revert to an equally legitimate but much more general use of liberalism: one broadly defined by the existence of state organized around a liberal constitution. Why do I say so? Because Japanese live in a liberal democracy, that’s why! Hell, their ever dominant party is even called the Liberal Democratic Party, and even though the usual joke about the Holy Roman Empire applies (neither liberal, nor democratic, nor a party), that should count for something in terms of their own self-representation. So, for them at least, making liberalism (in the second sense) works mean making liberalism in the second sense work for people who have an illiberal (in the first sense) outlook on the social world.

Let me repeat that so you don’t miss it: for contemporary Japanese people, making liberalism work means making liberalism work for people who categorize the social world in public vs. lord/vassal bonds. That, for them, is making liberalism works. Making liberalism work for people who categorize the social world in an individual vs. state frame would not mean making liberalism work for them.

That distinction is what I’m trying you to convey to you. If you want to make liberalism in the second general sense work, you should first learn to recognize that people might not have a liberal-in-the-first-sense outlook on the world. And this realization is, I believe, important even if you are interested only in making liberalism-2 work for people having a liberal-1 outlook on the social world, for reasons I already explained several times in this thread but at which I nevertheless have another go, seeing how unclear I evidently was. With the liberal-1 outlook on the social world comes a lot of baggage, some good, some bad, most of it neutral from a moral and philosophical point of view, and we don’t want to mistake the narrow logic of liberalism-2 (the one which applies equally well to present day USA and present day Japan) with the more finely textured logic of liberalism-1 (which applied only to present day USA), because confusion is intellectually bad, and because mixing them up often leads to equally unsavory outcomes: people who like liberalism-2 might deny that liberalism-1 has decidedly dark undertones or, worse, feel that a criticism (actual or perceived) of liberalism-1 is an attack on their dearly held liberalism-2 values, people establish liberal-1 institutions and believe that they are liberal-2 institutions, people who perceive the dark side of liberalism-1 reject liberalism-2, people who believe equally in liberalism-1 and liberalism-2 decry as anti-liberal-2 people who are merely not liberal-1 while the latter reply that such an accusation is decidedly anti-liberal-2, and that the former are the real anti-liberal etc.

That clarification made

What is tricky is coming up with something that is 1) new; 2) consistent with the liberal framework we are actually operating within, and to which I see no more attractive alternatives; 3) treats groups as groups.

Which sense of “liberal framework we are actually operating within” did you use? 1 or 2? (And if you meant in the 1 sense, could you stop using the pronoun we? The framework I operate within is certainly liberal, yet it looks nothing like liberalism-1. Damn, don’t you feel similarly not quite part of the We as an American living in Singapore?) In either case, the task is, as you note, already quite tricky. I believe it is essentially impossible if you don’t specify.

“Val, when someone gives you the last word, it’s generally considered polite to take just one!”

Yes, but you were wrong on the internet!

I don’t suppose this debate is going to be resolved on this thread so I think I will leave it there.

Also – apols for multiple comments (this is what happens when you write short snappy comments but I still think it’s better than being long winded)

SH – why do I think I’m being patronised as a woman rather than just as a person? 5000 years of patriarchy maybe?

JH – we’re talking about social organisation which by definition involves more than one person (possibly that comment sums up everything that’s wrong with America, although I must admit it’s not confined to men, since I read a female Trump supporter yesterday complaining that the problem with Obamacare is that her money goes towards other people’s care)

“I’m saying: what kind of imperfect, abstract framework can we overlay on our reading of the news everyday to make our thinking about groups and their place in a healthy liberal democracy better? (Not perfect, just less dumb?)”

I’m saying: “thinking like a planet” (Joni Seager, 1993). But that might involve thinking about something better (not worse, as you seem to imagine) than liberal democracy.

In my experience, when somebody announces ‘I am giving you the last word’, more often than not it is not true; I have learned to be deeply suspicious of such announcements.

Commuting is a state-enforced abridgment to each citizens right of free association.

That is all.

1) Course, going post-all, I would throw language and desire/affects as mediations between perceptions/body and groups.

2) To be honest, the “state” is a level of abstraction too high for me, with way too many mediations below it, from Trump to SCOTUS to an army division to a park ranger. Might be fun to replace the state at the top of my Greimas square with particular issues interests and contests, like immigration or gay marriage.

If only the rest of the world could be like Australia…

In fact if there was an international prize for total comprehensive stuff up, England should win it.

But we have spent thousands of words talking about this collectivism stuff at CT
Healthcare
Gun control
Anti discrimination laws
Anti hate speech laws
Universal parental leave
Minimum wage
Etc etc

I think almost any political expert would tell you that Australia is more collective and has a more egalitarian ethos than America.

I am inviting a rebuke from engels again, but I was chatting to a guy from Florida on the tram once, and he said to me ‘ordinary people live like kings and queens in Melbourne’. He was just a visitor so obviously he didn’t really know, but there was something that struck him that way, I suppose.

Don’t want to turn this into the Australia thread but, this:

he said to me ‘ordinary people live like kings and queens in Melbourne’.
Strikes me as not so obviously true, as someone living in Melbourne. (As I’m teaching Australian labour/employment law right now, some of the other comments are not so obviously distinctive or pro-Australia to my mind either, but I don’t have time to go into details – I have to prepare for lectures!) On beer, I’ll say that Coopers is barely drinkable. The mico brews have a long way to go, and are expensive. People are trying, and there are some good ones, just that the average quality is a lot lower. It’s not the most important thing about a country. But, I wish it were different.

Val@171: I remember you arguing that most of the population of London should be expelled, for ecological reasons. I fear that if you were forbid in supreme power, you would comprehensively stuff up England beyond any previously imaginable limits.

Incidentally, if it comes to “an international prize for total comprehensive stuff up”, in your opinion how does England compare to Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Russia, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Nazi Germany, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Venezuela … needs I go on?

“I am an Australian woman” is not necessarily the right answer.

Been meaning to raise the question whether whatever rights to join an associative group are symmetrical with rights to leave a congruence group? Or are they the same thing differently viewed?

I have insomnia, so have been whiling away the time reading definitions of “collective”. I think John Holbo may be right, it is rather abstract. There’s a cultural definition on which Australia comes out very close to the US, and an economic definition, on which again I think we’d come out quite close to the US.

The way I was using it was the existence of laws and practices that promote the common good, even though some of them may restrict individual freedoms. That may be a bit of an idiosyncratic definition though because I can’t seem to find anyone else defining it that way.

I guess Matt’s “Benthamism” may be nearer the mark, in terms of promoting the ‘general welfare’ (rather than utilitarianism, which is a bit too mixed in meaning for this context I think). Certainly here it’s widely believed that we have a lot of laws which arguably restrict some freedoms, but which are accepted widely here and often adopted earlier than other countries. To the previous list, I could add:

Seat belt legislation (early)
Anti-tobacco and anti-smoking laws, including plain packaging (first in world I think)
Compulsory voting (Matt you probably would have seen the headlines that now about 96% are registered to vote?)
Bike helmet laws (controversial!)

Val, did it ever occur to you that as a white Australian your connection to, responsibility for and enrichment from the British empire is every bit as great as mine?

@Stephen: “I remember you arguing that most of the population of London should be expelled, for ecological reasons.”

No, you have your Aussies mixed up. That was ZM with the London thing.

Having read the OP more thoroughly on the long drive from Montreal to Boston, instead of “Contrapolitanism” or another 30 pages of “The Goldfinch,” I think this suggests a big problem:

most of us – I’ll wager – subscribe to the view that life in a modern liberal democratic society is like this: there are citizens and there is the state.

What reason is there to think this? I take it, that is, that you mean that you expect your readers, here at CT, to think things should be “simply citizens and the state”, with no groups. Not even “family” or “community.” Thus, you go on to try to persuade them that there should also be groups. But why should you think your audience believes this? My first guess would be because they’re typical Americans–this thought seems to have occurred to other commenters, as well. But the idea that on a scale from 0 to 100 of groupishness, Americans should be at 0, doesn’t fit with my experience. I don’t think even the rhetoric of extreme anti-groupishness is common, except maybe among certain academics (of more or less Rawlsian views), strawmanning people who think THEY understand groups but that some OTHER group is too individualistic, and under-50 libertarian or propertarian right-wingers. Trying to find the ideal mix of individual and group in the state may be fun, but in terms of politics right now, failing to understand where the median groupishness-level lies, and what that means for electoral politics and political rhetoric, seems more consequential.

I mean I know this is going OT but surely you cannot deny this is a stuff up of the highest order:

Poll finds that 60% of Britons want to keep their EU citizenship https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/01/poll-european-eu-rights-brexit

Sorry – you didn’t have typos – my comment did but that’s irrelevant.

‘People’ is understood, in an ultimate legal and normative sense, individualistically.

Liberalism-2 in the sense of my 147, in other words. Or liberalism as in the preamble of the Wikipedia definition, if you like that more.

Generalizing: when I point out that, constitutionally, intermediate groups don’t get a very clear look-in – only citizens and the state do –[…] It’s just that their place isn’t clarified as much as we might have assumed.

And bam, there you did it again. A clear look-in by whom? Clarified by whom? By the constitutional order? Sure. By the actual people inhabiting that constitutional order? not necessarily. The Japanese Constitution is every bit as liberal as the American one, so it is every bit as fuzzy on what groups should be constitutionally, but the Japanese people did get groups a clear look-in, a better one arguably than to the notion “individuals” and “state”. So the place of groups, if it has not been clarified by the abstract document, might be perfectly clear to the people, and if it is not, it might be unclear for totally different reasons than those making the constitutional document unclear on that point.

We end up thinking of them as big individuals or mini-states, because those are the slots we have pre-prepared for stuff to go in.

Please John, no, we don’t. Maybe you feel like that. But I assure you I certainly don’t. And I bet I’m not the only one in the world and not even the only one in this thread (hello Lupita!). I mean, from time to time, coming from a totally different cultural world than the main posters must have some perks.

What prepared some of us (human beings) to think of groups as big individuals or mini-states is not the way a particular constitutional order is set up*, it is a historically and socially specific process which is arguably true of most current English speaking person, but which is strictly true essentially mostly for them, and which is decidedly false for a good number of people who nevertheless live within and subscribe to a liberal system of democracy as understood in your Wikipedia definition (me, for instance).

So basically I was saying, for discussion purposes: assume a first paragraph of Wikipedia-grade understanding of liberal democracy.

And I’m OK with that, but not with the much stronger move which then consists in taking this Wikipedia-grade understanding and then somehow implying (or even asserting) that this Wikipedia-grade understanding somehow influences the way “we” think about the social world at some deep cognitive level as if this was unproblematic. It might do so, it sometimes do so, certainly. But it does not always do so.

*That’s exactly the point Tocqueville makes in Democracy in America and then again more forcefully in Rapport de… Démocratie en Suisse which I quoted above.

States guarantee the rights and liberties of the persons within them. They are the primary rights holders. Not churches. Not clans. Not races. Not guilds. Not genders. Not families. Individuals.

This is an interesting and important point (that could have been put clearly much sooner!) If you talk to, say, Catholic legal theorists who are first “Catholic”, that is, not ones who are liberals who happen to be Catholic, they want to talk about the “freedom of the church” much more than “freedom of religion” or “freedom of conscience”. And, they have been able to make a bit of headway (though only a bit) in this direction in the US. It’s a fundamentally ill-liberal move. But, it’s one that various groups often want. Now, liberalism can accept groups being illiberal internally. (Rawls, who I think is getting short shrift in this post, notes this.) But, it requires that there be boundaries on group control. Contrast this with, say, the way groups worked in the Ottoman Empire for a different view. I’d be very surprised if more than a tiny handful of people who read this blog would object to the liberal position, if they thought it through carefully.

(I actually think that Levey, as presented by Holbo, at least, underplays the way that groups get a lot of attention in recent liberal political philosophy and theory – certainly in my work, but then, I draw on the work of lots and lots of others. Even the presentation of Rawls here seems to me to be a caricature, although a common one.)

John Holbo @ 198

So you are talking within a discourse of liberalism, which you assume everyone shares, even though you are talking to an audience which includes Marxists, feminists, ecofeminists, cross-cultural theorists, probably theorists of racialised oppression, and so on – none of which theoretical perspectives accepts your framing of people as citizen/individualists and all of which in different ways assume that human beings are born and constituted within existing relationships of unequal power.

And yet you seemingly expect us all to agree with you, and if we don’t, you not too subtly suggest we are whackos who believe some truly, madly, deeply odd things.

It’s just not entirely convincing.

This is a deeply odd thing, don’t you think?

“So, for example, white people should be ruled by a head white person who perhaps gets to dictate that white people not be race traitors and such. (And Asian people get one of those too – fair is fair! – and black people, etc.) And then the head white person and the head black person, etc. both meet with the President and they hammer out harmonious deals”

Val, It sounds like you agreed with John’s assumption, actually, that “we” (Americans) are at 0 on the scale. That’s what I’m questioning.

Val and John, I’m not pretending I know what the ideal place on the scale is, or where any one group of people is. I’m questioning the utility of talking like “of course we’re all at 0,” when maybe what “we” really mean is something more like “I know you young’uns are at about 80 and I’d like to show you that philosophy says you ought to be at 0, really,” without being clear that’s what’s happening.

I know it’s much easier for white male professors to say to a female or nonwhite student “oh you disagree with me because you want more groupiness, you should really either stop disagreeing or find a more “identity-oriented” prof for yourself.” But I’m too old for that, and that’s not what my disagreement is. I actually think we should realize that real existing liberalism is not the negation of everything that might be called feudal, but has its own values, norms, and groups. I also think “but there are groups!” is usually tossed around in a specious way, as a kind of debating technique. If we think of groups, unless they’re each absolutely egalitarian, they are all going to have different ways of describing who’s right in a situation, and I think “groups!” is usually a way of shutting down discussion of which description is right.

(In my first comment I was mostly expressing frustration with commenters who were pretending they’d never heard anyone talk about the things Val did, or who maybe thought a woman talking here must have no morals and thus not know anything about “group behavior”, or something.)

But this way of focusing on Kantian or Rawlsian liberalism, as if we were focusing on the ideology of our own nation, when in fact most people are taught from childhood to distrust it, creates a distorted view of the electorate and of the political possibilities we have plausibly open to us.

I think I’ve been accused of this twice now, by you and engels (?). Can you point to where I said this, because I think it’s something engels made up.

No, what I once mentioned on a previous thread (readily googlable) was someone had said that. You assumed that I was talking about you and vehemently denied you had. So as usual you’re the person who’s making things up.

I really don’t want to sound too harsh but

I guess I’m just sort of vexed by the implication that, because I’m constructing this particular abstract argument, I’m just burrowing down into my own perspective.

The implication is straightforward, and I laid it down clearly several times already: you start with a reasonable assumption that liberalism-2 is a given, you then move on and the very first step you take is treat it as if that implied “we” should predominantly see things through the lens of liberalism-1. That is burrowing yourself down into your own perspective, or at the very least you are committing a fallacy of laying one of your hypothesis unspecified and implicit, as your reasoning at the moment admits (or so I claim) clear counter-examples: many people re happy to make your first assumption of liberalism-2 but do not share your opinion on how that conditions us to look at the social world.

What makes you think I am?

Your reliance on how “we” think in a certain way because those are the slots we have pre-prepared for stuff to go in. How is that not burrowing yourself in your own perspective? What I find odd is that burrowing oneself in one’s own perspective is fine, and I’ve said as much in my very first comment on this thread already, so that’s OK, John, especially if you don’t see a way out of the Burrow!

But I don’t understand why you seemingly deny that is what you are doing (hypothetically, of course I could be all wrong about how different people have different slots pre-prepared for them depending on specific historical and social conditions; I mean if you actually think the slots individual vs. state are really the one we human beings or we human beings living in liberal democracies are pre-prepared for, then fine, one of us at least would be wrong and I wouldn’t presume it is you, because I’m modest like that, but you don’t seem to believe that – or do you? – and certainly you didn’t specifically argue that – or did you?).

John, okay, that’s not what you’re getting at. But it seems to be part of the Niskanen/Wilkinson/Levy shtick: the point of this discussion is to move you (that is, presumably, me) from your/my liberal ultra-individualism to this better place where we recognize the importance of groups (but never, ever name those groups or discuss their nature and requirements in detail, not here).

I mean, we get only so many topoi to choose among. We get “(America sucks because) Americans are too individualistic.” Or “things are less individualistic than you think.” Or “we can only start from where we are, and individualism is false, therefore where I have started from is also where you necessarily are starting from.” Or “the Internet is immature and hasn’t come into a mature understanding of the true way of groups, at least not yet.” So your comments sections invariably end up as one of those, instead of each person looking at the nuances of the text to come to her or his own understanding of the truth–we’re not mostly tenured philosophers after all.

You can have ‘cultural rights’ or ‘group rights’, as primary, for example. You may have specific groups that you want to give constitutional status of a special sort. I’m not in principle opposed to that, but it’s a dicey move and one whose merits I would propose to weigh and measure once we see this important point about how treating groups as groups is hard. Why are we treating this group as special?

I’ll assume John Holbo pressed the “summon-Lupita-button” since I was the one who brought up group rights.

The reason we should treat social groups (not demographic groups) as special is because people need them to be healthy and happy and if they are destroyed people start to have mental disorders, do drugs, commit suicide, become refugees, and get sick. This is why the first and foremost collective right is that of self-determination. Nations should not be destroyed by other more powerful ones. There is also the collective right to the resources of a group’s territory: other, more powerful states should not take them, for example, in payment for debt. As to cultural rights, language groups should be able to use a legal system in the same language used at home and socially, that is, no powerful state can colonize a nation and institute a legal system in its own language.

