The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel’s theorem doesn’t really say “there are true things which cannot be proved” any more than Einstein’s theory means “everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view.”I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen dubious appeals to intuition or claims about chaos theory and the like supported with reference to Godel’s theorem, but I have derived the following proposition:
Quiggin’s metatheorem: Any interesting conclusion derived with reference to Gödel’s theorem is unfounded.
Feel free to evaluate with reference to the post title, and your level of interest in the formalist program.
Direct him or her to Scott McLemee’s speculations about where Rand got her ideas (Scott doesn’t do permalinks - so if this link decays rapidly, don’t blame me).
A rather interesting paper by Richard Tuck at the OPT conference on Hobbes and Rousseau contained a longish quote from De Cive (10.9) about the inconveniences of democracy. At the time it seemed to me to contain wise advice about the downsides of blogging, and on chasing it up, that view is reinforced:
But perhaps for this very reason some will say, That a Popular State is much to be preferr’d before a Monarchicall; because that, where all men have a hand in publique businesses, there all have an opportunity to shew their wisedome, knowledge, and eloquence, in deliberating matters of the greatest difficulty and moment; which by reason of that desire of praise which is bred in humane nature, is to them who excell in such like faculties, and seeme to themselves to exceed others, the most delightfull of all things. But in a Monarchy, this same way to obtain praise, and honour, is shut up to the greatest part of Subjects; and what is a grievance, if this be none? Ile tell you: To see his opinion whom we scorne, preferr’d before ours; to have our wisedome undervalued before our own faces; by an uncertain tryall of a little vaine glory, to undergoe most certaine enmities (for this cannot be avoided, whether we have the better, or the worse); to hate, and to be hated, by reason of the disagreement of opinions; to lay open our secret Counsells, and advises to all, to no purpose, and without any benefit; to neglect the affaires of our own Family: These, I say, are grievances. But to be absent from a triall of wits, although those trialls are pleasant to the Eloquent, is not therefore a grievance to them, unlesse we will say, that it is a grievance to valiant men to be restrained from fighting, because they delight in it.
It seems that no op-ed piece on the British government’s proposals to criminalize incitement to religious hatred is complete without some reference to Voltaire. So, for example, Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian (and cf Toynbee on the same subject in August):
Voltaire would have defended Islamic communities to the death from racists - but not set their beliefs beyond ordinary debate.
From Maurice Cranston’s The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity pp. 100—101:
It was amid these ominous stirrings that the Letters from the Mountain [by Rousseau] arrived in Geneva like ‘a firebrand in a powder magazine’, a phrase used in a letter from Francois d’Ivernois to Rousseau and often repeated. One or two magistrates proposed burning the book immediately, and Voltaire wrote impassioned letters urging them to do so. Posing as a champion of Christianity, he pressed his best friend on the Petit Conseil, Francois Tronchin, to ensure that the government acted against a ‘seditious blasphemer’ and put a stop to ‘the audacity of a criminal’ not simply by burning the book but by punishing the author ‘with all the severity of the law’.
Documents concerning Karl Marx’s life, including a shareholders’ certificate and the police advice on his application for naturalization, are to go on display at the British National Archives in Kew. According to the Metropolitan Police he was a
notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society and an advocate of communistic principles. This man has not been loyal to the King.
There seems to be another outbreak of Orwell quotation across parts of the blogosphere (at least I’ve noticed a couple of the usual suspects engaging in this over the past few days). Matthew Turner commented on this habit in September:
It’s by now well-established that a man who died over 50 years ago has all the answers to today’s problems (well except when he talks on economic policy, or social policy, or class, or etc).
Still, following a link to his Notes on Nationalism (not one of his better efforts, but anyway) I did find a few words that seemed descriptive of blogospheric “debate” :
Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.
No sooner does Des von Bladet leave a comment mentioning Marshall Sahlins than I click on a link in a document Henry sent me and get taken to the Creative Commons site, where there’s an interview with …. Marshall Sahlins on the topic of pampleteering on the internet. Sahlins has republished (and e-published) a number of pamplets from his Prickly Paradigm Press , including his own Waiting for Foucault, Still (PDF), which contains some great observations. Here are two:
Relevance
I don’t know about Britain, but in America many graduate students in anthropology are totally uninterested in other times and places. They say we should study our own current problems, all other ethnography being impossible anyhow, as it is just our “construction of the other.”
So if they get their way, and this becomes the principle of anthropological research, fifty years hence no one will pay the slightest attention to the work they’re doing now. Maybe they’re onto something.
And
Orientalism (dedicated to Professor Gellner)
In Anthropology there are some things that are better left un-Said.
I can still recall my surprise when I happened upon a volume in a second-hand bookshop by Maurice Maeterlinck, author of Pelleas et Mellisande and one of history’s most famous Belgians, only to discover that it was all about the natural history of bees. If James Meek’s piece in the latest LRB is anything to go on, I’m in good company:
Not long after the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’
Further on in Meek’s review of Bee Wilson’s The Hive [1] he claims that Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts somewhere that nations which eat honey are natural democracies but those which use sugar as a sweetener are fit only for tyranny. I guess I can see what the argument might be — something about honey-gathering being a suitable activity for free citizens whereas sugar came from large plantations worked by slaves — but does JJR really say it anywhere?2
1 One of the names we canvassed for this blog before we launched was “The Grumbling Hive”, I’m glad I lost that argument.
