Category Archives: philosophy

by | 26 January 2008 · 10:59 am

Prague, 1994: Fractured Intelligentsia

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), p. 141:

The intelligentsia—one of the characteristic phenomena of modern Central and East European history—is now everywhere engulfed in sweeping change. This world of “circles of friends,” of milieux, where artists, philosophers, writers, economists, journalists all felt themselves to belong to the same group and to be committed to a certain common ethos (albeit often honored in the breach), was something anachronistic in late-twentieth-century Europe—but also something rich and fine. Its extraordinary character was summed up for me in a phrase that Ivan Klíma used in describing how he and his fellow writers had set out to revive the dormant Czech PEN club in 1989. “I was,” he said, “authorized by my circle of friends.” The peculiar world of the intelligentsia under communism was one in which you sought authorization from your circle of friends.

Freedom has changed all that. With remarkable speed, the intelligentsia has fragmented into separate professions, as in the West: journalists, publishers, academics, actors, not to mention those who have become officials, lawyers, diplomats. The milieux have faded, the “circles of friends” have dispersed or lost their special significance. Those who have remained in purely “intellectual” professions—above all, academics—have found themselves impoverished. Moreover, it is the businessmen and entrepreneurs who are the tone-setting heroes of this time. Thus, from having an abnormal importance before 1989, independent intellectuals have plummeted to abnormal unimportance.

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by | 15 September 2007 · 4:11 pm

Disgust Usually Outweighs Detached Reasoning

Via Arts & Letters Daily, I came across a very interesting essay in Edge by Jonathan Haidt, entitled Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion. Here are a few excerpts.

In my dissertation and my other early studies, I told people short stories in which a person does something disgusting or disrespectful that was perfectly harmless (for example, a family cooks and eats its dog, after the dog was killed by a car). I was trying to pit the emotion of disgust against reasoning about harm and individual rights.

I found that disgust won in nearly all groups I studied (in Brazil, India, and the United States), except for groups of politically liberal college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said that people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else.

These findings suggested that emotion played a bigger role than the cognitive developmentalists had given it. These findings also suggested that there were important cultural differences, and that academic researchers may have inappropriately focused on reasoning about harm and rights because we primarily study people like ourselves—college students, and also children in private schools near our universities, whose morality is not representative of the United States, let alone the world….

Surveys have shown for decades that religious practice is a strong predictor of charitable giving. Arthur Brooks recently analyzed these data (in Who Really Cares) and concluded that the enormous generosity of religious believers is not just recycled to religious charities.

Religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors. They give more of their time, too, and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood. The bottom line, Brooks concludes, is that all forms of giving go together, and all are greatly increased by religious participation and slightly increased by conservative ideology (after controlling for religiosity).

These data are complex and perhaps they can be spun the other way, but at the moment it appears that Dennett is wrong in his reading of the literature. Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior—giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need—religious people appear to be morally superior to secular folk.

My conclusion is not that secular liberal societies should be made more religious and conservative in a utilitarian bid to increase happiness, charity, longevity, and social capital. Too many valuable rights would be at risk, too many people would be excluded, and societies are so complex that it’s impossible to do such social engineering and get only what you bargained for. My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

But because of the four principles of moral psychology [outlined earlier in the essay] it is extremely difficult for people, even scientists, to find that wisdom once hostilities erupt. A militant form of atheism that claims the backing of science and encourages “brights” to take up arms may perhaps advance atheism. But it may also backfire, polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process.

In my experience, secular academics are just as likely as anyone else to thoughtlessly dismiss in moralistic disgust not just behaviors, but beliefs they find repugnant, especially those emblematic of their social and moral inferiors.

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by | 12 July 2007 · 3:24 pm

North Korean Ideology: Juche as Kokutai

The North’s successful quasi-Stalinist economic development did not mean that North Korea adopted the particular blend of Marxism-Leninism developed under Stalin in the 1930s. On the contrary, if the North’s ideology resembled any socialist experiment, it was closer to the Chinese model [under Mao]. In retrospect, it is now clear that North Korea actually developed an independent ideological line from the beginning. Perhaps because of its early close association with the USSR and the PRC, the North continued to parrot a line of Marxism-Leninism, but from Kim Il Sung’s first formal elaboration of Chuch’e [= Juche] thought in a 1955 speech, Marxism-Leninism progressively declined as a formal category of thought in the North. In hindsight, it is difficult to see how the North’s economic and social revolution had anything at all to do with Marxist antecedents. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites after 1989, North Korea quickly disassociated itself from Marxism altogether. Moreover, the development of Chuch’e thought in tandem with the rise of the cult of the leader has provided the North with a ready explanation for the survival of its revolution even after the collapse of the Socialist world order.