In short, collective rights, if respected, protect collectives from colonialism, imperialism, global neoliberalism, and other forms of injustice and oppresion. They are very un-American, basically third-world stuff.

So, for example, white people should be ruled by a head white person who perhaps gets to dictate that white people not be race traitors and such. (And Asian people get one of those too – fair is fair! – and black people, etc.)

This is a fair description of a racial corporatist political structure. Mexico had a similar structure for decades, but instead of racial groups, the PRI organized people by “sectors” that included agricultural workers, health workers, communications workers, etc., and a very stable system it was since it lasted seven decades. The head of each sector was very powerful and could negotiate on behalf of his/her non-voluntary members or sell them out for personal gain. The system was very rigid (a “perfect dictatorship” Mario Vargas Llosa famously called it) but, initially, it did bring peace and stability to the country after the Revolution. Then it imploded.

What you describe is a similar system but based on race, as defined by the state, with membership to each race similarly non-voluntary (one-drop rule; Africans, Europeans, and Latin Americans who never identified as black, white, and Hispanic respectively until they reached American shores and learned; the re-branding of the Hispanic ethnic group to a race for the 2020 census), caucuses organized by race in congress and in political parties to represent whole racial categories, and race-based groups throughout society. This race-based corporatist system is just as rigid as the Mexican PRI, equally prone to corrupt charlatans, but did help de-segregate society. It seems about to implode.

My point is, we must carefully distinguish between corporatism and social groups which is easy if we ask the following question: Who created, legitimized, and gave these groups power, the state or society?

If everyone always thinks primarily in racial terms, that’s collectivism.

Since the state defined, instituted, and legitimized racial groups in the US, and quantifies them, I would call it corporatism.

John Holbo and bianca

I don’t think I’m working within your framework about ‘how groupish is America’, although it might seem like it at points. I’m saying that citizens/individuals and the state is not a useful framework for understanding the problems facing America. Indeed I think it’s part of those problems.

One thing that’s really unhelpful is the suggestion that if people aren’t completely on board with liberal democracy, they must want something worse, or possibly even ridiculous.

Question (for John Holbo) – how might your post (or your reasoning in general) be different if you assumed that people who don’t want liberal democracy want something better than liberal democracy?

So maybe the problem isn’t just with your concept of the individual, but also that you have substituted the concept of the ‘state’ for the concept of ‘we the people’.

I’ve resisted the urge to play Marshall McLuhan and interrupt the conversation. I just want to pop in with an offer: I have a new batch of copies of the book thanks to the paperback coming out. If there are students (undergrad, grad, postdoc) who’ve read this and decided that the book might be relevant and useful to their research, send me an e-mail with a brief note about what you’re working on, and your snail mail address. I could send out comp copies to several students so situated. First come, first served.

(The offer is not limited to people who think they might want to draw on the book favorably, of course. A useful foil is still useful.)

Val: you have substituted the concept of the ‘state’ for the concept of ‘we the people’.

John Holbo: I don’t think so. The state is ideally supposed to be just ‘the people’

I agree with Val that they are distinct groups with distinct rights and obligations. For example, the Declaration of Independence grants the people the right to overthrow the government and the constitution grants the state (congress, specifically) the right to declare war.

Madame Bovary, c’est moi!

Val: I haven’t done a close textual analysis of all your posts here, but I’m pretty sure – I’d probably wager – that nearly all the examples you have given of alternatives to liberal democracy are ones that you, John Holbo, think are ‘worse’ than liberal democracy. So it looks like you’re loading the dice, as well as smuggling.

A close textual analysis reveals that the examples of alternatives to liberal democracy John Holbo has mentioned are: neo-feudal system, depriving my fellow citizens of rights and liberties @OP, guild privileges or feudalism or theocracy or race-based government or a dictatorship of the Proletariat @56, Catholic monarchist, one-world government communist @107, and fascists, antifa, communist one-world-staters @198. He repeats some of those, but listed are his first mentions.

John Holbo: I don’t think I’m especially incapable of wrapping my poor brain around radical alternatives to the contemporary US. I just don’t advocate them. I don’t see any alternative that I think would be fundamentally different AND fundamentally better AND you can get there from here.

One way to see it is that liberal democracies got the liberté bit first with bills and declarations of rights and then worked on the egalité part with public education, transportation, pensions, and health, progressive income tax, unemployment insurance, etc. An alternative, and one that I advocate, has to do with adding fraternité, that is, ending wars, militarism, arms trafficking and American global hegemony and guaranteeing absolutely every human being on earth, at the very least, food, shelter, running water, electricity, health care, and education. We have the resources. If one wants to get really radical, throw in a free cell phone and internet connection. And, of course, guarantee third generation rights of self-determination, control over resources, and social, cultural, and economic development to all nations and ethnic groups. I am sure we all can come up with measures that would ensure more solidarity among all human beings at the local, national, and global levels.

John Holbo: As to loading dice, doesn’t it depend on the objective incidence of alternatives to liberal democracy being worse than it?

That is kind of End of History, no? I am sure that next millennium people will look back at us and declare how inferior our global system of perpetual war, millions of dead, millions of refugees, hunger, ecological devastation, and financial crises was, how utterly barbaric and stupid we were. Let’s not go there and declare systems of the past as inferior options (feudalism was better than the chaos brought by the fall of Rome). Instead of feeling superior to societies past and glorifying the present, let’s think of how we can improve things for future generations.

Lupita and John Holbo

I think the reason we may be getting a bit confused here is again because of problems of definition. Looking at various definitions of the state (Wikipedia and elsewhere) it can mean the whole community under one political system (ie all the people) or the mechanisms and structures of government/governance. It seems to be used both ways.

So let’s say you (Holbo) were using state to mean ‘all the people of the state’ and by citizens you meant ‘the individual persons of the state’ (including as I said before those who don’t have citizenship or don’t have full citizenship).

So what you (Holbo) are talking about is the rights of the individual persons in the big group of people who comprise the state, versus the rights of all the people in the big group. (It’s easy to see how this could be made into a tautology, which would be funny, but wrong). The rights of individuals versus the rights of collectives, as I was trying to say.

(And then of course there’s the rights of other species and ecosystems but I won’t go there just now)

And then you’re saying there’s also a lot of smaller groups and how do they fit into this picture?

And from there I’d have to go back and re-read the post.

The next problem in the OP is about liberal democracy and whether it’s ok or not but we’ve already talked about that, so maybe we coukd just add that it may not be the best system but anyway moving on ..

Then after that the next problem is the issue about groups and identity.

“This is a timely issue: identity politics and groupthink and partisanship and tribalism
… Everyone sees bad groups – bad identity formations – they don’t like. But everyone is also attached to groups they like.”

I’ve fulminated at length on CT about the way people use “identity” to talk about issues like gender, race and power, but I don’t seem to get anywhere. So I’ll just have to do it again!

What work is “identity” doing here? Is the person (or group) who protests about being seen as inferior because they are female or black or Jewish the same as the neonazi or white supremacist who claims that women and blacks and Jews are inferior?

Just a fixed link for Val’s post above

https://www.fastcompany.com/40457258/this-urban-farming-accelerator-wants-to-let-10000-new-farms-bloom

Great way to solve London’s housing crisis: fill empty lots with shipping containers where yuppies can grow their own kale…

My point remains the same as it was on my very first comment: there are constitutional orders and there are cognitive dispositions. You seem to treat as a given the fact that a specific constitutional order (liberal democratic, the only one I ever discussed in this thread) yields specific cognitive dispositions (“the slots we have pre-prepared for stuff to go in”). See for instance your 45 or “It’s hard to theorize the intermediate space for them in liberal democracy, as we understand it”. I disagree. In fact, I believe this statement to be clearly false: Japanese people live under a liberal democratic constitutional order and do not share said specific cognitive disposition, or so have argued at length C.Nakane and E.Ikegami (among many others) in highly respected books. That doesn’t end the argument, of course, but as far as I can tell, you never offered any argument in favor of your position, if you actually hold it, as if it were completely obvious.

Sometimes in this thread you have expressed a qualified position: that for some people – Americans, for instance, and philosophers (!) – operating within a specific constitutional order yields a specific cognitive disposition. I still disagree (I believe that the cognitive disposition and the constitutional order are both consequences of something else, so I agree that, in fact consider obvious that, they co-vary; but I am doubtful about the existence of a causation, in either direction, and especially in the one you assert). Again, as far as I can see, you did not offer any argument for your position, as if it were obvious.

You are entitled to believe that there exists a causation from the liberal democratic constitutional order to a cognitive disposition making it hard to think about the entity group as group because of the binary opposition state/individual, or that it sometimes exist (sometimes in a statistically non-trivial sense; even I am ready to believe that there exists one individual on Earth whose thinking about groups in terms of government or individual has followed causally from his living in a liberal democratic order). You are entitled to believe that this is so obviously true that it doesn’t merit any explanation or argument, so that for example you can presume your interlocutor shares them (as you did with Val in your 157). That is fine. Maybe you do not actually believe in such a causation and I mistakenly deduce from the quotes above that you did. Please pull me quickly out of this embarrassing misunderstanding if that is the case.

But could you at least acknowledge that my specific disagreement with you in this thread has been about the belief in such a causation which I understood you to hold, and which I don’t? That this, not something else, is what I am disagreeing with you about?

This is an interesting topic, you wrote a thoughtful text about it. Thanks. Even greater thanks to Jacob Levy for his very generous offer which I hope many students will seize. Now, what I would like (a lot, I know) is for you to correctly characterize what I said about it before writing that I claimed you didn’t know where babies came from, or that I claimed other cultural outlook are superior or less contradictory, or that I want you to imagine radical alternatives to the US or to advocate for them, or that I claimed you didn’t know or can’t think about guilds, medieval corporations and medieval Parliaments, or that I’m accusing you of gazing at your navel.

In one of your comments you said you couldn’t think of anything better than liberal democracy, or something like that, which sounded a bit like Fukuyama’s thesis – that’s how I interpreted Lupita’s remark, anyway.

Even 45% is a bit “WTF?!”, I think!

John Holbo
“Or are you saying that you think the LGM is a bad post because it uses the word ‘identity’. ”

Of course not. I’m recommending it because it explains what is wrong with the term ‘identity politics’.

I’m really disappointed with the way you’re conducting this discussion. Let’s leave it at that.

That sounds ungrateful, so I should add that I really appreciate your readiness to engage with commenters, I just don’t understand why you keep misinterpreting and dismissing what I’m saying. As others have said, it is sometimes hard to understand what I’m getting at, but no one else seems to misinterpret me as often as you do. It feels as if you don’t respect me.

And when someone says that “yours seems dangerously close to” it is obviously open to you to defend it and I think most people would see it that way rather than as ‘I’m being accused of …’. I understand that anyone might get defensive with this level of criticism and scrutiny, but anyway as I said I feel this is a bit of a lost cause.

One thing you know there are a lot of people in these threads saying ‘Americans you’re doing something wrong’ (eg see the arguments with Layman in another post), which is also what I’m suggesting here. Again it’s not nice to hear, and no one at CT would think they were responsible for Trump, but maybe when people are telling you that your culture is too individualistic and not enough concerned with common good and structures of unfair power, it would be worth listening.

Let’s just leave it that you’re absolutely right and I’m absolutely wrong then, shall we?

Ah well – I think I was talking about your post – I may have missed some of your points, but I also think Bob was right about incommensurate discourses.

It’s a big problem for the progressive side of politics, this lack of communication, but you have not (of course) convinced me that in this case it’s all my fault.

I have read Levy’s “Rationalism, Pluralism, Freedom” (and, fwiw, his “The Multiculturalism of Fear”) with, I hope, some profit. One would, I suspect,
need to be either much smarter or much dumber than I (believe I) am not
learn something from Levy’s work(s), though one surely need not care (much)
about the issues he discusses.

Having now worked my way through the OP and this thread, I find myself in basic agreement with Layman @ 214 (though I must confess that I do not use ‘disinterest’ in this way–not that there’s anything wrong with that.):

“I have been frankly mystified that there was any controversy to the formulation in the original OP. That an essay which is entirely about the difficulty in striking a balance between individual and group rights should result in claims that the author is uninterested in group rights is, well, absurd. That those claims should also imply that this imagined disinterest is the result of his gender (or race, or culture) actually blows my mind. WTF?”

I might add that the OP seemed to me a fair summary of (a/the major point of) the Levy book–RC

There’s an old joke about the person who asks for directions and gets told “I wouldn’t start from here.”

We might make an analytical distinction between (a) someone who seeks to replace liberal democracy with some other system they think will work better; and (b) someone who thinks the mountain of philosophical thought used to legitimize liberal democracy is a bit unconvincing, viewed as an argument. You can, of course, attempt both at the same time. But on the other hand, you can question the validity of an argument that p->q without doubting q.

I get the feeling from the some of the above discussion that what we ought to be saying to John H is that we don’t care for being stuck in the hole he seems to have got himself in by accepting his basic assumptions.

Everything in 272 is wrong.

I think I want to apologize to Z, who knows much more about Japan and post-structuralism than I do.”Disposition” aka dispositif is probably pretty good, to the extent I understand the concept. I am always looking for as much agency and complicity as I can find in social structures, because I think a recognition of agency and complicity is necessary for revolution…and maybe compassion. “Disposition” struck me as possibly too close to “natural inclination.”

Understanding Society i sa good meta-sociology blog.

278: Not really. The Wiki Entry
gives hints. Consider “Analytic philosophy is often understood in contrast to other philosophical traditions, most notably continental philosophies such as existentialism and phenomenology, and also Thomism and Marxism.” food for thought, as in if the contrast is unique to each or common to all. John Emerson used a historical or genealogical critique. Mine is more ontological, but even “only subjective and personal” would be adequate from my perspective.

There are not many names on that page I have found useful. And there are a lot of names with differing perspectives, many of which I have read.

We aren’t really going to do this here, are we? The analytic/continental thing? It isn’t, specifically something I so little interest in, though of course some the issues arise constantly, for instance where Habermas and Honneth went wrong.

Here’s a Discussion of Leiter

Moi:”My definition of continental philosophy is: the school of philosophy that only makes sense after dropping acid 😀”

Works for me, and is a very good argument. Everybody needs to take more acid.

or

re Leiter’s book “Hermeneutics of Suspicion?”…”these being Deleuze (who is not even named in the book), Klossowski (not named), Irigaray (who is dismissed in a single sentence), Ricoeur (dismissed in two or three sentences), Adorno (who Leiter concedes to social theory but not philosophy), Jameson (likewise), and so on. In THAT sense, those names that make up an imagined core of an imagined genre of philosophy are not good, in Leiter’s view, in terms of what they offer to the advancement of the field.”

Fuck the analytics. Hard.

This is a more concise and clear argument

“The analytical thinker’s wet dream is to someday wake up with a book, where each and every problem that troubled mankind in any time is neatly analysed away and replaced by some basic axioms of formal logic, so that all those questions can be forgotten and each and everyone can live their lives without having to go through the pains of philosophy, religion and other headaches. It’s much more utopian than it admits and – as the quote above implies – bears more problems than it admits to”

Jameson: “Form is political”

There are not many names on that page I have found useful.

That wouldn’t surprise me. What surprised me is that

analytic philosophy… is designed in its very logic and language to erase difference

which means it’s worse than I realised, even after having been hollered at by John Emerson about it back in the day.

(The ‘wet dream’ comment by the German MA student has been duly noted.)

John, thank you very much for the clarification, that is very helpful, now I feel I understand where I erred in attributing some positions to you and my objections correlatively vanish. So two rare events happened in this thread: I got a positive comment from bob mcmanus and an argument was resolved on the Internet! Now, if only geo could show up… (engels, last time I heard from him, a couple of months ago already, he unfortunately sounded pretty gloomy).

Liberal democracy sets up twin sovereigns: the individual and the state.

I like to state things I believe in bold terms, not because I am convinced my beliefs are correct, but because that way there is material to disagree with. So I would slightly reformulate that sentence.

I would say that what happens is that in the context of complexification of society and especially with the spread of universal alphabetization, all the social structures that give order to pre-modern societies (groups!) are shaken to their core, if not shattered (Gauchet’s Le désenchantement du monde is good on that for the specific case of religion and religious communities, but I think the point is more general). This tends to be a deeply disturbing, and usually deeply violent, period for individuals, so I believe they then desperately look for anything within themselves and in the social world to restructure society. Within the particular socio-historical context of part of the Western world, that something were Individuals and States as understood by liberal philosophy (so compared to your pithy formulation, I interchanged the chronological order and specified an actual agent for the verb “institute”).

J-D 188 +1

kidneystones 204: I never expected to experience this: a word of common sense from none other than ol’ kidney.

I am conscious at times of condensing my claims about the world into abstractions with no explicit referents (though I “saw” what I was talking about in my imagination as I wrote, even as I “saw” my readers understanding what I wrote by making the same connections — though I discarded the exemplars in the interests of brevity.

Talking about the state of the world and talking about the logic of the world are, to my mind, distinct and quite different thoughtful activities. Though both may make use of abstraction to condense what is argued, and all rich arguments mix the two, they go in different directions and follow different compasses in navigating their respective paths.

In the OP, I thought Holbo was primarily interested in making statements about the world, but was strategically employing a strict abstraction foregoing examples in order to get some emotional distance, so these statements about the world became tentative hints about the nature of emotional attachments not just to group memberships, but to particular meta-narratives associated with creating those groups.