2 Montesquieu makes explit the link between sugar and black slavery at Spirit of the Laws I.15.v.
This year is the 300th anniversary of the death of John Locke and since he was born in Wrington and brought up in Pensford (both small villages near Bristol) we’ve been doing our bit to celebrate. On Saturday we had a one-day conference aimed mainly at schoolchildren and last night I gave an evening class on his political thought (attended by, among others, our polymathically perverse commenter Count Des von Bladet who asked a question about Levi-Strauss that I didn’t understand). There’s also been a flurry of newspaper articles, of which the latest is from Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian .
Reading Scott McLemee’s review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity (as discussed by Henry yesterday), I’m struck by the inadequacy of her contrast between the “French” and the “British”. Take two of the alleged dimensions of difference:
She finds in some English and Scottish thinkers of the 18th century (Adam Smith, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, for example) something like the first effort to create a sociology of virtue. The French savants exalted a bloodless notion of Reason to bloody effect. The British philosophers emphasized the moral sentiments, the spontaneous capacity to recognize another person’s suffering and to feel it as one’s own.
and
Nor was this Enlightenment necessarily at war with religion, as such. Himmelfarb quotes the jibes of Edward Gibbon (no orthodox religious believer by any stretch) against those French thinkers who ”preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists.”
Anyone who knows anything about the “French” enlightenment knows that at least that one of its non-French participants, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, differed from the likes of Voltaire on points such as these. Somehow, I doubt that this Jean-Jacques’ virtues on these points (if virtues they are) get highlighted by Himmelfarb since doing so would muck-up her division of the world into sheep and goats.
There is a desire on the part of the community for an investment in infrastructure and human resources and I think there has been a shift in attitude in the community on this, even among the most ardent economic rationalists2Howard is, arguably, the last of the Thatcherites. He entered the Australian Parliament in 1974, just as the Keynesian social-democratic consensus of the postwar period was coming to an end. He was Treasurer in the Fraser government (which held office from 1975 to 1983) and, subsequently one of Fraser’s bitterest critics, arguing that the government had missed the opportunity to undertake radical market-oriented reform3. In Opposition through the 1980s, he was the leading advocate of free-market reforms, continually pushing the Hawke-Keating Labor government (by inclination a precursor of Blair’s Third Way) to the right. On gaining office in 1996 after a very muted campaign, he introduced drastic expenditure cuts and established a Commission of Audit to find more. He’s been gradually moving away from this radical position ever since, in the face of increasing public opposition. Until now, however, he has never openly repudiated the ideological goal of rolling back the public sector.
.I think it’s reasonable to treat this statement as representing the end of the neoliberal push to overturn the social-democratic settlement, at least in the English-speaking countries
In Britain,the Blair-Brown government, which started out offering little more than Thatcherism with a human face has gradually shifted towards a modified social democracy, raising both taxes and public spending. New Zealand has turned its back on the radical reforms of the 80s and 90s (though Don Brash, one of the architects of those reforms, now leads the opposition National Party, having morphed into a law-and-order race-card conservative). I can’t really follow Canadian politics but the story there seems to be much the same.
Finally, there’s the US under Bush which has managed to follow the tax-cutting part of neoliberalism, but not the expenditue-cutting part. I honestly don’t know how this will play out when the bills finally come due. But it’s fair to say that, in rhetorical terms at least, Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” represents a repudiation of neoliberalism.
The failure of the neoliberal counter-revolution doesn’t mean that old-style social democracy is going to be restored any time soon. Rather, the current period of confusion will eventually generate a new synthesis, something I plan to post more about soon.
1 Because of changes in the tax system, and the complexities of a federal system, debate over this claim gets tangled in definitional issues. For the purposes of this post, it’s sufficient to note that the ratios of government revenue and public expenditure to GDP have been broadly stable for the past twenty years or so, after rising steadily for many decades before that.
2 The term ‘economic rationalist’ is broadly equivalent to ‘neoliberal’ or ‘Thatcherite’, though with more emphasis on bureacratic rationality as the basis of policy processes
3 Fraser, originally seen as a disciple of Ayn Rand has given credibility to this critique, moving steadily to the left ever since he left office to the point where he is now in general agreement with his former adversary, Gough Whitlam.
ABout 25 years ago I was innocently listening to my radio very late at night, and heard the first episode of a strange science fiction show. I was one of the few thousand people who listened to all the first series. It was not a success, but, being the BBC, they made another series anyway. A couple of years later it was transcribed as a book and became a huge publishing phenomenon, and the author wrote several more books added on to the series. I refrained from reading them, on the grounds that books are just second-rate radio shows, and if it wasn’t dramatised it probably wasn’t worth reading. It never occurred to me that, if I refrained from reading them, I might, eventually, be able to hear them dramatised on the radio as they should be, and not have any inkling of the plot. Fantastic.