Not only do North Korean ideologues assert they have leaders such as the world has never seen before, they also have an ideology that completes their self-image as the center of a world revolution. This ideology revolves around the seminal idea of Chuch’e. Chuch’e is a Sino-Korean compound formed from Chinese characters for the words “subject” [or ‘lord, master’] and “body” [主体]. Together they adumbrate the concept of “autonomy” or “self-reliance.” In its most straightforward use, Chuch’e can denote one’s independence and autonomy from any external control or manipulation. Therefore, one core meaning of Chuch’e resonates in society-wide contexts to describe an autonomous, independent, and self-reliant nation. The ch’e in Chuch’e is the same character used in kukch’e, often translated as “national body” or “polity” (see below). Here it can also carry the connotation of the “national face,” as in self-respect. Thus an independent and autonomous nation’s face (honor) must not be besmirched or denigrated. This core definition goes a long way to understanding the intense emphasis in North Korean ideology on their independence, whether in terms of their national integrity, their position earlier in the global socialist revolution, or their autarkic economic policies. The nationalist connotations of Chuch’e developed in the late nineteenth century, when it was used as an antonym of the concept of “serving the great” (sadae), a term used originally to describe the interstate relationship between Korea and China during the Chosŏn period. In the twentieth century, sadaejuŭi (the “ism” of sadae) became synonymous with being subordinate to another, with being a toady. To have sadae consciousness means to worship the outside world while denigrating one’s own culture. Chuch’e thus had come to mean an independent stance, in mind and in body, and in nationalist context it means to uphold the independence and integrity of the nation.

Chuch’e was a useful concept in creating distance with the early Soviet presence in North Korea, and later, during the time of extensive Soviet assistance in the rebuilding and first Five-year Plans, it was deployed to signal North Korean independence. The term, first elaborated by Kim Il Sung in 1955, moved to its central position during the 1960s as Kim maneuvered between his giant socialist neighbors during the Sino-Soviet split. By the 1970s Chuch’ e thought had become so linked to the genius of the Great Leader that it literally became the “ism” of Kim Il Sung, as in “Kim Il Sung-ism.”

In the polemical warfare between the two Koreas, the North’s Chuch’e stance gave it an advantage over the South, especially in the first decades of division. The South was an economic dependent in the 1950s, and until the mid-1960s it relied heavily on American military protection. Although the North was also relatively dependent on the PRC and USSR in the early years, foreign troops withdrew after the Korean War, leaving the North to defend itself. To the North Koreans, the continuing presence of the US Eighth Army in the South has been proof of the ROK government’s “slavish” dependence on outside power. The Chuch’e argument continued to resonate with opposition forces in South Korea into the 1980s, since they had from the start questioned the legitimacy of the ROK government and they railed against the continuing US military presence in the South. They pointed to the contrasting stance of the North and its resolute emphasis on autonomy. Whatever the facts may have been with regard to the North’s actual independence, its consistent propaganda and its emphasis on national independence reminded all South Koreans of Korea’s historical humiliations at the hands of imperialist and colonial powers.

Chuch’e has become the principle behind all government policy in the North, which, of course, has significant implications for economic policy. Indeed, in keeping with astrict adherence to independence in all matters, North Korea has developed perhaps the most autarkic economy in the world. Economic achievements are touted as successes based on self-reliance, and great pains were taken to seek internal solutions to economic problems. The story of the creation of the synthetic fiber “vynalon” by North Korean scientists using indigenous raw materials (in this case limestone) became an often-repeated morality tale of technological self-reliance in state propaganda. Where indigenous capital was scarce or other inputs unobtainable inside the country, the state resorted to exhortation and mobilization of the innate creativity of the masses. Thus all problems, technical or otherwise, are solvable if the people retain a staunch consciousness of Chuch’e. Such a stance inhibits overtures to the outside world for the economic or technical assistance the North now desperately needs to solve its economic woes. With the principle of Chuch’e inviolate, the state finds itself in its own straitjacket. And as we will see below, the new policies that have created zones for foreign investment, initiatives to find foreign capital, and, most obviously, accepting foreign food aid during the 1995 famine are issues that must be justified in terms of the unitary logic of self-reliance.

At its most abstract, Chuch’e operates as a code word for North Korean identity itself. Thus holding a consciousness of Chuch’e is to have a North Korean subjectivity. Some speculate that Kim Il Sung developed the idea in reaction to the vague and virtually indefinable concept of kokutai (kukch’e in Korean) used to evoke “national essence” in Japanese ideology before 1945. All North Koreans are enjoined to hold Chuch’e in their minds and hearts, as only in so doing will their actions be appropriate. Since Chuch’e is the leader’s core inspiration, all his subjects carry the leader in their hearts when they hold fast a consciousness of Chuch’e. Just as the emperor embodied the essence (kokutai) of the nation in pre-World War II Japan, so does the leader, now Kim Jong Il, embody the very essential principle that guides all thought and action in North Korea today.

SOURCE: Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2007), pp. 158-161

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by | 5 February 2007 · 8:47 pm

Pamuk on Tristesse vs. Hüzün

Tristesse is not a pain that affects a solitary individual [like melancholy]; hüzün and tristesse both suggest a communal feeling, an atmosphere and a culture shared by millions. But the words and the feelings they describe are not identical, and if we are to pinpoint the difference it is not enough to say that Istanbul is much richer than Delhi or São Paolo. (If you go to the poor neighborhoods, the cities and the forms poverty takes are in fact all too similar.) The difference lies in the fact that in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner—the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques—inflict heartache on all who live among them.