Groupishness is a strategic instrument and groups are socially constructed in the service of political contests by means of competing and contradictory narratives. That’s inherent in the analytic logic of the social politics of groups and since those narratives draw on and socially construct the political culture out of the experience of people, an experience that is always receding over the horizon of actual memory into myth and mirage, there is both path dependence and a persistence of social artifacts which may puzzle each new generation, creating a demand for new narratives creating new groups in a chaotic evolution that turns the kaleidoscope of group contention, creating new patterns.

It is interesting to me that the hoary myths of liberal democracy are being called into question by, to me, a peculiar new species of left which combines a screechy righteousness with an economic complacency even foppishness. I suppose one cannot discuss that development without taking sides and making provocative judgements, which will obscure in partisan rhetoric any insight into the process. Because the social construction of groups is both strategic and contested, it is necessarily true that emerging groups are defined both by their conscious intentions and by the criticisms and attacks of their opponents busy forming other, opposed groups. And, in the melee that follows, “complicity” as bob says.

People do not in these contests argue only or even primarily from their own interests, which are always unclothed a minority interest — in the case of the putative self-governing individual, an isolated minority of one. Back in the 18th century, that self-governing individual of liberal theory was conceptualized as a propertied head of household and a component member of a socio-economic class, a reincarnation of a Roman pater familias reborn as yeoman farmer or landed gentry ready to resurrect the synthesis of the traditional rights of Englishmen and concepts of Roman law as constitutional rights and liberties and not a naked personality, but that was before television and social media made celebrity into a source of wealth far beyond the scope of Renaissance fame as an object of ambition and one’s own self-presented nakedness a means to that end and a platform for aggression and social power.

Most of us are not on television, of course, or at the head of a twitter following exceeding triple digits. In American political culture, the triumph of the liberal political platform has made us suspicious of group identities at a time when all social affiliation has declined to low ebb. The economy has been structured around attrition of the politically and economically naked individual, who is offered not membership, not social structure but identity — a team jersey to don and a set of myths. The completely artificial and synthesized nature of “Asian-American” and “Hispanic” as cultural groups (they are not culture groups) goes unremarked even as they are used routinely as political categories and political identities.

Within the on-going political contest, partisans well-represented on CT comment threads, are inclined now to deny that anything can be meant or understood from the use of “neoliberal” or “identity politics”. That is a tactic, just as a use of those labels is a tactic. It seems like an old and obsolete argument to me already, an engagement rapidly receding into the past, back there on the path of path-dependence. As someone inclined to use “neoliberal” and “identity politics” as pejoratives, I will say that I think both were about the practice of a politics of groups that wanted to do without membership organization (by which I mean groups in which the leadership structures the group to leverage dependence on their members for resources and the construction of group interest, as opposed to leveraging resources from above to the advantage of the leadership in manipulating the “membership”).

How skeptical are we of being manipulated? Any of us. If the politics of groups is the politics of manipulation by propaganda from above, if we live in Adam Curtis’s universe in which the autonomous individual of liberal theory has evolved into a self-involved narcissist trying to construct a life out of opportunities for on-line exhibitionism and virtue-signalling (or vice-signalling — a lot of that going on!), what function is left for political organizing? Antifa seems to me like a self-licking ice cream cone of social construction of political groups. If the whole point is the drama and the self-regarding role we can play by simply having the right opinions about the drama — or the wrong opinions, if we prefer the perverse, where has power wandered off to? (In the movies, the bad guys often get better lines, so it is really not that strange that the new guest at WestWorld might choose a black hat over a white hat, is it?) Buy a Prius, or roll coal — politics as a consumer good, like soap that confers social status or provides protection against a fear of social embarrassment (you need deodorants!)

Jacob Levy seems like a nice guy, but I am suspicious of a congruence that seems to have no theory of power in politics. Authoritarianism seems like a symbolic style rather than an operating method, if it is illiberal in principle to form membership groups interested in their own economic interest. Bring me some tariffs, Trump comically demanded. Without groups, where is there to be found a constituency capable of concerted action except at the top of the economic pyramid? Is this a design for living?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting Levy is an analytic philosopher. I did think you were. It does seem to me, however, that Val’s criticism of you is basically that you are one, and should at the very least be less “Kantian” and more “Hegelian”. I’d add that it also seems to me that you share some of the same prejudices as analytic philosophers, or at least that those prejudices affect the horizon within which you apparently feel comfortable. But I could say the same of her, to some extent, also, though probably with regard to different specific prejudices.

John Emerson said some very astute things.

Emerson got about half of it, but didn’t apparently AFAIK recognize the parallels between the first manifestation of AP in mostly Britain and the second in the Cold War. It is easy enough to see what pre-WWII Britain and post-WWII US have in common…Empire. AP is a logic of control and mystification. Of course there has to be at least one.

Dialecticians have to work in all directions at once, cause they’re required to see a totality. Working backwards/forwards from oh:

“We’re creating distinctions and difference. Now there are KFCs in Hakodate and sushi bars in Dallas. People are much more free with more choices”
“But doesn’t that eventually make, in some manner, Hakodate and Dallas the same?”

Then you try to find controlling concepts of that late capitalist process in a guiding philosophy or ontology, like maybe “universal singularity,” something that would make an analytic laugh.

Today’s book:Aime Cesaire. I am trying to study black nationalism/Marxism in order to love Obama better.

Of course Hegel.
And I also think Levy and Holbo are good guys.

Wilder: when all social affiliation has declined to low ebb.

Facebook Figured My Family Secrets But Won’t Tell Me How

The crises of late capitalism are crises of overproduction and excessive competition. It is not that we are lacking relationships, but that we have an unmanageable surfeit with more being produced by the minute. And relationships and identities are becoming a major profit center, ie., capital. Facebook owns the fixed capital and producing algorithms, which are designed to provide the raw material for us to create the product, which is ourselves. The black lesbian Democratic midwestern coder is certainly aware she is also a worker, but in order to maintain she must prioritize one or two, or thinks she does.

If, as the O/P argues, groups sit uneasily within liberal democracy as a political theory (and I agree), then perhaps the place to look is not within political theory – as in John’s Catholic Monarchist – but outside it altogether? A respectable argument could be made from an ethological/anthropological perspective as follows:

for humans, groups should the primary level of analysis, as we have evolved as a ultra-social species. Our key adaptation – language – is a group characteristic, not an individual one. In this perspective, groups individuals are the locus of various group identities, and the maintainers/changers of groups.

So states are just another form of group, and the question is what they characteristically do as groups. One thing they do is erode/disempower other groups, and so isolate the individual. Seen this way, liberal democracy is an outcome of strong states, and the political theory question is not how to curb states so as to empower individuals, it is to curb states so as to empower other groups.

I should also refer back to engels point @ 253 about married women not having a separate legal existence when the US state was first formalised – we may think that is all forgotten but I think psychologically the identification of women with the interests of family/husband is by no means just ‘history’.

I should also refer back to engels point @ 253 about married women not having a separate legal existence when the US state was first formalised

Engels, somewhat oddly, tied this to the US constitution (which is neither hear nor there on the matter) but the rule of “coverture” is an old English common law notion, which existed in all common law countries (even Australia!) until it started to be taken apart in the mid to late 19th Century (in all common law countries), though the final defeat of all parts of it took longer in some places than others. There were similar systems in “continental” “civil” legal systems as well. The idea that this has anything special to do with the US, or the subject matter of this post, seems to me to be a weird confusion. For a semi-helpful overview, see here

Ok no I’ll have one more try.

That historical view, of the white adult man as the normative citizen or normative individual, can still be traced in the way you, John Holbo, are talking about the issue today.

That’s the claim. I don’t expect you to agree with it, but do you at least understand it?

The idea that this has anything special to do with the US, or the subject matter of this post, seems to me to be a weird confusion

Fortunately it is a weird confusion that I don’t have (nor have I said nothing as far as I can see that read in charitable way suggests that I have).

I meant that at the time the Constitution came into force I think you could reasonably argue (pace John) that the family (headed by the husband), not the individual human being, was the primary conceptual unit (whether explicitly ackownledged as such or not) for liberal protection and political power versus the State, at least in some respects (voting rights, property, …) (As I said I might be missing the point, as I haven’t the post properly, or Levy…)

I think psychologically the identification of women with the interests of family/husband is by no means just ‘history

I agree with this, and I don’t think it’s just psychological either. Btw anyone who spends any time listening to British political debate might reasonably think the primary unit of concern for distributive justice in our country is the ‘hard-working family’.

I don’t get Matt’s complaint either. I don’t quite agree that couverture makes the family the primary unit of the polity; it simply negates the rights of women but an unmarried man had in principle the same political rights as a married one had he not?

JH somewhere pointed out that he specifically referred to the family as a special case of a group in the OP. His treatment there is as follows:

“The family needs to cease to be patriarchal. Same goes for churches and communities that enforce illiberal norms within their group borders. … For Okin and other ‘congruence’ theorists it’s not enough to say that these groups are voluntary, or that citizens enjoy formal right of exit upon attaining the age of majority.”

One problem with this is that belonging to a family is precisely not “voluntary”, certainly not in the sense of a bowling club or even church. And what is really meant by “the family needs to cease to be patriarchal”? Isn’t it rather that the state needs to cease to be patriarchal? What is at issue is precisely patriarchal family *law*, which for example gives the husband the right to beat children, rape the wife, denies married women economic agency, and so on. These laws were part and parcel of the modern “liberal” state and were dismantled in most places only very recently. One can surely argue that patriarchal laws violate the principles of liberalism but it seems relevant that most self-described “liberals” up to the 20th century apparently didn’t think so at all; they had no problem with a “liberal” order that was inherently patriarchal (and of course in the 19th century, many had no problem with a “liberal” slaveholder society).

Finally, an observation. the German constitution states that “Marriage and the family shall enjoy the special protection of the state”. (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/) This comes in Art. 6, after the inviolable rights of the person have been declared. Does this legal position of a liberal state prove anything either way about the status of groups vis-à-vis the state? The next clause says that “the care and upbringing of children is the natural right of parents”. Are parents rights group rights or individual rights? It seems that the OP aims at these kinds of questions but I don’t see that it sheds any light on them.

In the western democracies that actually exist (as opposed to, e/g/, science-fiction speculations by philosophers), political groups have a key role. Although voting in elections is as an individual citizen, nearly all negotiation with the state (e./g. lobbying over proposed legislation) is done by organized groups. The main principle seems to be: if you want to negotiate with the state on any issue of policy, you need to join some kind of group to do it (possibly creating a new one if necessary) because the state is not interested in dealing with you, as a single individual.

Groups seem to be a key feature of the political order as it actually exists. Indeed, the political system basically requires groups to be created, rather than trying to marginalize them.

Thus, any theory of our current democracies that leaves out groups is not taking adequate account of the facts on the ground.

Too many details close above.

General principle: history and minorities etc must be pro-actively, pre-emptively included in everything, all discourses. No assumptions of general applicability or abstraction allowed.

I don’t really understand what Val’s arguing at this point in the thread, but it looks like we largely agree (though I’d rather not use the term “patriarchy” at this moment in history) . . .

But looking back through the thread, a lot of it seems much too politically focused. When we talk about these issues (we educated humanists), mostly talking about how we each can find some kind of personal autonomy among the restrictions the world places on us, be they from the state or some “intermediate group”?

One problem with this is that belonging to a family is precisely not “voluntary”, certainly not in the sense of a bowling club or even church. And what is really meant by “the family needs to cease to be patriarchal”? Isn’t it rather that the state needs to cease to be patriarchal? What is at issue is precisely patriarchal family *law*, which for example gives the husband the right to beat children, rape the wife, denies married women economic agency, and so on. These laws were part and parcel of the modern “liberal” state and were dismantled in most places only very recently. One can surely argue that patriarchal laws violate the principles of liberalism but it seems relevant that most self-described “liberals” up to the 20th century apparently didn’t think so at all; they had no problem with a “liberal” order that was inherently patriarchal (and of course in the 19th century, many had no problem with a “liberal” slaveholder society).

Every once in a while someone (often engels, for whatever reasons) will link to this blog from, say 2006 or 07. One big difference from that time to now is that then there were a lot more professional political philosophers and theorists (and other academics) actively involved in the comments than now. Because of that, I think, there were fewer comments like the one above, which invokes some ideas that everyone who is seriously involved in political philosophy would know and take as not needing to be said. I mean, you can just, like John did over and over, briefly reference Okin’s book, to make known that we all know this stuff. Now, if you’ve never read Okin’s book, and all the literature that came after that, you are likely to miss this, and then think that basic points, that are actually being assumed in the post, need to be pointed out over and over again. But this is just likely to lead to annoyance, frustration, and confusion from people who can’t help but know that the last 30+ years of political philosophy have actually happened, even if the average Crooked Timber commentor doesn’t know this.

(This is even leaving aside all the Dunning Kruger level “discussion” of “analytic philosophy” in the comments here.)

This is a fascinating thread, and I’m late to it, but still…. The question I have, which maybe a postmodernist theoretician would be best disposed to answer, is which, if any of these marketing driven, consumer choice Wahlverwandtschaften are groups to which anyone would be willing to mutually pledge his/her life, fortune, or sacred honor? The Hell’s Angels. maybe?

Quaint, that question, but when the individual desires driving our chosen group affiliations, not to mention the rules governing the ones we’re born into, are so much in flux, and the scholars as well as the politicians are everywhere visibly scratching their heads over the implications, it doesn’t seem an impertinent or irrelevant question, at least not to an apostate like me.

Matt,

I don’t know if you’re referring to me, but if my reading is able to leave me only with a “Dunning-Kruger” level of understanding, I’m happy to walk away with my attitudes towards its practitioners intact, thank you.

I don’t think it’s unfair or even surprising to note that different *groups* would interpret the Brighouse/

SusanC@311:

Groups seem to be a key feature of the political order as it actually exists. Indeed, the political system basically requires groups to be created, rather than trying to marginalize them.

Reading this thread has been a strange experience. John Holbo points out that the official forms of liberal democracy say a lot about the powers of the state and the rights of the individual, but say little about intermediate level associations such as bowling leagues. And the collective CT commentariat cries out “Why does John Holbo hate bowling leagues?!”

A question for Val (preceded by a statement) that, if she answers it, might help clarify some positions.

States — which for these purposes can be roughly defined as governments claiming sovereignty or authority (and recognized by other governments as having authority) over a population within a particular territory — are an ubiquitous, basic feature of the contemporary world and the way it’s politically organized. (There are somewhere around 200 of these entities that comprise the basic membership of the United Nations.)

Assuming we all agree that states/governments should not torture, slaughter, or otherwise randomly or systematically grotesquely abuse the populations over which they claim sovereignty or sovereign authority, what more precisely should the relationship betw. states and the populations be? Should states’ power over populations be *formally* constrained in some way, and, if so, how, and should those constraints take the form of assigning rights to some below-the-state entities, and if so, which entities? Individuals, or groups of some kind, or what?

It’s clear, Val, that you don’t like the style in which J Holbo has chosen to address these issues, but until you make clear what your own views are at least on the basic questions just listed, I don’t think it will be entirely clear just where your disagreements w him lie.

Holbo has already acknowledged, more than once, that no one has to agree that individuals should hold formal rights ‘against’ the state (i.e. to be free from certain kinds of state control of their behavior, etc, or to be guaranteed certain kinds of process if arrested, etc etc.). But if you don’t agree with that, or agree but think it’s insufficient, then who or what should hold formal rights vs. the state? W/o knowing yr answer to that question, it’s hard to for me (and I think some others) to see where your problems w Holbo move from stylistic disagreement to actual substantive disagreement.

Now you could say “I don’t want to think about states and their relationship to populations at all. I find that conceptual framework uninteresting/uncongenial/strange/reactionary/whatever.” But if that’s yr answer, then you and JH don’t really have any grounds for even a conversation here, b/c istm one of his post’s assumptions is that this relationship (states to their populations) is worth thinking about. If you disagree w that assumption then, at least for purposes of this topic, you don’t share enough common ground w him even to have a discussion.

And yet when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution they did not write things like: “Basically what we are doing here is establishing little private tyrannies of each man over his family.” They WANTED to think of marriage as a private voluntary union whose existence harmonized with the overall individuals-state framework they were working out. (At this point TM gets mad: ‘but that’s not a correct thing for them to have thought’. And I reply: precisely, but I’m not saying it’s a good argument. It’s a bad argument. I’m just trying to say what it IS. This is what they WANTED to make sense, not what actually makes sense.)

I guess I’m disputing the inference from ‘they didn’t say it’ to ‘they didn’t think it’. Or maybe, to adapt a formulation Norman Getas made in a different context, they thought that the family group, not the human individual, was protected and primary, but they didn’t think that they thought it. To be clear, I’m not sure I want to defend this to the death, I just think it’s an interesting line of thought (apologies if it’s been discussed elsewhere and rebutted).

Another datum for our ontological underlabouring might be Mrs T:
“There is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women and there are families” (emphasis added).

323: Nah, Matt meant me, which means that either you skip my comments, good on you, or that you did read my comments and desired to have me called out by name. Which is amusing.

I did embarrass myself in places above and answer Matt’s interpellation without defensiveness or apology.

Today’s reading: Chela Sandoval. Who doesn’t show up once in umpteen years of CT. Bad book? Am I in the wrong place? Why don’t I hang instead at my intellectual and political home Verso? Cause it feels like accepting ghettoization (sic?) and irrelevance and because so little Real Left or diversity shows up here.

And because the practical moderate centers are leading the world to hell.