I bought my copy of Blom’s Encyclopédie yesterday afternoon and it promises to be an entertaining read rather than a scholarly one. Leafing through for Rousseau references I found that the author claims that JJR’s unexpected death in 1778 may have been suicide. This is the first time I’ve come across such a speculation and it is certainly at odds with what Maurice Cranston has to say in The Solitary Self . Cranston tells us that Rousseau suffered a brief illness and died of a stroke. Incidentally, the relevant page of The Solitary Self also covers Rousseau’s re-interrment in the Pantheon in 1794. The fashion these days on the libertarian right (you know, the sort of people who bang on about “the wisdom of the founders”) is to see the French and American revolutions as springing from very different impulses and to hold Rousseau as responsible for the collectivist faults of the French model. For many reasons I think this latter is deeply mistaken, but the American participation in the Pantheon ceremony at least reminds us that people back then didn’t see the two traditions as so sharply divided:
The procession escorting Rousseau’s remains was led by a captain of the United States Navy carrying the stars and stripes, along with others bearing the tricolour and the flag of republican Geneva. At the end came members of the national legislature, preceded by their “beacon”, The Social Contract . The American Minister in Paris, James Monroe, accompanied by his staff, was the only foreign guest invited to witness the ceremony inside the Pantheon. (p. 186).
Today’s Telegraph has two reviews of Philipp Blom’s Encyclopédie: one by Graham Robb and the other by Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple). It sounds like another volume to add to my Enlightenment pile (some of which I’ve even read). From Daniels’s review:
Because censorship was still strong, though not completely inflexible, in the France of Louis XV, the authors of subversive articles in the various volumes had to adopt an indirect Aesopian approach (a most aesthetically and intellectually satisfying technique that is closed, alas, to authors who have no censorship to evade). My favourite practitioner of such subtle subversion is the Abbé Mallet, who undermined religious dogmas by discussing them in deadpan and literal-minded fashion. He meditates, for example, at great and pedantic length on the precise geographical location of Hell - was it in Terra Australis, in the sun, or in the environs of Rome? And how many species of animal Noah would have had to take aboard the Ark, how many bales of hay and straw, and how often he would have had to clean out the animals’ stalls? No dogma can long withstand the onslaught of this kind of concrete-mindedness, posing in the garb of credulous orthodoxy.
At some point soon I want to write an extended post on the Enlightenment and the common references on blogs to “the Enlightenment Project” and “the values of the Enlightenment”. Pending that, here’s a link to Robert Wokler’s essay The Enlightenment: The Nation-State and the Primal Patricide of Modernity (PDF) which digs overs some of the questions concerning the relationship between the Enlightenment and “modernity”. (The essay also appears in a collection co-edited by Wokler and Norman Geras — The Enlightenment and Modernity).
I’ve always found Foucault pretty hard going, as I intimated in yesterday’s post, though I think he’s a more interesting figure than his epigones. As it happens, he is the subject of not one but two biographies. The first is David Macey’s The Lives of Michel Foucault which is scholarly and fact-filled. The other is James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault , and is a tremendous piece of writing which presents itself as a “narrative account of one man’s lifelong struggle to honor Nietzsche’s gnomic injunction, ‘to become what one is’.” I really can’t recommend Miller’s various books highly enough. As well as the Foucault volume he wrote a very readable study of Rousseau — Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy — and a highly entertaining history of rock music: Flowers in the Dustbin (also published as Almost Grown in the UK). Miller is currently editor of Daedalus .
Surfing round the blogosphere, I find Oliver Kamm banging on about alliances between “the Left” and theocratic fascism. Kamm’s correspondent, the philosopher Jeff Ketland of the University of Edinburgh, offers the following as an example:
One can find examples in the postmodernist literature, and the most obvious example is Michel Foucault, once a member of the French communist party and main source of much recent postmodernist and social constructivist philosophy. Foucault visited Iran around the time of the revolution. He enthusiastically described the revolution as a new kind of “political spirituality”, and was very impressed with its characteristically anti-Enlightenment aspects.
This just doesn’t stack up, though as an instance of left-theocratic alliance. …
Presumably Ketland’s mention of Foucault’s PCF membership is supposed to support the identification of Foucault with “the Left”. But Foucault left the PCF in 1953 and wrote profoundly silly things about Iran over a quarter of a century later. By 1979 he was hardly a leftist on an sensible view of what that involves. Looking in David Macey’s The Lives of Michel Foucault to check the facts, I also found the following concerning Foucault’s departure from the PCF, suggesting that Foucault left the Party for reasons which Kamm would wholeheartedly endorse:
The “doctors’ plot” had revealed the existence of an ugly strand of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. The French Party press was not to be outdone in the matter of anti-Semitism. According to Annie Besse, writing in the Cahiers du communisme, “Hitler … refrained from harming the Jews of the big bourgeoise … Who will ever forget that Leon Blum, his wife at his side, contemplated from the windows of his villa, the smoke from the ovens of the crematoria!” Zionism was “a mask behind which to conceal espionage operations against the Soviet Union.” Whether Foucault ever read these statements is not known, but in 1953 he was already denouncing the “odious” attitude taken towards Israel by both the superpowers. His pro-Israeli sentiments were as unswerving as his dislike for the PCF and it is difficult to believe there was no connection between the two. (p. 40)
Foucault was a difficult, obscure, contradictory and often infuriating figure. At his worst he wrote nonsense. At his best he can be profoundly unsettling to the lazier assumptions of the “Enlightenment” (with a capital E) view of the world, in a similar way to the manner in which Rousseau and Nietzsche also can disturb them. What he won’t do is provide an easy example for blogospheric divisions of the world into sheep and goats.
