Chris Bertram

Always nice to discover something close to home that you were previously unaware of, in this case Nunney Castle, built around 1370 and destroyed nearly 300 years later during the Civil Wars.

Harry mentioned the politics of the second-best in comments to his post on higher education the other day. I guess it falls into something of the same space as non-ideal theory or realism, as opposed to moralism. The basic idea is that we shouldn’t hold out for purity if doing so gets in the way of making the lives of many people, some of them with urgent needs, better. And that makes a lot of sense. Pursuing the ideal policy, refusing to compromise, only allowing for perfect justice can seem like a form of self-indulgence that has real costs for those who can least afford to bear them. We always have to start from where we are, with the resources that we have and making progress can involve messy compromises with people that we don’t much like in order to do the good that we can.

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Apologies for the brief photo hiatus. Stuff going on. Anyway, here are some cranes.

(iPhone photo)

A few days ago, I tooted at Mastodon about a Christmas message I’d had from a Russian friend. I intended my post to convey something hopeful about peace and reconciliation, but got immediate pushback from someone who asked why, if there are are some good Russians, they haven’t stopped the war. Meanwhile, over on Elon’s death site, the theme of holding Russians collectively responsible for the war seemed to be gathering momentum with vehement assertions that this isn’t just “Putin’s war” but one backed by “the Russian people”. I think claims such as these, particularly in their maximal forms are absurd, and become all the more absurd when the alleged collective responsiblity of “the Russian people” is extended to an attitude of hostility and blaming towards individuals, simply because they hold Russian nationality. And many members of “the Russian people” are, after all, children. Yet in rejecting such absurdities, I also want to leave room for those Russians who feel their own responsbility keenly and who feel shame at the Russian government’s actions and who want to take responsibility by resisting, in great or small ways, what that government is doing.

One obvious point to make is that Russia is not a democracy and that Russian citizens have no effective means to restrain their government, even if they wanted to. Rather, they live under a tyranny, quick to mete out savage punishments to its opponents, and where public opinion is partly shaped by relentless nationalistic propaganda. In this light, one might think of ordinary Russians as being among the victims of the regime, even though there are others, most notably Ukrainians, who are suffering much more at its hands. During the Soviet era, it is worth noting, Western governments were keen to frame ordinary Soviet citizens as victims of dictatorship rather than holding them individually or collectively responsible, but this approach has been abandoned in some reponses to the war, including by Baltic politicians who refuse to accept that Russians who refuse to fight for Putin are legitimate refugees.
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When we renewed our roster of bloggers a little while ago, I mentioned that there would be more announcements to come. Today I’m very happy to say that Macarena Marey will be joining us at Crooked Timber. I met Macarena a few years ago at a workshop in Bayreuth and was immediately impressed by her combination of rigorous scholarship (there mainly on Kant’s poltical philosophy) with passionate commitment. Macarena was born in a little city by the sea in the Argentinian province of Buenos Aires. She’s been living in the city of Buenos Aires since she was 4, so one could say that she is “porteña”. She is a Researcher at CONICET (the National Scientific and Technical Research Council for Argentina) and Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires as well as being director of the Centre for Critical Studies and Philosophy of the Present at the Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, UBA. She is currently working on problems of political participation and on the work of the first American Marxist, José Carlos Mariátegui. She is the mother of Elías (10) and Galileo (3). Galileo is currently helping her learn a lot about ableism and how to fight it by unmasking autism, while Elías teaches her all about the science of engines in general and Formula 1 in particular. We look forward to reading what Macarena has to say!

Sam Freedman, whose Substack is the only one I subscribe to, recommended an essay by one James O’Malley on this subject. But reading the essay, it struck me as rather obviously wrong-headed, mainly for the reason that the characteristics it identifies as quintessentially “woke” are shared with other political tendencies and currents, albeit in ways that may be rendered less visible by dominant ideologies and frames of reference. Often, the claim that they are new is, to say the least, somewhat suspect, and I think O’Malley misconstrues various aspects of “woke”, most notably intersectionality.

O’Malley mentions six characteristics as defining “woke” they are:

• identitarian deference
• priority of harm reduction over free speech
• a commitment to intersectionality that makes politics totalising
• a prioritization of communitarianism over individual rights
• a scepticism about progress
• a prioritization of “right-side norms” over “accuracy norms”

Let’s take each of those in turn:

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Sometimes you walk all day with a camera and don’t take a single picture you like; at other times you just look out the window and the shot is right there.