John Holbo
I’ve stated my criticisms numerous times but you don’t understand them. This paragraph

“Continuing on cartoonishly, for (possibly illusory) clarity: most of us – I’ll wager – subscribe to the view that life in a modern liberal democratic society is like this: there are citizens and there is the state. Citizens enjoy a basket of liberties and rights, over and against each other and the state. A lot of critics say ‘liberals’ think too much in terms of autonomous individuals – little social atoms, bouncing freely off each other – but even those critics would mostly be slow to replace what we’ve got with another system in which some other circle was deemed more elementary than this mutually orbiting citizen-state binary: the family, the estate, the deme, the guild, the tribe, whatever. If you seriously want to scrap the US Constitution in favor of some kind of neo-feudal system, for example … well, that’s pretty radical. I’m just going to assume I’m addressing an audience that is basically ok with making individual citizens primary units over and against the state. (All pretty vague? Yes, quite. But we haven’t got all day. On we go.)”

You think that by making a passing reference to what critics might think you’ve addressed that criticism, but you haven’t.

You also haven’t understood what I said earlier about not thinking of (assumed human) groups as the only alternative to thinking about individuals v the state, instead of thinking ecologically.

Matt – I’ve been around for a while and read a fair bit of feminist thought.

bianca our posts above had a nice synchronicity if that’s the word I’m looking for, but why don’t you like the term ‘patriarchy’? I’m interested in this for my research.

If one wants some CT-type commentary on the book mentioned by Rob Chametzky, look here.

By the time I wrote this, others have probably posted the same….

The formulaic of late marxism tends to leave me puzzled: increasing poverty and precarity is “overproduction” and the re-incarnation of monopoly capitalism as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon — not to mention creatures like JPMorganChase or Uber or Monsanto — is “excessive competition”. Okaay. I should write that down.

Leaving the top down economics aside for a moment, what I meant in context was an overproduction/overaccumulation and excessive competition in social relationships and social capital. F De Boer committed himself essentially because he couldn’t quit adding Facebook and Twitter feeds. Call it an “attention economy” because your attention linking and friending is what makes Facebook profits. The excessive competition is for your attention and loyalty.

I have never been clear about what you read, partly I suppose because the preferred comment stylesheet doesn’t approve of cites or quotes, cause that is appealing to authority or something.We live in pure reason round here, by will alone we set our minds in motion. But Jameson started writing great books thirty years ago. Or you could explore “late capitalism” online and learn quickly enough. Although of course if you hang out trolling the liberalsphere you will never hear his name.

“It’s clear, Val, that you don’t like the style in which J Holbo has chosen to address these issues, but until you make clear what your own views are at least on the basic questions just listed, I don’t think it will be entirely clear just where your disagreements w him lie.”

I think this is a big part of my problem in discussing things with you Val. You seem to want to say that I don’t get something. You imply/accuse that I don’t get whatever that is because I’m a male, or misogynist, or whatever. But you never say *what the things are*.

And to the extent that you do say what the things are, it tends to be things like suggesting that I (or Hoblo) aren’t thinking about families. But of course we are, and do so either you are horribly misunderstanding what we are talking about, or you are refusing to disclose what you are really thinking. Or maybe both. And then when people request clarification you suggest that people are willfully putting upon you because you’re a woman.

But what if you’re right? What if hundreds or thousands of years of patriarchy have brought us to this place. Surely you can’t expect that merely alluding to the idea that we have missed the woman’s point of view will cause us to break through that. Surely you can’t believe that it is all so fragile that merely hinting at it will cause us males to see.

So tell us what you are thinking.

What is it you think my post IS worrying about, if not the things one naturally would worry about, regarding these sorts of cases?

I think you’re worrying about the case in my second paragraph, and pointing to a literature that discusses the same or very similar cases, and suggesting that thinking about this one case should be enough for us to understand how we feel about all the cases.

And that discussions of particular cases simply gesture at the same literature, or at posts like yours, as if they prove something, and everyone knows what they prove.

Is that case really even a live argument? Maybe for the small number of college students from evangelical backgrounds. Maybe when discussing the small number of communities that give their kids only rudimentary education. We are, by and large, past that. (You may disagree if you think the white supremacists and fundamentalist separatists are so strong, and have been so strong for years, that the rest of us should never have been talking as if they were easily dismissed. But that’s a different discussion.)

It seems we like discussions about tribal or rural people meeting “civilized modernity.” We like discussions about young people encountering education and having to choose what to do with the new information they’re confronted with. We like discussions about the acquisition and necessity of job skills.

When we have some other problem, like wedding cakes or marriage licenses for same sex couples, it seems we tend to struggle to fit the new problem into one of those, so we can say it’s already solved. Then we say “groups have a long shadow” and wave our hands,

Was that wrong? If so: why?

You left the conclusion to the argument off. “Therefore…”. What you write appears clear and true to itself and an honest attempt to be true with the world. It just doesn’t seem relevant, but a mirror for our own reflection of relevance.

Or, if you’d rather, your argument is a helicopter that gives us a clearer view, but then it puts us right down where we were, rather than transport us onward.

we all projected of where it might be going. A rather perfect CT thread come to think of it.

Could you expand on what you said about “this is interesting” where “this” was American pubic discourse around groups (and how it was wedded to the state/individual “coin”, IIRC)?

Cuz I would want to say, illiberal groups are NOT so-wed, potentially. But liberal groups are. Now that is something I’d be willing to entertain:

It (liberalism) undoes itself politically (we all know how oligarchic eddies of private interest overwhelm the purported public). Now we also know: it undoes itself socially by being much better at dissolving groups in the libertine acid of the state/individual system than it is at fostering liberally eusocial groups. & in the capitalist context, it doesn’t stick up for itself to satisfy the lust for belonging so craved for by so many. (authoritarian followers, I’m lookin at you!)

& then it should occur to us from our helicopter-heights that the above could very well be a good problem to have. For any social system that has that much going against it, the liberal orders that rule from the cities of Europe, America, Asia, and beyond are displaying an awful lot of complexity and order! & that speaks to inherent value, I think.

But a good problem is still a problem. If liberalism in some robust form(in a public works sense, NOT a military sense) doesn’t prevail upon the minds and hearts of enough Americans (& Europeans for all I know…I think it’s the same from the helicopter when I look over there), …

If you can’t pull people into liberal communties that meet their/our need for validation and belonging (status), you whither as a relevance.

John, various people here have stated that they found your analytical framework inadequate. You keep responding, no it’s not inadequate, you just don’t understand it. And then there are statements like this (to Bianca in this case): “But you infer that I haven’t thought about WHY or WHAT I am worrying about them? (…) What is it you think my post IS worrying about, if not the things one naturally would worry about, regarding these sorts of cases?”
Seriously, this is totally screwed up. if you want to be understood, you need to explain clearly what you are thinking, what you are worrying about and why. Not ask us to infer “the things one naturally would worry about, regarding these sorts of cases”. You are talking to yourself, and people who think like yourself, and you berate your readers for not properly divining your thoughts. How pathetic is that.

I’ll go back to Okin since you are so upset, indignant and mad about my not giving you credit for name-dropping her (btw if you don’t want to be psychologized, don’t do it to others): “You can’t have significant pockets of illiberal order existing within the matrix of liberal order, because such pockets are a toxic threat to that order, and to individuals living in it, inherently. For a representative expression of this view, see Susan Moller Okin’s classic, Justice, Gender and the Family. (Jacob cites it as a good example; it is.) The family needs to cease to be patriarchal. “ To which I responded: “The state needs to cease to be patriarchal.” (309), which I was berated for by both Matt and Holbo like a freshman student daring to question the professor. Now why exactly was I wrong to say that the state needs to cease to be patriarchal, if we all agree that the state has a long history of patriarchal family law, for example? I honestly have no idea what your disagreement is, other than that I ought to read Okin, which as a debating maneuver is immediately disqualifying. Perhaps you are not talking about the state as it really is but the state as it ideally should be. Or you are angry because you have already thought of this yourself and you think I should have guessed that. But surprise surprise I’m responding to what you wrote, not what you may have thought. The logic of your statement is: here is the liberal state, and there is the patriarchal family, and the state needs to depatriarchalize the family. But historically this is total BS. You know that don’t you?

here is an article I just found that might link things a bit
I don’t necessarily agree with it all and in particular I think she does not fully understand Ariel Salleh’s position but it might be useful towards bringing the incommensurate discourses together perhaps
Unfortunately it does not seem to be on open access

Macgregor, Sherilyn
From care to citizenship: calling ecofeminism back to politics
Ethics & the Environment, April 2004, Vol.9(1), pp.56-84

In other words, Sebastian, why not have a go at trying to understand me? I’ve certainly said enough. Try the old ‘charitable reading’, assuming that what I say does make sense and is possible for a human being to understand, even if he (you) may not necessarily agree with it.

In case anyone cares, I don’t believe congruence is a good idea if it means: the state needs to be neutral wrt ends and individual commitments (which it does to be a liberal democracy, which is something I like), so every legitimate group within the state has to be neutral wrt ends. I don’t think groups can be run that way. So I’d want to make a distinction between voluntary groups, like workplaces and political parties, and groups meaning legal identities that have legal representation, which people are born into and live within. But I think framing the debate the way it is makes it more difficult to discuss this. Sometimes you need to say to someone: this is just how we do it here (and no feudalism required!). But sometimes you need to do the opposite: there’s no one right way of doing that, and you need to cooperate with many people who disagree.

From the snippet of Levy’s book that I’ve read, I don’t see that this isn’t compatible with his argument. I expect we’ll have to wait until SCOTUS addresses it, and then it will be time to try to make the theory apply to the example.

John Holbo
Once more with feeling –
maybe I’m wrong to suppose that 1000s of years of patriarchy have brought us to the place where an educated woman tries to explain her viewpoint and a group of men (I think all men) keep saying it doesn’t make sense*, but you might get some glimpse of why I suspect it

* I have repeatedly told you what my critique of the post is, and you have repeatedly ignored it

Think I might give Bouvard et Pécuchet a go

“I try to tell you what I’m thinking but you don’t get it. And then you either say I’m wrong or I’m not explaining myself properly. It must be my fault, either way.

maybe I’m wrong to suppose that 1000s of years of patriarchy have brought us to the place where an educated woman tries to explain her viewpoint and a group of men (I think all men) keep saying it doesn’t make sense, but you might get some glimpse of why I suspect it.”

AN Educated woman often has that trouble I’m certain (which may indeed be why you are misdiagnosing it), but interestingly enough you’re confusing groups and individuals. YOU are not having that trouble in THIS thread.

The trouble YOU are having in THIS thread is that YOU (individually, not as a representative for ‘Educated women who get oppressed by the patriarchy’) seem to believe that asserting that men don’t understand a viewpoint because they are men/enforcing the patriarchy/don’t care enough about women is the same as actually explaining what the viewpoint they/we are missing IS.

There is a difference between “you don’t get IT” and “this is what IT is”. You are largely about telling us we don’t get it, and very little about telling us what it is.

There are two strategies that we can fairly use to engage you when you do this. We can ask you to clarify what IT is. Or we can make guesses about what IT is based on your vague suggestions and try to go from there. Both Holbo and I have attempted both strategies. Your response to those strategies has been to suggest that we don’t understand because we are tools of the patriarchy trying to actively harm you, or male idiots who just don’t think about the obvious things that we actually raised even before you mentioned them. So we can’t ask for clarification, we can’t try to guess what you think, and we can’t expect you to have read the whole post.

That isn’t a critique of ‘women as a group’. That is a critique of ‘Val on the comments of this post’. I sort of suspect this is performance theater on your part–like: no really I so strongly believe that groups are the proper measure so I will steadfastly confuse ‘women’ with ‘Val’. It is a critique I have in mind for another very male commentor as well, so it honestly isn’t a gendered thing.

In the context of the post, it would really be better for you to skip the speculation on why we don’t get it (which often just causes spiraling accusations and counter accusations), and go straight to the implications of your (desired?) more group level analysis.

I tried to do that from my perspective in #348. Now I fully expect that you don’t sign off on any of those outcomes. So please don’t feel need to waste time saying that you don’t like honor killings, don’t want forced marriages of gay people, are ok with inter-racial marriage, and don’t think that apostates should be executed. The arguments against those things are pretty well understood in terms of the individual rights frame. It isn’t clear to me how you would want to deal with them in the more group rights (specifically NOT individual rights) frame of analysis that you advocate. I think the apostate case is especially difficult.

Now I have some guesses, but considering your very strong reactions to my previous guesses I’m definitely not going to make them public at this time.

I feel like Val, or anyone, might like the poem I just pinned to the top of my blog.

I think there may be a critique of J Holbo — i.e., something J Holbo and others wd recognize as “a critique” — implicit in some of Val’s comments. So I’ll take a stab at drawing it out. Here goes:

The three conceptual elements of Holbo’s post are individuals, the human groups that individuals form, and the state (i.e., the government or the political regime, basically). While individual citizens should enjoy “a basket of liberties and rights, over and against each other and the state,” the post leaves out a discussion of the natural world or ecosystem on the health of which human life ultimately depends. So not only should individual humans (and perhaps, in some cases, groups) enjoy rights against the state and vs each other, but (so the argument would go) trees, mountain ranges, rivers, estuaries, plants, wetlands, non-human species, and other elements of the ecosystem shd have formal rights vs. depredation by individuals or the state. Parts of this already exist (for ex., it’s a crime to deliberately cause certain kinds of pollution or start a forest fire) and there are environmental laws (though their strength varies depending on the party in power), but in most countries at any rate there is no formal document giving the ecosystem, or its constituent parts, rights vs the state and vs individuals (and vs human groups).

So the critique is not that any particular statement by JH in the post is wrong, but that the post is incomplete in leaving out discussion of the ecosystem and whether it shd be given formal rights comparable in some ways to those that individuals enjoy vs the state in a liberal order.

In other words, this critique is not of the form “Holbo’s claim X is wrong” but rather “Holbo fails to consider crucial issue X, which makes his post incomplete, because if the ecosystem deterioriates to a certain level there won’t be any pt in talking about groups and individuals and the state, b/c civilized social life as we know it will have disappeared and/or no one will be alive.” This seems to me to be one part at any rate of the critique Val is implicitly making (though I’m not sure she will agree).

p.s. The other thing she seems to be suggesting is that one can’t talk at all about individuals and the state b.c individuals as separate beings with their own physical or social boundaries don’t exist. But that I don’t find that persuasive, whereas the notion of giving the ecosystem formal rights is more plausible.

TM: “I will in closing say that the style of debate you have exhibited on this thread has consistently been characterized by transgressions and bullying ,directed at practically anybody who criticized you.”

To which I’ll respond that this is nonsense on steroids. JH is in my view largely right, in that a number of commenters have wanted to attack him for the failures they say they find in his post; but in fact they simply attack what they perceive as his motivations without ever making any clear criticism of the actual content of the post. If anything, he’s kept a good sense of humor in the face of a steady diet of insults.

perhaps SusanC will consent to act as Val-whisperer

I wouldn’t want to speak for Val, but it occurred to me that possibly she has been considering that you took as an assumption what was in your mind a statement of the problem to be solved. Specifically, when you wrote “most of us – I’ll wager – subscribe to the view that life in a modern liberal democratic society is like this: there are citizens and there is the state”, I think I have correctly understood now as saying “hey guys, I bet you think in this way, but guess what, this way of thinking will make you trip in these precise ways Levy’s book have described and that’s pretty cool” (statement of the problem) but I understood that clearly only after reading comment 282 and especially “On the one hand, I think Americans are very conditioned to think about groups by the theoretical rhetoric of liberalism. When they argue about which groups are good or bad, or behaving well or badly, they fall back on a rhetoric that oscillates between the ‘pure’ theory and the ‘congruence’ theory, in Jacob’s sense. […] That’s very interesting and significant. It’s a nice point where abstract theory and real politics rhetoric coincide. See the limits of the theory and you really do see the traps the rhetoric sets, in a nice way.”

What I initially understood and what I think she might be understanding based on her comment 100 is you to be writing “hey ladies, I’m going to construct a careful and complex argument but I need to start somewhere, and I’m sure you all agree that liberal democratic societies means we think in terms of individuals and the state, so that initial step being OK, now we proceed to less obvious stuff.”

Seeing that the two interpretations are almost polar opposite – under the first interpretation, what you want to do is outline the pitfall of a way of thinking and out of politeness you included yourself in the group being confounded by this inappropriate way, hence the “we”; under the second, you are seemingly asserting as self-evident something she resists and so the “we” suddenly seem to erase her resistance (see her 209 in that respect) – it is not surprising that the two of you are frustrated with each other, since the precise task you set out to do (show the pitfalls of a certain way of thinking) is the precise task that she thinks you don’t even want to contemplate (because that way of thinking is self-evident and can be assumed without discussion).

Of course, all this is speculative and I’m sure Val will correct me and speak for herself if everything above is wrong, but I can assure you at least that I misinterpreted you like that until your 282 (well, I thought you were making a positive claim that people think in a certain ways while I think Val thinks you are perhaps unconsciously making a normative claim that people should think in a certain way, see her 303, but close enough). In retrospect, an ironic consequence of this confusion, at least in my case, is that ever rhetorical trick you used to include yourself in the bag of poor confused people who labour under a point of view that has inherent pitfalls (especially the use of the first plural pronoun), I interpreted (infuriatingly) has an attempt to force me to take (what I took to be) your assumptions for granted and obvious, which was precisely what I didn’t want to do.