Peter Gordon, a behavioral scientist at Columbia University, conducted an unusual set of experiments with seven adults of the 200-member Piraha tribe of Amazonian Indians in Brazil.
The tribe’s counting system consists of three words — one that means “roughly one,” one that means “a small quantity” and one that means “many.”
Gordon asked the Piraha subjects to perform various tasks in which performance would be greatly enhanced by the ability to count. These included laying out the same number of nuts or sticks that he had laid out; distinguishing two boxes whose only difference was the number of fish drawn on their tops; and knowing when a tin can was empty after watching the researcher put nuts into the can and then withdraw them one by one.
Gordon found that the Piraha were essentially incapable of following or accounting for more than three objects. When a task involved larger numbers — even five or six — the subjects’ answers were little more than guesses, even though they clearly understood the tests and were working hard on them.
He attributed this surprising finding to the fact the Piraha “have no privileged name for the singular quantity” — in other words, no one, no notion of an integer.
“The present study represents a rare and perhaps unique case for strong linguistic determinism” — the idea that language determines thought — Gordon wrote.
John D. Barrow explores similar ideas in his lively book Pi in the Sky: Counting, Thinking and Being. The most surprising thing, to me, is not the poor performance of the Piraha on these tests, given their linguistic disadvantage. Rather, I am amazed that anyone could get through life, particularly a no-doubt difficult struggle for existence in the jungles of the Amazon, with such a piss-poor numbering system. Perhaps the category “roughly one” has some unique areas of application which I am unable to appreciate. And it is by no means inconsistent with my strongly Platonic beliefs about numbers that it might take humans a long time to discover the existence of these supernatural, world-ordering entities. But the advantages of being able to count properly, even up to ten or twenty, seem so overwhelming, and the principles involved so obvious, that I am astonished anyone can get by without them.
If I could have the answers to five questions in political science/sociology, the appeal of Stalinism to intellectuals would be one of them.I don’t think this is as difficult a question as is often supposed.
Most of the intellectuals who professed support for Communism during the rule of Stalin (and Lenin) were primarily victims of (self-)deception. They supported the stated aims of the Communist Party (peace, democracy, brotherhood), opposed the things the Communists denounced (fascism, racism, exploitation) and did not inquire too closely into whether the actual practice of the Soviet Union and the parties it controlled was consistent with these stated beliefs. I developed this point, and the contrast with the relatively small group of intellectuals who supported the Nazis, in a review of1 Mark Lilla’s book The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics
Two very different types of people have ended up as Communists. First, there are those for whom the central appeal was the cartharsis of a revolutionary smashing of the existing order. This was essentially the same appeal offered by the Nazis, and many of this type changed sides when the mandate of Heaven appeared to shift from one totalitarian party to the other.After writing this, I recalled something Orwell had to say in response to an early Cold War description of the typical Communist as a fanatical ideologue, subordinating all personal values to the global struggle against capitalism and democracy. As he said (I’m paraphrasing from memory here), “this all sounds convincing, until you try to apply it the Communists you actually know. With the exception of a couple of hundred hardcore members, they are nothing like this. Most drift in, become disillusioned after a while, and drift out again”.On the other hand, there were large numbers of liberals and social democrats who were dissatisfied with the obvious failings of their own countries and accepted, at face value, the claims of the Soviet Union to be a peace-loving, democratic and socially just alternative society. Beatrice and Sydney Webb are prime examples of this sort of ‘fellow-traveler’.
The fellow-travelers may fairly be accused of gullibility and wishful thinking in their assessment of the Soviet Union, but this does not imply that their own ideas contained the seeds of totalitarianism. In fact, unlike the Nazi sympathisers discussed by Lilla, the vast majority of fellow-travelers, including those who took the formal step of joining the Communist Party, ultimately realised they had been deceived. Some repudiated their previous views entirely and became, in the American parlance, neoconservatives. Others simply accepted they had made a mistaken judgement, and adopted a more skeptical view of life, while retaining their old ideals.
There is nothing similar among those attracted to fascism and Nazism. Although Nazi propaganda was mendacious in every detail, it never concealed the fundamentally brutal nature of Nazism. The closest parallel to the ‘fellow traveler’ on the right is supplied by the many decent Catholics who supported Franco as a ‘soldier for Christ’.