Flipping the tables, John can surely correct me if I got him all wrong. But if I didn’t, Val, I encourage you to re-read the OP and his subsequent comments assuming that what you and I took to be an assumption was in fact a statement of the problem to examine. Many things, logically and rhetorically (and dare I say psychologically in terms of John’s puzzlement as to what your criticisms could be) take a very different light.

I would believe that the same confusion between a particular statement seen as initial hypothesis (in the mind of the reader) and the same statement seen as statement of the problem (in the mind of the author) also explains the lack of progress between John and TM on “here is the liberal state, and there is the patriarchal family, and the state needs to depatriarchalize the family. But historically this is total BS” per TM’s 376 but in this thread, my interactions with TM have not been productive so I’d rather not even venture a guess. Let’s just say that after 73 and 134, I was surprised to see him reacting so violently to “straw man arguments, false dichotomies, appeal to authority, judgmental language, pooh-pooh.”

Guys when I asked you to try to understand me, I was hoping you’d talk to me about it, not to each other. (There is a word for this, I’m trying not to use it)

For the record, I agree with most of what LFC has said, but also agree with Holbo that it’s a bit tangential to his post. The last paragraph is much closer to what I think, though not exactly. The article at 358 explains a bit of it – read it, it’s fascinating, I’d love to see what you make of it

There’s several aspects of my argument at least
– we are part of the ecosystem (not in spiritual or sentimental way, though I’m not knocking them, but physically)
– the original relationship is mother and child at birth – when one body becomes two (again I’m talking physically, not spiritually or sentimentally)
– the pregnant woman challenges the boundaries of self and other (please don’t think I’m saying the foetus is a person, I’m not, that’s kind of the opposite of what I’m saying)
– the useful words for what you are talking about is people and persons, not citizens and states (as Lupita and I pointed out to you, your usage of the word ‘state’ in unclear, not clear whether you are talking about institutions of government or the people who compose a state – I’m suggesting the latter is the one you need to talk about)
– the usage of ‘citizens’ and ‘states’, without acknowledging its limitations, carries the weight of patriarchal history

I started critiquing specific bits of the post way back at 100. I’ve engaged with specific bits numerous times eg 335, 336 and 338 with one paragraph.

You (John Holbo) are batting away criticisms without really engaging with them – which just means they keep coming – it’s a way to get lots of comments I suppose, as people more and more desperately try to explain themselves.

JH reminds me of my grandson A (a delightful child btw):
A: can I have this stick Grandma?
Me: ok honey if you’re careful
A: it’s a light saber! Kpow, Kazam (etc, etc)
Me: what are you doing darling?
A: I’m destroying all the bad guys!
Me: don’t you think it would be better if you engaged with the bac guys and tried to understand what they’re saying?
A: no you have to destroy them!

(Ok the last bit never happened)

Val @386
It’s the last bit, the para LFC doesn’t agree with, that’s closest to what I’ve been saying.

Just so everyone (i.e., whoever is still following some of this) is clear, I believe what Val is referring to here is this statement of mine:

“The other thing [Val] seems to be suggesting is that one can’t talk at all about individuals and the state b.c individuals as separate beings with their own physical or social boundaries don’t exist. But that I don’t find that persuasive….”

Actually I should have said I don’t find it persuasive, period. Anyway, I think maybe we are getting toward some clarification of the positions…

p.s. I was sent this NYT article a while back, about a murder in a small town in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. A troubling and interesting story, and at the end of the piece the reporter has a para about the group-oriented, rather than individual-oriented, character of Indian society and (by extension) its way, at least in impoverished rural areas, of meting out ‘justice’ (or in this case, failing to do so). Too much trouble right now to pull the exact quote, but here’s the link to the piece:

here

But you ‘wagered’ that most of ‘us’ (CT readers) would see the issue in those terms! That’s not just saying ‘ if we accept A’, it’s saying ‘most of us think A’. Isn’t it? how can it not be?

I am convinced that we will not agree on this. You think that you understand me, but you don’t – you don’t understand what I’m getting at. Maybe that’s my problem (as people keep suggesting) but I think it’s at least partly because I’m just doing these short, rushed responses. Anyway …

Bianca: you wrote “So I’d want to make a distinction between voluntary groups, like workplaces and political parties, and groups meaning legal identities that have legal representation, which people are born into and live within. ”

I think you’re on to something here, and I’d love to tease it out further. Somewhere upthread someone talked about the coerciveness of groups and the possibility of exit making us more or less trusting of the group.

So if the group is ‘race’, you can’t ever get away from it. So maybe we want to try to focus on a more individual level to keep control of that? Which probably involves the state?

If the group is “religion chosen as an adult” you can usually exit if you want. So maybe we don’t need to look as closely on the individual level to protect just outcomes? So we don’t need as much state involvement?

Family is always a tough case that people want to tackle first. But maybe it is such a tough case that we have to tackle it last?

I think I agree with you on the rationalist stuff. Sometimes you just have to be more pragmatic than theory wants to allow. E.g. the family. In practical reality we haven’t found a good substitute for good or even mediocre families. So we tend to give lots of autonomy to families. But we also know that bad families can be horrible. So when we get too many signs that things are going bad, the state tends to step in.

There is something here in this zone of the conversation. But I’m not sure what yet.

If the group is

Holbo 380. “No, I am pointing out that you – and some others – have said some things I think are idiotic, TM.”

Well that helps us out a lot. because now we know what Holbo thinks of as a thing he thinks is idiotic: “The state needs to cease to be patriarchal”. That is what I said and what Holbo attacks relentlessly. It’s idiotic. Holbo is exactly as confused and clueless as pretty much everybody (save a few cronies) have stated in this thread. Case closed.

As a correction to what seems to me to be some of the less than great readings of (or more likely, thoughts about) Kant in this thread, I’d like to point people to the excellent recent book by Pauline Kleingeld, _Kant and Cosmopolitanism: the Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship_. This isn’t to say that one can’t critique or disagree with Kant, but it’s a great corrective to the cartoon version of him often presented, by one of my favorite political philosophers and Kant scholars working today. It’s really a great book, and relevant to at least some of the topics in the threat beyond misreadings of Kant.

One of these days it will all be clear.

I know this won’t embed properly but anyway you’ll just have to click

Sebastian,

A while after I posted that, I thought “oh no, someone is going to apply this to race and say but aren’t you tending to build an argument against identity politics, or even to support the idea that it’s the focus on culture wrt minority groups that created our current white supremacist “identity politics” of the right?” (Andy Seal has an interesting post on the much longer history of the second of these here.)

I really don’t see what you’re getting at. Sometimes racial or ethnic groups are separate; sometimes they’re not. (Taylor spends a lot of time on Canada’s Five Nations policy and a lot on Francophone policy–I think the articles I read were written before Quebec passed their new language law.) Same with religions. Sometimes we’re interested in a minority group’s right not to be interfered with by the government; sometimes in their right to interfere with other people (not necessarily their own members); sometimes in their right to get positive benefits from the state or society (e.g. grants for playground upgrades) or society.

On Kant, Levy’s “Contrapolitanism” (which I think was free online until yesterday–I admit I’ve been checking out BHL to see what new nonsense they put up about Nancy MacLean) looks like it complicates that a bit.

John, I said “uses” because it really does seem to me the idea that we have to start with a disjunction between pure individual and pure state is all tied up with the idea of pure unsituated reason–you say you think the ideal or correct position, in your current thinking, is less pure-individual than that. And I didn’t think it was controversial that Rawls isn’t “pure-reason, pure-individual” especially by the time he published “Political Liberalism.” The social contract is a correction to Kant, not part of Kantian theory. Whether my description (or, as I admit it could be read, accusation, might apply in fact to “ideal theory,” I don’t know).

To be clearer, I’m not meaning to attack you or philosophy, but trying to find the point where it starts to look like philosophy mandates something like libertarianism, and where taking a different turn changes that appearance.

The social contract is a correction to Kant, not part of Kantian theory.

No – the opposite, in fact. Kant is a social contract thinker (heavily influenced by Rousseau, famously, but others as well.) Again, Pauline Kleingeld is good on this, as are others like Arthur Ripstein. Or, Rawls’s lectures on the history of philosophy, or Rawls himself.

Val,

Somewhere early(ish) on you said something along the lines of ‘I think John and I are engaging in different discourses.’ This is entirely true. What’s also true is that your discourse (a) isn’t a critique of what John said originally, and (b) is tangential to John’s argument. John doesn’t want to engage in that particular discourse; it’s his post, that’s his right. There’s nothing gendered about that choice.

Now, in my opinion it’s also true that you haven’t done a good job of articulating what your argument is, beyond the fact that you don’t agree with “the view that life in a modern liberal democratic society is like this: there are citizens and there is the state.” It’s possible, of course, that this failure to understand you is a failure on my part, rather than yours, and possible that this failure is gendered. Of course I don’t believe that’s true – but I wouldn’t, would I?

I think a large part of the confusion here is this: while I think you (and others – TM is far worse in this respect) are attributing beliefs to John which he does not hold, if pinned down he probably does (mostly) agree with “the view that life in a modern liberal democratic society is like this: there are citizens and there is the state.” But as he has said multiple times, the truth of that view is not relevant to his argument in his OP, and he doesn’t see the need to defend it in this thread.

@396
“That’s not just saying ‘ if we accept A’, it’s saying ‘most of us think A’.”

I think most of us do think A. Honestly, I think you think A, Val (although you may not think you think A). But some people don’t accept A, it’s true, and that’s important. At any rate, accepting the truth of ‘if we accept A, then B will follow’ does not require accepting A. Or positing that most people accept A.”

That’s having it both ways, don’t you think? Either you’re saying ‘you, Val, think A’ (there are citizens and there’s the state) or you’re not saying it..

I’m saying, no, I get A and I can think in terms of A, but it’s not fundamentally how I understand the world.

JH: “But ‘the state needs to cease to be patriarchal’ IS idiotic as a proposed revelation/criticism of people who are presumably aware of the problem and in substantial agreement with the sentiment.”

Here’s what happened. Holbo wrote something and I pointed out that it was flawed. I did so correctly and respectfully, without insulting anybody, without expressing indignation or madness or puzzlement or anger or anything else that Holbo has been
imagining as my mental state, even after I called him out for that blatant transgression. In fact I packed my criticism in a mild rhetoric question: “Isn’t it rather that the state needs to cease to be patriarchal?” That’s it.

My observation, as everybody had to admit, was entirely correct. Even if it weren’t – as pointed out, Holbo could have agreed or disagreed or ignored it but what he chose to do was to act the bully and paint my criticism as somehow illegitimate and turn my insolent objection into proof of ignorance (‘haven’t you read the book’) and pathology (“At this point TM gets mad” etc.) And that is entirely his method. He has spent a great deal of this thread using denigrating, condescending, paternalistic language aimed at commenters who dared express criticism. Which is what brought me back into the thread (see 103; 164, 178, 188, 208; 304 and 309): I have zero tolerance for bullying. I’m well aware that academia has its fair share of bullies – one gets the impression that being an asshole is if not a job requirement then at least an asset for an academic career. I have no tolerance for it and will not hesitate to call them out.

I haven’t been closely following some of the more philosophical bits of this thread (for ex., I’ve skipped much of bob mcmanus’s comments, not because mcmanus doesn’t sometimes say interesting things — he does — I just don’t have the mental energy to deal w his usual mode of exposition right now).

W/ that as prologue, a couple of things.

In the preface to A Theory of Justice (the first edition), Rawls writes: “What I have attempted to do is to generalize and carry to a higher order of abstraction the traditional theory of the social contract as represented by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.” (p. viii) This statement is relevant to some bits of the discussion above in this thread.

Although I’m roughly aware in a general (and no doubt not nuanced) way of how some of Rawls’s views changed in the 1980s and 1990s, the only book of his I have actually read (as opposed to dipped into here and there) is the first (1971) ed. of A Theory of Justice. After that he wrote, among other things, Political Liberalism, The Law of Peoples, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, and he also published a revised version of ToJ. On the rare occasions on which I see/read a scholarly article about Rawls (or one making substantial ref to him), I notice that the authors are still mentioning or citing, for certain points, the first ed. of ToJ. And the first ed. of ToJ was reprinted by the publisher a few years back on the grounds, as the preface by Scanlon (I think it was) stated, that “serious” students needed to have it in print. So the book is still ‘relevant’, despite everything he wrote afterward and despite the fact that his views changed on certain points. (This paragraph has nothing much to do w anything I’ve read upthread, but what the hell…)

As for the Rawls-curious BernieBros — mentioned in a comment upthread — who had not previously read a lot of Rawls (which wd be most of them, I’d guess), it’s possible that some of them took the reasonable step of skipping Rawls himself and reading one of the secondary books about him, of which there are now many good ones available, which likely wd have given them enough background for their purposes, whatever exactly those were.

“Maybe if you don’t get the significance of the above, you could try thinking a bit harder. I know you don’t like it when I drag in the patriarchy (like some smelly, old-fashioned, embarrassing man that nobody want to see) but why do you assume it’s me that’s the problem here?”

I don’t mind talking about the patriarchy. I mind when you use it as crutch to cover up your failing to actually make points. I don’t mind engaging the problems of patriarchy, I mind you invoking it as a magical excuse to avoid engaging. I mind when you use it as an all purpose weapon to try to whine instead of explain.

This quote from you is actually perfectly illustrates the problem. I’m not assuming you’re the problem at this point. I’m showing and explaining it (with specific details and quotes). If you were willing to show and explain things, it is very likely that people would misunderstand you less frequently. And if they still misunderstood you, it would be more obvious WHERE they misunderstood you. Then you wouldn’t have to hide behind excuses about the patriarchy so often. At this point all we know is that you have vague but allegedly important concerns.

“Sebastian, you write long, demanding posts, and I have really limited time at present. I can’t, and there is no reason why I should, jump to do whatever you tell me.”

The funny thing is that you interpret it as ‘demanding’ and that you should ‘jump to do’.

I’m merely illustrating one way that you could move forward. You don’t HAVE to use my particular examples. But you probably should use SOME particular examples. You don’t have to use my arguments, but you definitely need to use some arguments. At this point you are hundreds of comments in and even your most friendly readers only have a vague idea of what you are gesturing toward. You don’t even give unsupported arguments because you don’t give arguments at all. You say things like “the pregnant woman challenges the boundaries of self and other (please don’t think I’m saying the foetus is a person, I’m not, that’s kind of the opposite of what I’m saying)”

That is like a free floating nothing the way you use it. You could have said that in any discussion and it would explain about as much as it did here.

Not because it CANT mean anything. But because YOU don’t connect it to anything to make it anything. Statements like that need to be followed up with something like “this initial pairing implies X” or “this challenge to the boundaries of the self implies Y”.

Someone on the individualist side could easily have said “this challenges the boundaries of self in the initial months but the rest of life is never so close again so THEREFORE we must protect individual rights because we are never that connected again” I wouldn’t agree with that argument, but I can recognize it as an argument.

Thanks, Matt. We cross posted. I remembered that Rawls had combined multiple methods of arguing, and got the details wrong.

@420

“(All these discussions could be considerably simplified if you would tell us what you think, but … there will always be mysteries.)”

This is the orthodoxy isn’t it? You, and your supporters, are now saying this regularly. So even when I try to explain what I think, and give examples, you don’t have to engage with them. You can just repeat the mantra.

I think there’s some truth in what TM is saying. This does feel a bit like group bullying. I don’t think you (or Sebastian) are actually interested in understanding what I’m saying.

This thread is far above my pay grade in a number of ways, but as an onlooker I want to thank a number of people–JH, Bianca, Z, and Sebastian come esp. to mind–for the long, patient attempts to clarify various things. I still have hopes of reading the whole thread carefully, even though the fact that I never took a philosophy or political science course in my life is a serious handicap. Plus, I copied the text into a Word document and it’s literally as long as a novel — more than 80,000 words. !!

I keep thinking about the saying, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Little did I know that there’s a fancy name for it: The Law of the Instrument.

I’ve been looking in on this little conversation now and then and saying to myself “Yikes”. But I haven’t, until now, actually read the OP in full much less tried to follow the whole thing. So, now that JH is about to call a halt I thought I’d take a crack at the OP.

Yikes!

Rolling down there near the end: “I’ve tried to avoid naming group names in this post. I’ve talked very abstractly about ‘groups’. I think that’s actually a good thing, even though abstraction has its limits.” Yes, it does. Somewhere in the middle there I found myself unable to follow the difference between pure theory and congruence theory. At any given moment I wasn’t sure which JH was talking about.

So I come away with the feeling that, in the first place, the OP is dealing with a very difficult problem, one which has attracted a lot of attention over the years and produced a large and diverse literature. Alas, I’m not familiar with that literature – my problem, for sure, not John’s, nor Levy’s – and so naturally some of those balls are going to go whizzing by me. Secondly, it’s really clear that JH is NOT claiming that we ARE atomic individuals. Rather, the whole problem is that we aren’t atoms. We each (am I allowed to say that now, “we each”?) live in an ecosystem (not JH’s word, but it, or a close relative, comes up often enough in the discussion) of intersecting intermediate groups. So how do we think about making the whole contraption work? And the problem’s important because, well, the real-world shebang seems to be coming unglued at the moment, at least in part because a lot of those intermediate are clamoring for power.

I’ve got a meta-comment, which I’ll formulate via an analogy with juggling. Pretty much anyone can, in time, learn to juggle three balls. W/ more time and effort, four, maybe five balls. At some point we’re moving into a territory where it takes more or less full-time dedication to the task to learn how to keep all the balls in the air. And, according to this argument, no one’s ever going to manage 13 or more.

So, I figure that Levy’s book is working with nine balls in the air. John’s abstraction takes it down to seven. And me, on this topic, I can only follow five balls at a time. Alas.

Hence Yikes!

Judging from the drift of this conversation, I’m not the only one stuck at five balls.

Let me try to juggle three, two real, one not so real. In the Declaration of Independence it says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…

Three balls: “men”, which I take to be individuals (though I realize at the time that women, children, and slaves were not included in the pseudo-generic “men”), the Creator, the Government (aka the state). In this formulation the power of the Government derives from the powers of the men, which in turn get those powers from the Creator. (The Creator’s the not-so-real ball.)

You can see why, in this arrangement, you’d want to have a separation of church and state. If they aren’t separate the power logic doesn’t work. The Creator’s institution (the church) HAS to be separate from the Government. I suppose this Creator is some kind of unmoved-mover and then grants motion to individuals who in turn grant motion to the state. If you collapse the Creator and the Government together, then the individuals have no standing which allows them to rebell against an unjust state. It’s the separate and independent Creator that (who?) gives them that standing.

These days, of course, there’s a lot of people here in the USA who don’t like separation of church and state and likely don’t realize that their preferred arrangement, by collapsing three balls into two, undercuts the whole system.

I realize, of course, that the OP says nothing about this Creator and, presumably neither does the book. Nor do I think matters would be improved by introducing it. I’m just reporting what the Declaration says, which presumably was some of the best thinking of the time, and how that works in terms of institutions that existed then and still do exist. Whatever your beliefs about supernatural Creators, churches of all kinds and sizes do exist, both as groups and as legally recognized entities (tax-exempt, etc., depending on whatever national arrangements exist).

As near as I can tell, John begins by clearing the deck of all those institutions other than the “men” and the “Government”. Why? As far as I can tell, it’s because the two varieties of theory he’s talking about take those, the individual and the state, as rock bottom. Everything else is somehow derivative. And then Holbo lets all those intermediate entities back in so he can pose the problem: How do these two kinds of theory deal with them?

Well, I’m not clear on that, but I figure that’s more my problem – don’t know the literature – than John’s. Would matters improve if we made the interpersonal ecosystem our rock-bottom primitive? Don’t know.

PS @ Lupita #434: There’s not nearly so much yelling and screaming as there was before moderation.

Z mentioned mothers and infants (#54). And I note John’s reply (#56): “From my point of view, its facts like this – the necessity of non-individualistic social units besides the state, so babies don’t die – that make the subject of the post interesting.” The following paragraphs are from a post I put up some years ago:

A few years ago I was sitting in a departure lounge at Newark International Airport and happened to observe a mother and her infant playing together. She was seated in one of the chairs and had her infant on her lap. The infant was, say, nine months old and was playing with some cup-like object, perhaps a plastic container for storing food in a refrigerator. She was turning it around in her hands, looking inside, grabbing it and waving it, and so forth.

Then she dropped it and it fell to the floor. She had been following it with her eyes, of course, and so followed it to the floor. At the same time she leaned over and reached down for it. As she did so her mother smoothly lowered her to the point where she could grab the container and thus retrieve the dropped object—dropped deliberately, in exploration? Once she’d grabbed on and started pulling it toward her, her mother pulled her up and back to her lap. This happened quickly and smoothly, as though mother and infant were not two, but one: motherandchild.

Biomechanically, I suggest, they WERE one. They’d spent many hours thus playing together. They knew one another’s moves. Mother knew what baby wanted and how it would move; baby was secure in mother’s grasp.

So, how did this infant experience she mother’s action of lowering and then raising? Did she experience as her own, as answering to HER will? After all, when she reached for the dropped object, she was intending to reach it and the move was correlative with that intention.

And when mother carries her infant from one place to another, how does the infant experience that movement? Say, for example, that the infant spots something across the room and looks right at it, with interest. Mother carries the infant toward the object and then places the infant on the floor a few feet from the object. How does the infant experience that? How much of that movement is within the compass of the infant’s will? All of it? What distinction does the infant make between the carry portion and the crawl portion? And, if the infant is attending to one thing, and mother moves her away from that thing, against her will, how does the infant experience THAT movement? Note that, in neither case, does the infant herself propel the movement from one place to the other.

No doubt this will be so far behind the discussion as to be comical. It may be inadvertently insulting in the way it suggests I haven’t been paying attention. My apologies if so.

But, for one thing, I’m stuck on what “rationalism” has to do with Levy’s book. Looking at the table of contents and the Amazon description, about the only clue I can find is section referring to the “man of system.” In the real world, this means people like accountants, programmers, scientists, engineers, all very practical people. In the book it appears to invoke crackpot history where intellectuals who sit in libraries somehow devastate society with their crazed ideas when demonic forces give them power. That seems so bizarre I suppose the idea is to rationally analyze the theory of rights, to help maximize freedom?

The thing there is, it is not at all clear to me that the book really even tackles analysis of political theory. For one thing, shouldn’t a serious historical analysis concern itself with Edward Coke, Algernon Sidney, Shafetesbury, Locke, Cato’s Letters, John Adams’ book on constitutions? But perhaps the analysis is not really meant to be historical, but about the figures now regarded as the fundamentals?

But the thing there is, it is not at all clear to me that pluralism actually produces freedom. Yes, libertarians are convinced the freedom of property owners to exercise their rights over others is an indispensable part of freedom. But I’m still not there, even though this book seems to start somewhere past that.

Another thing is, I’m not altogether certain that an abstract commitment to individual rights are the motive for what freedoms we do have. It seems to me that modern individualism really seems to be modeling its notion of the citizen on the consumer in a modern market society. The notion of individual rights is not the political postulate that produces freedom, it’s the expression of the kinds of freedom we have now. It’s not clear to me this book addresses such issues, starting somewhere past that.

And the last thing is, it’s not clear to me at all that the action of the state to express the will of the majority really constitutes an attack on freedom. I think you can make a case that freedom is the ability of the majority to decide things, not the ability of minorities (“groups” as they appear to be called in this book,) to do things their way. I’m not sure that creating the term “congruence” in lieu of majority rule is really very helpful. Again, the book seems to be starting somewhere far ahead of me.

I’m afraid at this point I rather suspect Levy’s analysis assumes away most of the real issues, to focus on carefully limited subsidiary points. In other words, it seems to be about trying to rationalize a mildly reformist approach to libertarianism. But I think libertarianism if fundamentally a crock, and mild improvements are a waste, if not PR.

I think there have been some thoughtful comments here

Yes, it’s just a pity they seem to have got lost in a whirlwind of convoluted ad hominem denunciations

Rob Chametzky: When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a thumb.

I am so going to steal that….. ;-)

Z […] has been consistently interesting.

LFC, please stop, you’re making me blush.

I’m also impressed that a mathematician has read certain books that I haven’t

Ah yes, but think about all the math books I should have read that I haven’t…

e.g. Ertman’s Birth of the Leviathan

It’s a good book, I think.

, whether I agree with him or not (and I’m not always sure about that),

Yeah, about that, since I’m still high on your compliment and since I want to promote the glass half-full approach of CT’s comment thread , I would like to express my appreciation towards Sebastian H. He disagrees with me, in fact I suspect he thinks I’m mostly talking non-sense (though I would believe that if we could sit together for an hour or so, that would clear a lot of things up), but he’s always disagreed with me in a respectful, inquisitive and pertinent way and I’m grateful for that.

Thanks for the passage, Stephen, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never read it.

The Flying Karamozov Brothers:

https://youtu.be/IpUQZh9HjJA

Will this work?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS-LyKorcq8&w=560&h=315%5D

I found Bill Benzon’s comment @435 very thought-provoking. As he says, the logic of “people” and “state” does not work without some third element if, as in a democracy, the people constitute – en masse – the state. Rebellion, or simply dissent, then becomes internal to the people – arguments with oneself (this is not a problem when the state is conceived as not constituted by the people). It directs attention to those groups the state has historically not claimed jurisdiction over, or which have held power over and against the state. Churches, ulemas, the Buddhist clergy, the army in imperial Rome and under Cromwell and in Prussia. Interestingly, arbitration of family is usually among the areas the state leaves to religious groups.

Not quite the last, obviously.

All I asked at the end was that you tell us which numbered comment you thought was a good explanation. You just won’t explain yourself. You don’t have to. But whining about how people won’t listen to you while refusing to explain yourself is just petulant. I’m sure you’ve had experiences that made your reflexive reactions turn out that way. We all have defenses that served us well enough at the beginning to become ingrained. But if you really believe that you don’t play a huge part in how the discourse with you played out–well the defenses aren’t serving you well.

“Bouvard et Pécuchet” is great!

@458

@228 @229 @239 @245

@457

‘Good explanation’ of what? Why don’t you go back and read the whole lot? If you still can’t get what I’m talking about, maybe we can talk then. But don’t just assume that my comments were all meaningless, because you know what – there may be moderation here now but I think I can still say that asking someone to identify which of their comments had any value is still a fucking awful move.

Matt, thanks for mentioning the Pauline Kleingeld book.

I don’t know if any of these comments are going to get published, but I’ve woken up at four in the morning, and calmed down a bit (though I still think my anger was justified and that I have been treated disrespectfully in this discussion) so I’ll have a go at an overall summary.

I was intrigued by the post, although at first I had trouble getting past the early paragraphs because of the apparent problems in the framing, particularly around state and citizens and liberal democracies (which I’ll return to later).

I thought it dealt with some important issues and I thought the part about the problems with ‘free association’ and how it can lead to social exclusion and oppression was good. I’ve seen some things like that in my own life and been ambivalently involved in some group ‘sorting’ that was ostensibly based on values, but also class and education, in practice, and was socially exclusionary, I think and thought at the time, although I didn’t effectively oppose it.

There were bits I didn’t understand, probably partly because I’m not trained in philosophy and I didn’t get all the allusions and wasn’t familiar with all texts, also because some were a bit US-centric, also for reasons of style. However in the end I felt it didn’t deal with the issues satisfactorily and it wasn’t just because of my failure to get bits. (I have now read it about four times)

Some problems I see are the failure to define ‘citizens’ and ‘state’, and the apparent privileging of liberal democracy.

As discussed, it’s not made clear whether the ‘state’ that’s being referred to is the people or government.

‘Citizen’ seemed to be used in a rather individualistic way that didn’t take into account that there are different types of citizen and that they have different relationships of power with each other and the polity/state/government. It also didn’t seem to take the ecological feminist insights that we exist in relationships, that as embodied people we come from the body of another and are part of an ecosystem that we will eventually merge with when we die. As such it seemed to potentially be drawing on the patriarchal enlightenment notion of the ‘reasonable man’ (adult male, probably white and educated or ruling class, separate to and in control of the ‘natural’ world) or at least not explicitly rejecting that.

Liberal democracy seemed to implicitly privileged as a good or the best form of sociopolitical organisation. As Lupita’s analysis made clear, most of the other comparisons were with societal forms that the author would have thought of as ‘worse’ so those of us who don’t see liberal democracy as the ‘best’ form were being excluded to a degree. There didn’t seem to be room for a nuanced view – accepting that liberal democracy has some good points and is better than many other forms, but isn’t the best form possible.

Finally as a historian I found it a bit ahistorical – there seemed to be a failure to recognise that a) liberal democracy is a historical form that has been imposed on many forms of pre-existing groups and associations. So we we were forced into using the state and the citizen as primary categories even though there are a lot more ‘primary’ categories that exist before them
b) that even within the broad category ‘liberal democracies’ there are many different societies which have developed differently and have different issues to deal with. This was also related to an apparent US-centric approach that made it unclear whether the post was talking specifically about American problems or broader problems.

So that’s a lot of ‘problems’ but that’s not to say that I thought it was bad – I thought it was interesting and intriguing, but that it didn’t really make things clearer and it didn’t persuade me that Jacob Levy’s approach was helpful in facing major problems, such as I am dealing with in my research (environmental degradation/climate change and inequality) or even the specific political problems the US faces. That was a pity because I feel there may be something I’m missing here, and that this may in some ways be about different discourses.

I am not going to go back and read all the exchanges here, but it’s a shame this went off the rails. Maybe it’s my fault or responsibility in some way, maybe I didn’t express myself politely enough or something, but I did have some genuine questions that I think could have been answered. However it seemed they were taken as attacks by an upstart.

Holbo continues his psychic adventures into my mind:
“Val, TM doesn’t really think I’m a bully. He’s mad because I rebutted his criticism of my post in a somewhat sharp and impatient way and he doesn’t have a good response, apparently. So ‘You’re a bully!’ it is!”

Calling a discussant “mad” – repeatedly – is a convincing way to prove you’re not a bully. For the cronies who enjoy the spectacle, at least. Note how Holbo consistently misattributes quotes to other people ‘You’re a bully’ – wrong, I said he acted the bully, his behavior has been characterized by transgressions and bullying, he used denigrating, condescending, paternalistic language. Anybody who doesn’t understand the difference, do some research (try “nonviolent communication”). Again this is method. Go back in this thread and almost every time Holbo pretends to quote me, it’s a made-up quote. Contrary to Holbo, I avoid ad hominems and I only quote and criticize what the other person actually wrote. There is one exception, namely when I wrote that Holbo is “confused and clueless”. I should have said his writing is confused (Layman 414 has a point – but it’s the only catch, compared to the dozens of transgressions by Holbo and other commenters).

Whether Holbo is a bully he has to come to terms with in his own conscience. That he has been engaging in bullying in this thread is a factual observation. Cronies who support this behavior share responsibility for the abysmal level of debate around these parts. Those who don’t wish to support misbehavior should call it out. I do and I will.

engels @ 469

I don’t know what is at issue either exactly, except that I made some comments (mainly short) that were apparently all either completely wrong, completely off-topic, and/or so mysterious that no human being could ever possibly have understood them (well at least according to John Holbo and Sebastian H).

I know that getting pissed off about this stuff online is generally fruitless, but it just does piss me off. I’m thinking of leaving and coming back as Keith Mann https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/aug/30/keith-mann-the-inside-man-who-has-exposed-tech-industry-sexism

@ 473
Except you are a blog owner so I would have to get a new email address too. Moreover I wonder if when women use male names they may also use different ways of speaking (since the research shows that men and women do speak somewhat differently)

not that that invalidates the findings but the mechanisms may be different ie it may not be just the male user name but also that women using a male user name also ‘speak like a man’

personally I would rather not have to do such a thing, but be able to express my views and have people try to understand them, without making the false assumption that I haven’t actually read the OP, or asserting that whatever I am trying to say is a “mystery”

[Sorry]
470: +1
Holbo 474: Indeed. And how about you now fulfill your promise and leave the last word to Val?

Val. There was no false assumption that you hadn’t read the OP. You said so yourself that you didn’t read it thoroughly till comment 100 something. No one just asserted that what you said was mysterious. At posts like 79 and 91 I pointed out where I thought I was confused and what I thought you could expand on. You spent many posts over multiple days complaining about the patriarchy and your lack of time rather than doing so. In the meantime I had relatively fruitful exchanges with Z (gender unknown) and Bianca (presents as female). The Bianca one should be interesting in that while we never really agreed, I wrongly interpreted her but was able to find that out through clarification and dialogue.

I literally don’t know enough about your position even now (after almost 500 comments) to agree or disagree with it (even in part). You object repeatedly to characteristics of people in the discussion (usually by focusing on their male gender) WITHOUT explaining what those missing viewpoints that you want to be represented ARE. That doesn’t lead the discussion forward.

There are indeed many venues where women have a harder time speaking. This is even one of those. So it makes sense that you have defences built in that direction. But you are letting them interfere with times when you actually have chances to be heard if you focused more on what you were trying to say rather than the identity of the speakers.

Just want to throw it into the mix that until Val showed up on one particular thread and demanded everyone id themselves as either male or female (and suspected me of being male on the basis that I was disagreeing with her) quite a few people said they weren’t sure of my gender (not sure how reasonable that is but it’s a data point)

https://crookedtimber.org/2014/11/12/adventures-in-sexual-implicature/

engels
I’ve just skimmed through Val’s comments in that discussion, and I can’t find one where she (to use your words) ‘demanded everyone id themselves as either male or female ‘. She analysed the content of comments, grouped them into categories, and referred to the declared or presumed genders of commenters in her analysis; in other words, she guessed which commenters were male and which female (if they hadn’t made it explicit themselves), but she didn’t demand or even request that her guesses be confirmed or disconfirmed — at least, not anywhere I can see. So your characterisation doesn’t seem fair. Do you think there’s something wrong with guessing commenters’ genders? I found nothing objectionable in Val trying (in another thread) to guess my gender, even though I was never going to confirm or disconfirm.

I’ve just skimmed through Val’s comments in that discussion, and I can’t find one where she (to use your words) ‘demanded everyone id themselves as either male or female ‘.

You’re right, I over-simplified, but I linked to imthe thread so people can read what happened for themselves. She complained about gender-neutral language and attempted to guess everyone’s genders; the effect of her intervention was to type everyone as male or female where previously it had been ambiguous (at least for some).

Just noticed that was three years ago: yikes! Time to take up a new hobby…

I didn’t say it was objectionable

Val, here we go again. You don’t understand how difficult you make it to respond to you. Look at 398 for example. I express confusion about your lack of clarification on multiple points. Then you spend multiple posts not responding by to them. Then you complain that I won’t read your posts carefully. You don’t HAVE to respond of course. But not responding AND complaining about not being listened to is a bit much.