1 And also of a couple of books by Christopher Hitchens
According to this report, Louis De Branges claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis. If correct, it's very significant - much more so than the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by Wiles.
It is also, I think, the last of the big and well-known unsolved problems in mathematics, and it would be nice to see the search ending in success. Some of the other big problems have been closed, rather than solved. The classic problems of the Greeks such as squaring the circle were shown to be insoluble in the 19th century, and the Hilbert program of formalisation was shown by Godel to be infeasible. And the four-colour problem (not a really important problem, but a big one because it was easily described, interesting and very tough) was dealt with by a brute-force computer enumeration.
Almost instant update Commenter Eric on my blog points to Mathworld which says "Much ado about nothing". On the other hand, the same page reports a proof of the infinitude of twin primes which has been an open question for a long time, though not a problem in the same league as those mentioned above.
The programme about Rousseau that I blogged about the other day is available on-line (though I think this link may only work for about a week). I thought it was pretty good on the whole. Though it didn’t resolve the Derbyshire—Staffordshire controversy, it should have made listeners curious to read or re-read Rousseau’s autobiographies and there were some entertaining musical excerpts as well as contributions from such eminent Rousseau scholars as John Scott and John Hope Mason. Recommended.
As part of a series about philosophers and places, BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting a programme this Sunday (21.30 GMT, so internet listeners should adjust for location) in which Jonathan Ree discusses Rousseau in Staffordshire . I’m rather hoping that this will clear up a little dispute I had with Chris Brooke . Chris emailed me soon after my Rousseau book came out to tell me that I was mistaken in writing that Rousseau had lived in Derbyshire . Chris wrote, correctly, that the village of Wootton near where Rousseau stayed, is in Staffordshire and that, since the county line there is set by the River Dove, Wootton was almost certainly in Staffordshire in the 18th century too. We both set to consulting out various works of reference, only to reach a stalemate. So for, for example, this 1776 account of Hume’s life has Derbyshire, as does Rousseau himself in correspondence, but other reputable sources insist on Staffordshire. I’m sure you’re all intruigued by this antiquarian mystery! I shall be listening with attention.
(And see The Virtual Stoa for a map of the area).
Below the fold is a request for someone to dig out something Marx-related from their university library for me.
I’m giving a paper on Friday on Marx and Rousseau at a conference in Manchester in honour of Norman Geras. Marx and Rousseau is a surprisingly neglected topic in view of the affinities between their work. Surprising, that is, until you find out just how sparse the references to Rousseau are in the works of Marx and Engels. In fact, there’s only one decent paper on the topic in English, “Rousseau and Marx” by Robert Wokler, in The Nature of Political Theory (eds Miller and Siedentop) published in 1983. In it Wokler says that there’s no direct evidence that Marx ever read Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (Engels certainly did read it). Now the thought occured to me of trying to find out whether Marx had a copy in his personal library (not that that is a sign that a person has actually read something ). The trouble is, the most recent list is in a volume of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, the volume discussed here . It isn’t in our library but it may be in yours. If so and you feel like saving me weeks of waiting for an inter-library loan, email your findings to chris at crookedtimber.org
I recently read Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality with a group of colleagues. To the extent to which I understood the book (and despite the book’s brevity I’m feeling somewhat sympathetic to those snakes who have to sit around whilst they digest a large mammal), my comprehension was greatly assisted by Brian Leiter’s excellent Nietzsche on Morality . Reading the reviews and commentary on Mel Gibson’s Passion, I was immediately reminded of a passage from the second essay, where Nietzsche is writing about the genesis of guilt from the sense of indebtedness (at first to ancestors) and remarks on the further excruciating twist that Christianity brings: on the pretext of having their debts forgiven, believers are put in a postition of psychological indebtedness from which they can never recover (He sent his only son, and we killed Him):
…. we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity—God’s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! (sec. 21)
I haven’t seen Gibson’s film yet (since it doesn’t open in the UK for another month) but it is clear from the reviews that it is precisely this aspect of the Christian story that Gibson accentuates through his relentless focus on the torture and suffering of Jesus. (And see the email of the day on Andrew Sullivan for evidence that some believers are taking the movie in exactly this way.)
Contrast this with, say, Pasolini’s treatment of the story in his The Gospel According to St. Matthew , where another aspect of the Christian message is emphasised: that we all belong to a common humanity, that each person has moral worth and should be recognised as such, and that compassion is an appropriate attitude to the suffering of our fellow humans (a vision powerfully expressed, also, in Joan Osborne’s song “One of Us”). Nietzsche doesn’t like this aspect of Christianity either, of course, but for me at least, it is the most attractive feature of the religion. Not just attractive, of course, but morally and politically important and influential: the basic equality of humans posited by both Locke and Kant is strongly rooted in this Christian tradition (which poses an unresolved problem, I think, for those of us who want to hang onto that moral idea whilst rejecting religion - c.f Jeremy Waldron’s recent God, Locke and Equality ).
One of the reasons I can’t bring myself to share the antipathy to religion that is expressed by someone like our esteemed regular commenter Ophelia Benson , is that, at its best, religion succeeds in a symbolic articulation of universal moral concern that secular morality finds it hard to match up to (motivationally, I mean). Secular morality is a thin gruel compared to the notion that, as children of God, we are to think of ourselves as brothers and sisters. It sounds as if Gibson’s film is a reminder not of religion at its best, but at its very worst: cruel and sadistic and aiming to provoke a mixture of guilt, worthlessness and rage in believers. I’m keeping an open mind about whether the film is specifically anti-semitic, but it sounds very much as if the film draws on and inflames the very reactive attitudes that have inspired much religious violence and persecution (not to speak of personal unhappiness) in the past.
I’ve been rereading parts of the German Ideology , the text where Marx and Engels really start to get historical materialism straightened out. And very fine and interesting it is too. But my purpose in this post isn’t to discuss the content of a work which Marx and Engels did not publish but “abandoned … to the gnawing criticism of the mice”, but to reproduce (below the fold for bandwidth reasons) a page of the original MS which appears in facsimile in volume 5 of the MECW. What readers get, thanks to the intervention of subsequent editors, as a piece of elegant if vituperative prose, appears in the original in the form of a half-crossed out scrawl . The scrawl only occupied about half the page, the rest of which is filled with jottings, notes and many many doodled heads (probably by Engels). Other facsmile pages are in an even worse condition with great chunks consumed by the rodents. [I now discover that the page I’ve photographed and a few others besides are on the marxists.org website anyway, never mind ….]
The page displayed is from the Feuerbach part of the MS, and the facsimile is at MECW 5 facing p. 35.
Below I’ve enlarged a detail of Engels’s heads.
Sometimes quotes take on a life of their own. They become famous and get attributed to someone without anyone citing a traceable origin. I ran into such a problem about five years ago when I wanted to use a quote by Herbert Simon in an article. The quote was this:
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
I remember doing all sorts of searches online to figure out the exact source of that quote. But others using those lines either cited no source or pointed to a piece by Hal Varian in Scientific American as the source of the quote. I checked out that article, but there was no citation. What to do? I ended up contacting Hal Varian directly for the source and he very kindly provided a pointer to it (p.40.).
I was reminded of this today when I saw a message on a mailing list wondering about the source of the quote “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”. It is often cited and attributed to William Gibson, but without an exact reference anywhere. A blogger cites an issue of The Economist, but I can’t track the quote down in the archives of The Economist. In fact, The Economist didn’t even seem to have an issue published on the date cited. Maybe a blogger intern isn’t such a crazy idea after all.
I looked up the quote using Amazon’s “search inside” feature. The one instance in which there is a source (page 15 of this book) the author cites personal communication in November 1999.
Maybe Brad DeLong can help.:) (see the last paragraph in that piece)
I see that Chris Brooke is guest-blogging over at a Fistful of Euros. He’s sure to say much of interest at what is becoming one of the best blogs around. His first post there alerted me to something I’d missed, namely Scott Martens’s excellent exposition of Marx’s On The Jewish Question (in comments - you have to scroll down), which connects with some of the issues discussed in my post below about Clermont-Tonnerre and the 1789 debates about the rights of man in the French National Assembly.
I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference — and great fun it was too. One of the things I managed to do in Oxford was to meet up with Chris Brooke of the Virtual Stoa in his palatial college rooms. Just over a year ago Chris and about the board games: me about playing Monopoly in the old GDR and he about Bertell Ollman’s game Class Struggle . I was fortunate enough to find myself sitting next to Professor Ollman at lunch today and asked him about the game, and one of the things he told me was the Monopoly itself was originally conceived as an anti-capitalist game by a follower of Henry George. The story of the game’s invention and its subsequent appropriation by Parker Brothers is here (scroll down to list of articles) and here .
Norman Geras has a post on anti-semitism in France which documents some awful recent attacks on Jews. But he then goes on to cite another article by Serge Klarsfeld which alleges that France has been a “consistent adversary of the Jewish nation” and cites a 1789 speech to the National Assembly by Clermont-Tonnerre, one of the deputies. I was curious about this and googled for it, and the whole speech is available on-line . The speech actually concerns the various groups who were excluded from various legal rights before the revolution, including members of “questionable professions” (such as actors and executioners) and religious minorities including Protestants and Jews. Clermont-Tonnerre is arguing for the extension of legal rights to all citizens, regardless of their religious opinion, and that no-one should have a special and distinct legal status because of the religious or ethnic identity: all individuals should be equal as citizens before the law. He attacks the idea that the Jews should be allowed to have their own judges and to exact their own punishments on lawbreakers. But it is clear that the point he is making is the same as a liberal would make now if it were proposed that Muslims should be allowed to establish Sharia courts with the power to enact punishments within France or Britain today. Maybe there is an argument supporting the thesis of a persistent anti-Jewish bias by the French state since the revolution, but the broadly liberal sentiments expressed by Clermont-Tonnerre in the National Assembly are no evidence for this.
Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian intellectual and former PLO representative — whose book Traditions of War reclaims a central place for Jean-Jacques Rousseau in thinking about the ethics and law of war and conflict — writes today in the Guardian about Rousseau, the Geneva accords and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Her piece points up a central problem in the politics of the Israeli—Palestinian conflict: for all the neoconservative rhetoric about the centrality of democracy to progress in the Middle East, the sort of Palestinian leaders with whom Bush and Sharon want to deal are very different from those who would emerge from democratized Palestinian institutions.
I’m off to the Oxford Political Thought Conference (programme here in Word format ) tomorrow. I’ve never been before, but I’m very much looking forward to it. Jonathan Israel, author of the monumental Radical Enlightenment is speaking, as is Michael Otsuka whose Libertarianism Without Inequality I’ve been discussing on Crooked Timber. I’m also hoping to meet up with Chris Brooke of the Virtual Stoa , who has recently blogged about both Jonathan Israel and about Sankar Muthu’s new Enlightenment Against Empire (of which I’ve read a chapter and a half and may comment on soonish).
Josh Cherniss has published the results of his top Marxists poll. I’m going to resist the temptation to sat anything about the accompanying commentary except to recommend, as an antidote, the essays on Lenin and Trotsky that feature in Alasdair Macintyre’s Against the Self-Images of the Age.
Last Friday night, I went along with a friend to a cello recital in the Marais, an arty area of Paris. We missed the right door three times in the dark, but finally found our way upstairs, through an ordinary old apartment building complete with post boxes, lights on a timer, little old ladies and exhortations to keep the door shut, to the last remaining temple in Europe of Comte’s humanist religion, the Chapel of Humanity.
Of course we didn’t know that at the time. We just knew that we had finally found 5, rue Payenne, there was no heating, and the cellist had been involved in a traffic accident on the wrong side of the Peripherique. So we sat down with about six others to wait and see if he’d show.
The chapel could have seated about thirty people and had a Madonna and Child at the front, and a series of paintings of what seemed to be saints on each wall. It was too decorated for a Quaker meeting room, but too downright odd (to me) to be anything Christian. And, I thought, if it was a Masonic temple they’d have never let us in. On closer inspection, I saw the Madonna wasn’t enclosed by any walled gardens testifying to her virginity, and the ‘saints’ included Shakespeare, Descartes, Gutenberg, Heloise, Aristotle, Archimedes, Homer and Dante. The statue of Comte and the inscription that he had been inspired by Clotilde de Vaux was the final proof. The chapel was a place of positivist worship.
I’d read about Comte’s nutty-sounding invented religion, with its prayers, sacraments, and priesthood all based on Catholic ritals on the grounds that while rational people might worship sweet reason, no one knows how to put on a show like us Papists. I’d also heard that the only place the religion of humanity had really taken off was in Brazil, where there are said to be several thousand adherents still practising today. But what really surprised me was that this chapel didn’t date from Comte’s time (he died in the mid-nineteenth century) but was built by Brazilians in 1880 to honour their founder/prophet. And it’s in the actual house where Comte’s beloved Clotilde had lived.
The only really odd thing about the place was how old-fashioned it all seemed. I’d have thought that positivism might seem really scientific and go-ahead as religions go. But the words inscribed over the altar were ‘famille, patrie, humanite’; family, homeland, humanity. Comte seemed to have taken more from traditional religion than just the trappings. Then again, it’s probably anachronistic of me to associate individualism and all its freedoms with Comte’s brand of positivism.
The chapel is nothing really special on the face of it, and the paintings themselves aren’t nearly the best of their kind. But I think the place is worth a visit for more than its status as a unique little oddity. There’s something melancholy about it – perhaps partly because of the sad and unfulfilled lives Comte and Clotilde led. But there’s also something spunky and unbowed about it that’s hard to put my finger on. One of the mottoes on the wall says ‘Connais toi pour t’ameliorer.’ (‘Know yourself to improve yourself.’), which seems like a good start to me. I’m sure that, as with certain other religions, besides the funny dresses and the silly walks, there are a few gems of truth to be uncovered. Anyway, La Chapelle de l’Humanite (Maison de Clotilde de Vaux / Centre culturel franco-bresilien) is to be found at 5, rue Payenne, 75003 Paris, and visitors are allowed from 3pm to 6pm each day except Mondays.
The cellist did eventually show, no obviously worse for the wear, and played an absolute cracker.
I was thinking over some of the responses to my discussion of “sufficientarianism” below, and noticing how common is a certain type of right-wing response to facts about the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our societies. To whit:
It isn’t true.
or
It may be true, but it doesn’t matter.
or
It’s true, and it matters, but doing something about it would (a) have the perverse effect of making that thing worse, or (b) make something else worse. etc etc.
The same, of course, for global warming or any number of other issues. That these responses are difficult to hold consistently, doesn’t always prevent their proponents from either advancing them simultaneously or switching promiscuously among them. All of which put me in mind of Albert Hirschman’s marvellous essay The Rhetoric of Reaction (pdf), which appears as one of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values (and in a later version as a book ).
Hirschman identifies three reactionary theses:
The perversity thesis : the proposed action or reform “will produce, via a series of unintended consequences, the exact contrary of the objective that is being pursued.”