As to your 467, it seems like a very long wind up to almost make the kind of explanatory comment that I’m talking about. And then at the end of the wind up you still don’t do it. Look at the paragraph beginning with “Liberal democracy seemed too implicitly privileged…”. You then go on about how it made you and your viewpoints feel excluded, etc. and I thought to myself “finally she will tell us about what that viewpoint says!” And then you don’t. You just move on.

You do the same with your allusion to colonialism. I keep expecting something like: “a focus on liberalism causes Levy to misunderstand X, while my approach lets us talk about X more clearly revealing Y”. You spend paragraphs telling us about excluded viewpoints,but then don’t bother to tell us what YOUR viewpoint is. You tell us that there are groups more fundamental than individuals, citizens, or states. But you don’t tell us what focusing on those groups will/can/might reveal.

This comment might have served great as your first comment on the thread if you later fleshed any of that out. But it certainly doesn’t give much insight as to what you think we are missing. All we know is that you very passionately believe we are missing stuff. I sketched out the problems I see with group focused rights in my comments with Bianca, and we sort of got somewhere I think. But she revealed her thoughts in a way that you don’t seem inclined to do.

Still behind here. The idea that “groups” somehow distinct from the “state” are essential to freedom seems to me to require that the separate groups be equal in the essential respects. But, I’m firmly convinced that separate is never equal. And, since inclusiveness and equality seem to me to be essential to freedom, and also essential attributes of “congruence” in the state, I’m not seeing the tragic irreconcilability between group identities essential to freedom and the morally rationalized strictures of the state. In practice, I tend to think of the state as not being a moral project at all, but about defense of property, ranging from national territory and national currency and national market to minute details of labor law.

The war of all against all” isnt’t just the problem that isolated individual citizens will end up killing each other but also that said individuals will likely end up organized into groups for the purposes of killing each other.

Well there is that line about the life of Man being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short…

J-D, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Val, it has nothing to do with exacting standards. My standards aren’t very exacting for people who actually try to explain themselves.

You seem to be pained at being misunderstood by multiple people, yet simultaneously highly resistant to explaining yourself.

You seem to dislike having people make guesses about what your saying, but even more you don’t like to clarify things.

You allude to things but don’t make them concrete. You blame it on patriarchy but refuse to take steps when offered.

“Has it occurred to you to take my repeated statements that I don’t have much spare time seriously?”

Val, In context that sounds like trolling.

I’m fine with not having time. I drift on and off of threads based on time constantly. But if you don’t have time to explain yourself, don’t be so pissed when people don’t understand you. And especially don’t spend the time to attack the people based on your projections of their deep psychological features INSTEAD of explaining yourself if you don’t have lots of time.

You do lots of set up, but no follow through. The conversations would get a lot further if instead of spending hundreds or thousands of words on how we don’t see certain viewpoints you said “you’re missing a key viewpoint AND HERE IT IS, LETS LOOK AT THE IMPLICATIONS OF IT”.

But you spend nearly all of your limited time on something that could be outlined in a sentence or two–with none of it thus far on the hard stuff.

@ 505
have you ever stopped to ask yourself whether the problem is in you? Maybe the reason you’re not getting what I’m saying is something to do with a lack in you rather than me? Or are you completely certain that you are capable of judging what I say on CT and giving it a categorical mark? You’re some kind of world expert on these topics? Or what?

This just seems so typical of male entitlement and over-estimation of your own abilities, I can’t help but suspect that’s what it is.

Or as my kids used to say, who died and made you king?

How many feathers are on a Perdue chicken?
How many fibres are intertwined in a Shredded Wheat biscuit?
What does “touche et lele pu” mean?
How many times did the Batmobile catch a flat?

Umm, do I think I’m Nietzsche, or close to him. No I think I’m crazy (and boring) but not that crazy.

Shorter nonsense: If you want to relate to Val, you do it on her terms, not yours, her premises and priors, not any that can get you social support. Try it for a while. You’ll survive in untruth. Or not.

Two hangmen, hanging on a tree, but it don’t bother me at all. I get my philosophy from obscure country-rock groups. But alienation is so old-fashioned, so modern.

Where’s Baudelaire? I need support for my lies and hypocrisy.

bob mcmanus @ 510 (09.07.17 at 11:15 am)

I just got back from a weekend of horse-hugging. No, not literally. Seven of us rented a so-called retreat center in middle-of-nowhere New Mexico. Actually it was a two story, four bedroom faux log cabin with a large deck, one stuffed elk head, lots of cow skulls, painted and unpainted, navajo-like rugs over urethaned wood floors, and a massive outdoor barbecue. Besides myself, there were two couples I’ve known between for 50+ years, and another, much younger couple the rest of us met a couple of years ago. Both of them academics, PhDs in philosophy. He’s Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, she’s Wittgenstein. Daytime hikes, evening drinks and discourse.

It was madness, yet there was method in it. Your comment here is like a lingering echo of both. In a good way, you understand. Food for thought that relatively few others are likely to eat. Makes it all the more tasty, somehow.

Val@507:

have you ever stopped to ask yourself whether the problem is in you? Maybe the reason you’re not getting what I’m saying is something to do with a lack in you rather than me?

This is a rather odd assertion to make given the theoretical perspective you speak from. If a communication breakdown is in fact a result of the being and character of several discourse participants rather than the communication actions of one speaker, it is far easier for the speaker to change what they do than for the listeners to change who or what they are.

I would also note that while I certainly agree that no commenter has the right to dictate how another should spend their commenting time, this is hardly the first thread where you have complained about having insufficient time to clarify your comments while simultaneously complaining at length that you are being misunderstood. No other commenter has the authority to dictate how you spend your time, but it’s entirely reasonable at this point to observe that you do not seem to prioritize your time in a manner that is consistent with a desire for your arguments to be clearly understood.

@ 515
And one more thing – I know I’ve already asked a lot – but would Jacob Levy’s book, in your view, be relevant to the issues I’m researching about environmental degradation, inequality, how they’re related and what we should do about them?

Not that every book has to be relevant to everything, but from your post I’ve ended up with the impression that it’s not, and I’m not sure if that’s fair.

Follow up – and “cheer each other on when we seek to overturn them” is fine too – the only bit I actually have reservations about is “As citizens of a liberal state trying to preserve it”.

As I’ve said, I think we can do better than liberal democracy , especially the American version (not mindless anti-Americanism there, but your system of voting for example is terrible).

No Monty Python, and no De La Soul.

@ 523
“Before I answer I need an answer from you to two questions, Val. How and why do you see the post as privileging liberal democracy in an objectionable way? Be specific.”

We had a conversation upthread where I said it appeared to me that you were presenting liberal democracy as a preferred form, but I hadn’t done close textual analysis. Then Lupita went through and did close textual analysis, which appeared to confirm my theory.

Have you forgotten all this, or is this ‘be specific’ just an adversarial tactic? I think these kinds of debates are only worth having if they are conducted in good faith.

@ 526

“So let’s set Lupita aside.”

No.

Lupita @ 243

” Val: I haven’t done a close textual analysis of all your posts here, but I’m pretty sure – I’d probably wager – that nearly all the examples you have given of alternatives to liberal democracy are ones that you, John Holbo, think are ‘worse’ than liberal democracy. So it looks like you’re loading the dice, as well as smuggling.’

A close textual analysis reveals that the examples of alternatives to liberal democracy John Holbo has mentioned are: neo-feudal system, depriving my fellow citizens of rights and liberties @OP, guild privileges or feudalism or theocracy or race-based government or a dictatorship of the Proletariat @56, Catholic monarchist, one-world government communist @107, and fascists, antifa, communist one-world-staters @198. He repeats some of those, but listed are his first mentions.”

You haven’t dealt with that. I think, again, that just wiping people’s specific objections away is not good faith arguing. You have said elsewhere that you can’t think of preferable alternatives to liberal democracy, but if arguing in good faith, I think you should acknowledge that some of your interlocutors can.

Val: “As I’ve said, I think we can do better than liberal democracy , especially the American version (not mindless anti-Americanism there, but your system of voting for example is terrible).”

Setting aside the criticism of the electoral college (with which criticism I agree), why do you think we can do better than liberal democracy? More importantly, how can we do better than liberal democracy?

@ 529
Thanks Layman that’s an interesting question – though an enormous one. Most of the changes I’d advocate would be incremental I think, building on processes that are already in place or developing, that I would hope would incrementally turn our system into something better.

I suppose I can say some obvious things – liberal democracy is not giving us egalitarian or environmentally sustainable societies at present (well most countries are probably doing a bit better on sustainability than the US but the election of Trump shows the vulnerability of liberal democracies). Some of the existing/developing processes here are to do with the concept of rights

– human rights – the human rights concept is supposed to include social and economic rights but they are usually weak – they could be strengthened a lot, in existing charters, bills etc, (for example you might ultimately, conceivably, limit the right of private ownership or the right of individuals to receive more reimbursement than others or decide that all organisations had to be run on a cooperative model rather than hierarchical)
– environmental rights, which LFC suggested before would be part of what I am talking about – I didn’t pursue it then but it is part of the broader picture, the concept that ecosystem/s and other species have rights, like the river in NZ – there is work being done on this

issues to do with politics as such – the issue with the US in particular is the first past the post voting – that’s not even democratic (let alone when voter restrictions happen as well). As an Australian, I would advocate for compulsory voting even though it may seem counter-intuitive to others (maybe we are not a ‘liberal’ democracy to begin with!), but also certainly transferable voting systems so you end up with multiple parties and processes of negotiation and (forced though they may be) consensus. That’s probably compatible with liberal democracy although any system that allows more ‘diversity’ in representation tends to be an advance on the ‘old’ liberal system (the one where we were all ‘individual citizens’, but somehow the assumed characteristics of the individual citizens were the normal characteristics of the adult white male and most of the parliamentary representatives were in fact adult white males, now is that a coincidence or what?)

Then moving beyond that you could look at quotas for representation and councils that have an advisory function to Parliament but might have a veto power, say a council of Indigenous people in Australia. Then there are functions that could be devolved such as to citizen’s juries to debate issues, even if the legislation is still debated in parliament, and powers that could be devolved to local government. At the global level I think powers could be ceded to world government (incremental – base on UN), particularly the power to wage war, which would be ceded to a kind of central policing function, building on the ICC and ICJ.

So there’s a weird mixture of almost ‘third way’ gradualism and wild utopianism for you, but you have to be able to imagine things for them to happen.

I did this in an awful hurry, as you can probably see, and probably some of my critics will pounce on the mistakes and inconsistencies, but I hope it makes some sense. What I would like to see if a society that is egalitarian, where ecosystems are valued equally with humans, where governance is multi-focused, diverse, and representational, where argument and debate is valued and consensus is about getting the best results for everybody as far as possible.

Hilarious guys. I said incremental change (that hopefully might gradually lead to transformative change). So let’s not mention getting rid of private property, or ecosystems having rights, or ceding powers to a form of world government. No , let’s talk about transferable voting (which btw neither of your countries has been able to achieve yet, in spite of you being such profound thinkers)

This is a complete waste of time.

@Val #539

It seems to me, Val, that your major objection is to a (very) abstract style of argument that leaves a whole lot of particular matters unspecified. Secondarily you believe, for whatever reason (things that he said, he’s a philosopher, he’s American*, he’s male, whatever) that John has preferences on those matters that are very different from your preferences.

Let’s take transferable voting, relatively minor detail though it is. And that IS what it is, right? A detail. It’s about how the votes are tallied up and winners selected. I should think that’s perfectly compatible with liberal democracy. I don’t recall anything in the OP about how liberal democracies should conduct the voting. In fact, I don’t recall anything explicit about voting at all – though it might well be there. Not even the distinction between direct democracy, where everyone votes on everything (not just electing officials, but voting on bills etc.) and representative democracy, where voters elect representatives, and the representatives decide on specific measures. The OP just assumed some kind of (abstract) democracy where people vote; it doesn’t even use the word “vote”.

Somewhere up there I believe someone mentioned that (wackiness that is) the electoral college system in choosing the President. That, of course, is not inherent in the nature of liberal democracy, assuming that America is in fact a liberal democracy; it’s just a contigent fact about America. Other liberal democracies don’t have it. Moreover, it applies only to one aspect of the voting system at the federal level, that is, the nation-state level. Senators and congressmen operate at the federal level, but they’re chosen directly by their constituents.

It’s not at all clear how these matters apply to the abstract argument being made in the OP. These matters are about the procedural details of how the democratic principle is implemented in specific cases, but not about the democratic principle itself. Given that that, for example, the electoral college system is what gave us the election of Donald Trump, one reasonably assert that these details are not without consequence – to put it mildly. But that’s a different kind of argument, an argument about the value of discussing abstract principles, which is what the OP is about.

That argument – about the value of abstract principles – is a running motif at CT, mostly likely to come up in connection with analytic philosophy. But Continental philosophy is every bit as abstract.

So that’s one thing.

Then there’s rights for ecosystems. OK. Where do they come from? Let’s say that they’re inherent in the nature of things, even inalienable. But just how could such rights be implemented in a social system? Ecosystems can’t speak, they can’t boycott Walmart, they can’t protest Trump’s hobbling of the Environmental Protection Agency, etc. I don’t see off hand why the state in a liberal democracy couldn’t decide to recognize the rights of ecosystems. Just what that means…I do not know. Lots of rules and regulations, lots of inspectors and so forth. But then, I don’t see why the Chinese government (PRC) couldn’t at some time choose to recognize the rights of ecosystems.

Unfortunately, if you will, human societies sit at the penultimate level of this ecosystem (Gaia is the top level, no?) and thus have inordinate strong influence over the rest. And humans are the only beings who can participate directly in human societies. So ecosystems and their rights are pretty much at the mercy of humans, and that’s true regardless of whether those humans organize themselves into a liberal democracy, a feudal hierarchy, a theocracy, a Communist dictatorship of the proletariate, or, for that matter, a humble hunter-gatherer group.

I don’t see how the desirability of rights for ecosystems stands as an objection to the abstract principles at issue in the OP.

And then there’s ceding powers to world government. Is it going to be just a bigger state – that nature of which Holbo declines to specific about (#526), which I understand – or something else? If something else, what? Will that something else be a liberal democracy or a theocracy or a dictatorship of the proletariat – can’t be a hunter-gatherer group because, well, it just isn’t on – or something wholly other that we can scarcely conceive of? A whole government, then, could just be another form of liberal democratic state, or not.

* But living, working, and raising a family in Singapore, which has a very different form of government from the USA. As people do vote, it’s some kind of democracy. But is it a liberal democracy?

Peter T@528 Thank you for the correction on your own view. I can’t say that I would use “outside’ to refer to the masses of people engaged in the conquests (or revolutions, more rarely but more happily,) that produce a constitutional order that eschews conquests (and revolutions.) But with your explanation of what you mean, I agree…I think.

So, why does liberal democracy sometimes (or often if you prefer) produce bad results?

Because underneath its the egalitarian ideology power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie

Thanks Layman. I think if we take a step back and look at historical forms of governance and society, the key thing is that people really did understand themselves differently. So Indigenous people here in Australia actually understood themselves as being related to different animals, as I understand it, and did in some way talk to them. Now I could of course say ‘well of course they didn’t’, but I’m not prepared to say that. I think they experienced something different from what I experience, in a way that I do not fully understand and possibly can’t.

Carolyn Merchant says that people in feudal and medieval times believed that everything was animated by the principle of life. I think I understand that, but I’m not sure.

Ursula Le Guin wrote a story about a tree that spoke of itself as moving – I can’t remember all the details but it hurt my mind (in a good way). The Left Hand of Darkness was quite challenging, but you could see how it worked – it was more that Le Guin portrayed so effectively the challenge for the earth guy in trying to understand. But this tree story was amazing. I guess it’s about relativity and the movement of the earth but anyway it was fascinating.

Anyway – you may not be familiar with those examples of course – what I’m trying to say is that understanding that people (and other species, possibly even trees!) actually see things differently than you, can be quite hard, and yet they do (well I’m not sure about the trees). I think anyone who has studied history knows that people at different times understood the world differently, and I think it’s what Foucault was getting at with the concept of discourse as that which legitimises knowledge. The Enlightenment thinkers said ‘this is knowledge, this is science’ but it’s not the end of knowledge – it’s not that it doesn’t work at all, but it doesn’t completely work, it doesn’t cover everything.

So we have people on this thread saying ‘oh it’s just people or states giving rivers rights’ (I don’t know that much about that case, perhaps the more interesting one is the woman who is trying to get Ecocide established, I’ll try to dig out the details) but acknowledging ecosystems as having rights is actually a fundamental change, especially since a lot of imperialism and colonialism was built on the notion of ‘improving’ the land (which is traceable in our property law, I don’t know about yours). Enlightenment thinkers like Locke actually did think that they ‘improved’ nature. As did Marx.

It was a relationship of control and ‘improvement’ and that I think is being challenged legally now, which is interesting (this is like that ridiculous argument I tried to have with that funny guy on here a few weeks ago, Preston or whatever his name was, he just couldn’t get his head around this stuff about humans not controlling nature).

The other side of it is agency. I go to a reading group with a lot of people who are interested in practice theories and they often talk about agency – who or what has agency? Do things have agency? That hurricane barrelling towards Florida, does that have agency? We’d say it’s not intentional like we are, but it’s still an active agent, it does things (sorry that’s a bit of a tactless example at the moment, I guess). A purpose of laws might be to stop us making hurricanes worse – which is what we are doing of course – which is where the ‘improving nature’ thing has got us.

So – apologies for going completely off at a tangent but I don’t think the way I think can be neatly fitted into the concept of liberal democracy, no. It may not even make sense to you but hopefully you can get some idea where I’m going with this.