The futility thesis : “the attempt at change is abortive, that in one way or another any change is or was largely surface, facade, cosmetic, hence illusory, as the ‘deep’ structures of society remain wholly untouched.”
and
The jeopardy thesis : “a new reform, if carried out, would mortally endanger an older, highly prized one that has only recently been put into place.”
Read the whole thing (as a certain reactionary blogger might say), it is a wonderful journey through the invariance of conservative responses to reform from Burke to Murray.
In today’s FT, Samuel Brittan reviews John Gillingham’s European Integration, 1950-2003 : Superstate or New Market Economy?. One interesting snippet, which I knew about but deserves wider publicity:
Readers may be more surprised to find the name of Frederich Hayek given as the source of the alternative neoliberal interpretation. For most of today’s self-proclaimed Hayekians view everything to do with the EU with intense suspicion. Indeed I was sufficiently surprised myself to look up some of Hayek’s writings on the subject. Although he played no part in the post war institutional discussion, he had written at some length on the problems of federalism in the late 1930s. Hayek was among those who believed that some form of federalism, whether in Europe or on a wider basis, was an important step towards a more peaceful world. In a 1939 essay, remarkably anticipating the EU Single Market Act, he argued that a political union required some elements of a common economic policy, such as a common tariff, monetary and exchange rate policy, but also a ban on intervention to help particular producers.
Matthew Yglesias has some reaction to Right-Wing News’s lists of greatest figures of the twentieth century as voted for by right- and left-wing bloggers. My considered view that such lists are inherently silly hasn’t sufficiently stifled my irritation at the omissions. There’s obviously an argument to be had (on Aristotelian lines) about whether a person can both be great and do really bad things, though the further back in time one goes the easier it seems to be to reconcile judgements of greatness with the fact of a historical figure having committed atrocities or other acts of cruelty (e.g. Alexander the Great, Cromwell).
But I was also appalled by the fact that the so-called left-wing bloggers were, for want of a better word, chicken. Their list contained no leading figures from the international communist and socialist movements at all, and yet quite a few of them warrant serious consideration. Jean Jaures, French socialist opponent of war, murdered on the eve of the first world war, for one. And how about Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, again, socialist opponents of the war, murdered by the neo-fascist Freikorps in 1919? I’d even make the case for Lenin and Trotsky. The leftists have voted, safely and reasonably enough, for Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King jr. Fair enough, but I’d have thought Ho Chi Minh and Ben Bella were in with a shout. Yglesias bemoans the absence of theorists other than Orwell (who wasn’t). I concur: why were there no votes for Bertrand Russell (also a campaigner against WW1), Max Weber and Emile Durkeim (20th century figures both) or John Rawls? No doubt the prevalent francophobia meant that the right-wing crowd denied Charles de Gaulle his place. (And don’t get me started on the artists, writers and composers.)
UPDATE: (Thanks CY) There’s a long thread on this at Electrolite.
UPDATE UPDATE: Norman Geras posts the list he voted for and some reflections.
Helen Szamuely reacts in EU Observer to Jan-Werner Muller’s reaction in European Voice to the Habermas/Derrida manifesto on a European identity. (pause for intake of breath) Muller’s article can’t be got at unless you’re a subscriber to European Voice, which is a shame - he seemed to be saying that Habermas was calling for a kind of historicism that would have Benjamin spinning in his grave. I have a special hatred for articles that end with that hoary old chestnut ‘we need a debate’, but as Muller’s piece is unobtainable by the masses, Szamuely’s is worth checking out.
By the by, I can’t bring myself to fork out for a subscription to EV. It costs almost as much as the Economist but often reads like a provincial gossip sheet. EU Observer is only available online and seems to draw on a wider pool of commentators.
Just musing on the whole facts and principles issue, I was reminded of a text which Jeremy Waldron brought up on the very first occasion I heard the Cohen thesis discussed. It isn’t really relevant to the whole fact-insensitive principle stuff at all, but it is a reminder of the kind of “facts” our great precursors helped themselves to! Normally when people are arguing for design in nature, they go for things like the structure of the eye, but Kant had other “evidence” in mind in this wonderful passage from Perpetual Peace :
It is in itself wonderful that moss can still grow in the cold wastes around the Arctic Ocean; the reindeer can scrape it out from beneath the snow, and can thus serve itself as nourishment or as a draft animal for the Ostiaks or Samoyeds. Similarly, the sandy salt deserts contain the camel, which seems as if it had been created for travelling over them in order that they might not be left unutilised. But evidence of design in nature emerges even more clearly when we realise that the shores of the Arctic Ocean are inhabited not only by fur-bearing animals, but also by seals, walrusses and whales, whose flesh provides food and whose fat provides warmth for the native inhabitants. Nature’s care also arouses admiration, however, by carrying driftwood to these treeless regions without anyone knowing exactly where it comes from. For if they did not have this material, the natives would not be able to construct either boats or weapons, on dwellings in which to live. ( Kant: Political Writings ed. Reiss p. 110)
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