I should try to be a bit more relevant though – the points you make are about democracy, but not necessarily liberal democracy. I’m not rejecting democracy, I’m rejecting liberalism, to be a bit more precise.

Bill Benzon @ 541 – I’m sure you don’t mean to be read to be rude, but maybe you should go back and read the thread a bit further back. The transferable voting thing was just something that I mentioned in a discussion with Layman. John Holbo and engels were trying to make something of it for some point scoring reason that isn’t even worth thinking about.

‘need more’ not ‘know more’ sorry

kidneystones @ 530:

I don’t think the writer or speaker has sufficient control over what is said or written, let alone what is heard or read, to be held entirely (or even primarily) responsible for the “clarity” of communication, however that might be defined. I understand that in your professional activity, you may very usefully train someone to follow certain conventions and, more than that, to take some responsibility for soliciting and responding to feedback. I am not challenging the value of what you do or suggesting its futility; I am saying that what serves as a premise for that professional activity may not be as useful as a general philosophical or political precept.

Just seeing that communication — and more fundamentally, thought — is a collaborative effort — a social process, and a social process in which the individual may be simply a conduit open at more than one end — can be a helpful step onto the yellow brick road toward understanding that what we are collaborating on in communication(s) is the construction of shared fictions, from which we may well take disparate meanings (and not be “wrong” in doing so). The clarity of constructive ambiguity may be the most valuable product of the process. Or, to mix metaphors, consider improvising in rehearsing a jazz standard: a very useful metaphor in particular for the kind of recreational musing we do here in the comments of CT, since we are often repeating compositions we have heard elsewhere (and the audience has heard elsewhere, understanding and appreciation importantly reliant on the precedent of previous experiences). Some players may be more interested in reproducing discordant sounds while others instinctively seek familiar harmonies. The most resonant, admired and effective performances cum compositions may well be mashups. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” was a mashup of old tunes, as you may well know.)

Obviously, I am getting carried away with my metaphor. Like many in this thread, I have been struggling against the hypothetical axis defined by individual and state capping opposite poles, which the OP proposed as making problematic the status of groups populating the intermediate regions of a liberal social globe. What does make this world go round? Surely, not Nozick’s separate persons! Say it isn’t so!!! Please!

And, yet, we seem to believe in “the individual” more readily than in the obvious collaborative fiction that is the state, even when we use imagined groups to construct our own individual selves. Curious.

The reference to Leviathan, the state as arbiter, reminded me of Behemoth, the state as debating society exhausting itself in passionate but pointless and centrifugal disputation. And, yet we must think and to think, argue, if the state is to have any abstract idea to guide it, for the state must make rules for the other, where no one of us feels the need of a rule to govern ourselves alone and isolated.

It does seem to me that the tyranny of the bourgeoisie is to be feared when the bourgeoisie is unopposed and undivided, and has no need for critique or argument to organize itself or raise a common, public consciousness. Enlightened self-interest shared in community is a lot of work. So, is manipulation by propaganda, I suppose, but maybe the policy implications differ? Where is the political process of communication to get the former instead of the latter?

(Fwuw I was trying to answer your questions. Those are imo textbook features of liberal democracy which the specifucation in your comment left out and the standard marxist critique of it if you’re interested—fine if you’re not!)

Val,

Sorry about the rudeness on transferable voting.

The following passage is from the opening of Chapter 9, “Musicking the World” (pp. 195-196) of my book on music, Beethoven’a Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001). You’ll find there’s stuff in the passage about “dynamical system, a community of sympathy, “synchronization of interacting brains”, “social neurodynamics” and “coupled sociality”. Somewhere up there (#437) I talk about a mother and her infant. Think of that as an example of coupled sociality. In this context I ask you to take it on faith that I’m not just pulling such terms out of the air. I develop them with some care earlier in the book (you can find final drafts of two critical early chapters here). Just how this bears on the argument in the OP is by no means obvious to me, but I think about this stuff ALL the time.

* * * * *

According to Fannie Berry, an ex-slave, Virginia slaves in the late 1850s would sing the following song as they felled pine trees:

A col’ frosty mo’nin’
De niggers feelin’ good
Take you ax upon yo’ shoulder
Nigger, talk to de wood.

She went on to report that:

Dey be paired up to a tree, an’ dey mark de blows by de song. Fus’ one chop, den his partner, an’ when dey sing TALK dey all chop togedder; an’ purty soon dey git de tree ready for to fall an’ dey yell “Hi” an‘ de slaves all scramble out de way quick.

The song thus helped the men to pace and coordinate their efforts. Beyond that, Bruce Jackson notes, “the songs change the nature of the work by putting the work into the worker’s framework…By incorporating the work with their song, by in effect, co-opting something they are forced to do anyway, they make it theirs in a way it otherwise is not.” In the act of singing the workers linked their minds and brains into a single dynamical system, a community of sympathy. By bringing their work into that same dynamic field, they incorporate it into that form of society created through synchronization of interacting brains.

What is the tree’s role in this social process? It cannot be active: it cannot synchronize its activities with those of the wood choppers. But, I suggest, “putting the work into the worker’s framework” means assimilating the trees, and the axes as well, into social neurodynamics. The workers are not only coupled to one another; by default, that coupling extends to the rest of the world. What does it mean to treat a tree or an ax as a social being? It means, I suggest, that you treat them as animate and hence must pay proper respect to their spirits.

Thus we have arrived at a conception of animism, perhaps mankind’s simplest and most basic form of religious belief. In this view animistic belief is a natural consequence of coupled sociality. In effect, the non-human world enters human society as spirits and, consequently, humans perform rituals to honor the spirits of the animals they eat, or the trees they carve into drums, and so forth.

@bruce wilder #553

“The clarity of constructive ambiguity may be the most valuable product of the process. Or, to mix metaphors, consider improvising in rehearsing a jazz standard: a very useful metaphor in particular for the kind of recreational musing we do here in the comments of CT…”

Yes on ambiguity being constructive. And yes on the jazz improv metaphor. In my experience, to get a bit carried away with the metaphor, improv is at its best when it gets away from you a bit and you’ve got to scramble to catch up.

Val: “I should try to be a bit more relevant though – the points you make are about democracy, but not necessarily liberal democracy. I’m not rejecting democracy, I’m rejecting liberalism, to be a bit more precise.”

Which of the tenets in my outline do you reject because they are liberalism rather than democracy? Or, which tenets of democracy have I left out, that you think should be there? I tried to frame something you could respond to without resorting to labels. As it is, I still don’t know what you reject in liberal democracy, and I still don’t know what you’d replace it with as a framework. I do get that you want different outcomes.

engels @ 558
@242 you seem to have been talking about patriarchal marriages. I’m talking about the organisation of (paid) work, including the work of government.

The head of state thing is interesting too in that context of preserving the ‘kingdom’ while ostensibly having a democracy.

Bill Benzon @ 557
No need for apology. Transferable voting is an interesting topic, I see Stephen @ 552 has also added some interesting information that might qualify my position a bit, it was just the silly way John Holbo and engels were trying to take a passing remark out of context and use it to suggest my whole argument was irrelevant that was the problem. (I really, really wish people would not do that stuff. You can have interesting discussions and then you get people doing that kind of stuff and you think, dear god what is the point. Anyway)

Animism is an interesting topic. I will try to look at your chapters. I’m kind of a musical ignoramus so I may not get it all, but I think anything that helps us think more clearly about ‘being-in-the-world/being-in-ecosystems’ is interesting. Was it you who used the term “ecological citizen” back there? I like that. One aspect of the ecological crisis we are creating is that it may force us all to begin thinking as world citizens too.
Animism

Engels @ 556
The people I’m talking about are questioning the conventional concept of agency you’re using. I think that’s pretty obvious. I also think this may be why you get comments like ‘helpful as always’.

If I could restate this as a rule: don’t make put-downs based on a simplistic misreading of other people’s comments.

Layman @ 561

I was talking about your framework:
“– open, fair elections in which any person can stand and all people may vote
– a set of agreed-upon civil rights and protections which all people enjoy
– a functioning government characterized by checks and balances between discrete, separated powers (legislative, judicial, executive) and the rule of law
– a broad understanding that the purpose of government is to improve the quality of life of the people (else why have it?)”

That’s a framework for democracy, right? Democracy is separate from liberalism.

Okay, I should have stuck to Flaubert. Enjoy your friction-free pontificating!

Val, are you saying you don’t reject any of the tenets I outlined, and (by extension) you’d count yourself among those who think it’s the right framework? Put another way, are you saying your objection to the OP is a dispute over the meaning of the term ‘liberal democracy’? I don’t want to guess at that, I’d like it if you could address that clearly.

@ engels

Man, you’re killing me.

‘How far liberalism has moved from those origins is a matter for example’ should be ‘matter for debate, for example’. Sorry using mobile

John Holbo – And to reinforce another point that I tried to make earlier: I appreciate that you’ve written a long and thoughtful post, and I can understand that you may get annoyed by what seem to you ignorant and poorly informed criticisms. But the possibility remains that the criticisms are not as ignorant and ill-informed as you think.

(Please don’t reply to this by saying it’s all my fault because I’m not expressing myself clearly. I don’t always express myself clearly, but that’s not the whole problem here.)

@ 585
No, I’m criticising liberalism. Referring to the historical origins of liberalism is not a moral judgement on you or your post, but if that’s how you’re going to react to it, there’s nothing much I or anyone else can do, since it seems we can’t criticise liberalism without it being taken as a personal attack on you. I am sorry you can’t see that.

(TM nods somewhere, I guess. OK I accept that this seems a waste of time, but sometimes even when people appear to reject something, they see it later. But clearly I am not getting anywhere at present and I should let it go.)

the possibility remains that the criticisms are not as ignorant and ill-informed as you think

🤔

After all, it isn’t just commenters who have agency. If even the trees might, I think it’s fair to suspect that the OP might as well.

Texts have agency? I am always so far behind the trends. Got more reading to do.

I am interested in incorporating Japanese popular animism: not just trees have agency, but rice cookers. Everybody needs more mecha and yokai.

“time-slice Holbo” – A relative of Quine’s time-slice rabbit?

I thought it might be useful to have definitions. People may or may not agree with them but at least they give us a starting point.

So first the definition of “Liberal democracy” according to Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy

“Liberal democracy is a liberal political ideology and a form of government in which representative democracy operates under the principles of classical liberalism.”

Then the definition of “Classical liberalism” according to Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

“Classical liberalism is a political ideology, a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on economic freedom. It is closely related to libertarianism and to free market capitalism.”

Then there is a discussion of Liberalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/

This is much broader and seems to encompass a very wide range of positions. Maybe a bit too broad, but puts a bit of nuance into Wikipedia’s bold assertion about “classical liberalism”. I’m guessing some people here subscribe to the more recent or ‘social’ form of liberalism, especially as Americans sometimes seem to use the term ‘liberal’ to mean the same thing as we here mean by ‘left’.

Then, trying to explain a bit about my views, here is a discussion of the “Ethics of care ” position http://www.iep.utm.edu/care-eth/

It’s quite comprehensive and includes a discussion about ethics of care as a political framework although it doesn’t (I think, I haven’t finished reading it all) include caring for environment/ecosystem, which I include in the definition of caring work I’m using in my thesis.

Finally here’s the info I promised about Ecocide earlier http://eradicatingecocide.com/our-earth/

I like this statement:
“”Ecocide law gives enforcement to a legal duty of care for the wider collective, for not only people and planet, but also future generations and the wider Earth community.”

Now it’s late here, I have to go to sleep. I hope the people in the path of the hurricanes are ok.

I have always assumed it is to be read ‘original poster’.

Are you oppressing my outsider readings?

Ikegami: $50 or a lot of gasoline and time.

Umm, apologies if I am drifting far, but might be able to attach this, like a leech or something. The yokai are important to me as the robots. In current art-anime trends:yokai way up, mecha way down, isekai* rules! What does this mean?

Nature Human Technology

Nature: environment, body, history?, capitalism, patriarchy, yokai
Human: mediation, reason, affect, labour, praxis
Technology: language, political philosophy, Marxian theory, feminism, computers and networks, mecha and robots

And all the other damn category errors

Now I must run before somebody throws Heidegger at me. I don’t do Heidegger or Derrida. I am assuming ecofeminists have read their Haraway.

@ 590
“In the imaginary fairy-land of the modern ‘historian’ everyone enjoyed equality. There were no social divisions, no hierarchies, – even chimpanzees existed in a blissful state of equality before individual members were ‘violently’ dispossessed of their right to reproduce at will. Slavery was invented sometime in a murky period around 1600 by violent, Christian, straight white men who loved guns and who wanted to take all the good stuff from women and people of color. Before that, everything was great. Bad them!”

This is silly, btw. I thought you were trying not to write nonsense these days.

@Val, I’m disappointed that you won’t answer my questions. You don’t have to, of course, but I don’t think we can get anywhere if you don’t. And that won’t be my fault.

@Val #602: Which group am I in? Both and neither (?).

As an aside – but I’m going somewhere with this – up until a short time ago I’d assumed that “OP” meant “original post”. Until John said (595) he thought it meant “original poster” that possibility had never occurred to me. Now I’m wondering if others have the same reading.

But that ambiguity is small potatoes.

When dealing with things like “democracy”, “liberal”, and “liberal democracy” the possibility of (more or less innocently/unintentionally) getting it wrong confused are legion. Thus I’m not a political theorist. If a couple of days ago you’d asked me to define “liberal democracy” I’m pretty sure I’d have gotten it wrong. I mean, I’m pretty sure the term is fuzzy and flexible, but still, allowing for maximum leeway, I’d have gotten it wrong. Heck, if I were to hazard a defintion right now, I probably wouldn’t do very well.

Just how and when this conversation got off track, I don’t really know nor do I care. John can be abrasive and abrupt (“passive agressive” I seem to recall him saying). And you waded in before you’d read carefully and brought your default understandings of various terms with you. Now we’ve got a mess.

Maybe there’s no way out. Just let it go.

@bob mcmanus: Sorry, can’t give you any more help. Wish the Ikegami were cheaper. There some good stuff in there about liminal spaces (forget whether or not she uses that term, but that’s what she’s talking about) that might shed light on isekai.

[But how better to end such a debate than with an orgy of links to online encyclopaedia articles?]

[PPPS. I wanna apologise to Bill Benzon for appearing dismissive of his views on animism, which sound interesting and eminently worthy of engagement, and make it clear that my snark was directed specifically at the argument that ‘hurricanes do things’ provides a reason for thinking they have agency.]

By the way. It would definitely help, if you actually want to positively interact with the ecosystem, that if you disagree with things like ‘liberal democracy’ you should give a specific example of a tenet (not outcome) that you disagree with, and ideally explain why you think that doesn’t work with the post or some specific comment.

That isn’t an order.

That isn’t a request.

That is an explanation of how to function in a particular ecosystem.

@ 609

“Just how and when this conversation got off track, I don’t really know nor do I care. John can be abrasive and abrupt (“passive agressive” I seem to recall him saying). And you waded in before you’d read carefully and brought your default understandings of various terms with you. Now we’ve got a mess.”

So who do you think hasn’t brought their “default understandings” into this, and why is it wrong to try for some clarity around the understandings?

But one thing I concede (not specifically to you, but in general). John Holbo’s ridicule of me may not be primarily to do with me being a feminist critic. I think that has something todo with it, but I think it’s more because I’m a critic.

Layman
I’ve said this before, but here it is again. In classical liberalism, the concept of the individual citizen was an adult white man of property and ‘science’ (ie educated), who was imagined as in control of ‘nature’ and superior to or in control of women and inferior races.

This Enlightenment understanding was also integrally related to capitalism, although there was a pre-existing belief in hierarchy and the right of some people (men) to control the labourer of others and have more money, wealth and resources than others. The belief that the production of commodities for the market is superior to and more important than small scale, local domestic and subsistence work, mainly done by women, was, however, common to both classical liberals and Marx.

I don’t think that contemporary liberalism has successfully overcome these assumptions, in particular it still draws on the idea of the individual as a discrete being who makes ‘free’ choices, rather than as someone who is also part of a community and ecosystem, and whose ideas and understandings are developed within that context. I have said most of this before.

John Holbo

Well, I tried. No one will ever be able to say I didn’t try.

Since I actually did say that, it seems clear to me that I can say that.

(My exact words were:)

You make extremely abstract claims and are very resistant to concrete analysis. This means that the claims can’t get clarified, even as to what they mean, never mind whether they are true. There’s no way forward.

JanieM

” … That’s not a REQUEST, it’s an ORDER.”

That was a joke I made because Sebastian H has repeatedly told me what I should be doing in this thread, frequently using CAPITAL LETTERS.

If you insist on coming into threads to police my behaviour, at least understand the context first.

@ engels: Apology accepted. I wondered what was going on, but decided to let it go.

@ Val 617: Of course, we ALL brought our default understandings (of everything, not just liberalism, democracy and their conjunction) with us, and John used his in making the post.

And, yes, the abstractness of the argument was/is a problem. I happen to like (very) abstract arguments. I think they’re useful and necessary. But they’re also very hard to control.

If you insist on coming into threads to police my behaviour, at least understand the context first.

1. On what basis do you assume I’m too dim to understand the context? Do you think I can’t read the thread and tell when there are capital letters showing up?

2. Since you seem to feel free to police other people’s behavior (on someone else’s blog, no less) in almost every thread you participate in, I don’t know why different rules should apply to me.

And as for “insist[ing] on coming into threads…” — I think I’ve only ever made one comment about/to you, or at least had only one exchange. What I said then still applies.