These are nothing like the remains of great empires to be seen in western cities, preserved like museums of history and proudly displayed. The people of Istanbul simply carry on with their lives amid the ruins. Many western writers and travelers find this charming. But for the city’s more sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power, and culture. It is no more possible to take pride in these neglected dwellings, which dirt, dust, and mud have blended into their surroundings, than it is to rejoice in the beautiful old wooden houses that as a child I watched burn down one by one….

The tristesse that Lévi-Strauss describes is what a Westerner might feel as he surveys those vast poverty-stricken cities of the tropics, as he contemplates the huddled masses and their wretched lives. But he does not see the city through their eyes. Tristesse implies a guilt-ridden Westerner who seeks to assuage his pain by refusing to let cliché and prejudice color his impressions. Hüzün, on the other hand, is not a feeling that belongs to the outside observer. To varying degrees, classical Ottoman music, Turkish popular music, especially the arabesque that became popular during the 1980s, are all expressions of this emotion, which we feel as something between physical pain and grief. And Westerners coming to the city often fail to notice it….

Likewise, the hüzün in Turkish poetry after the foundation of the Republic, as it too expresses the same grief that no one can or would wish to escape, an ache that finally saves our souls and also gives them depth. For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world. The screen he projects over life is painful because life itself is painful. So it is, also, for the residents of Istanbul as they resign themselves to poverty and depression. Imbued still with the honor accorded it in Sufi literature, hüzün gives their resignation an air of dignity, but it also explains their choice to embrace failure, indecision, defeat, and poverty so philosophically and with such pride, suggesting that hüzün is not the outcome of life’s worries and great losses but their principal cause. So it was for the heroes of the Turkish films of my childhood and youth, and also for many of my real-life heroes during the same period: They all gave the impression that because of this hüzün they’d been carrying around in their hearts since birth they could not appear desirous in the face of money, success, or the women they loved. Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.

SOURCE: Istanbul: Memories and the City, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, 2006), pp. 101, 103-104

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by | 31 December 2006 · 4:27 pm

What Motivates Scholarship?

The new scholarly blog, Tibeto-Logic, which I recently quoted on the topic of Cathedral Bell Diplomacy in Armenia and Tibet, articulated something else that has continued to resonate with me. The blogpost I cited begins with a quote from a well-known philosopher and mathematician given the ironical epithet, The Mysterious Whitehead, and ends with some reflexive rumination about the purpose of the blogger’s scholarship.

In considering the history of ideas, I maintain that the notion of ‘mere knowledge’ is a high abstraction which we should dismiss from our minds. Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose.

— Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 1933.
…

My present task as a Tibeto-logical thinker is a Tibeto-centric one. I hope I have succeeded in drawing up a small sketch that puts cracks in the stereotype of Tibet as a place cut off from the world. It’s a country right here with us on the ground, living and breathing in our times. Just so or, well, nearly so, it was an integral and meaningful part of Eurasia during the rule of the Great Fifth Dalai Lama. Some degree and kind of globalisation was in process at that time. And that remains true even if, limiting ourselves to what has been said within the bounds of this essay, the international presence in Lhasa would seem to have been mostly mercantile and proselytizing in nature. If these interests were being played out on a less than even playing field, we cannot pretend that today that field is necessarily more even or equitable. We should not be quick to dismiss the past based on ill-considered assumptions that things have gotten better, or all that much better, meanwhile.

And finally, I hope Tibetans will find in these investigations a source of pride in the past and encouragement for the future. There is real reason to take pride in the pursuit of that admirable Buddhist virtue of tolerance (Tibetan zöpa, or kshanti in Sanskrit, one of those Paramitas that go far beyond the bounds of duty) that enabled Tibetan society in the 17th century to often welcome and sometimes embrace the strangers among them: the Armenians, the Muslims, and yes, the European Christian missionaries. Oh yes, you’re right, I neglected to mention the Chinese, Indians, Mongolians and Newars. Now that people from every culture are living in practically every country, it’s increasingly important that we look back to times like these and find out how, and just how well, they did it. It’s in our interests.

This resonates with me on one level because my academic work focuses on a small corner of Papua New Guinea, where my two primary concerns are (1) to document poorly described languages and (2) to demonstrate that the histories of tiny coastal villages there have never been either all that stagnant or all that isolated. My documentation efforts are far from complete, but have at least sufficed to qualify the village in which I did fieldwork to establish its own Tok Ples (village vernacular language) school, despite having no more than 300 native speakers. The initiative was all theirs; not mine. My host during my fieldwork (thirty years ago!) had been a schoolteacher and the village was using part of its timber royalties to further the education of its youth.

But the wrapper of self-examination on the “Mysterious Whitehead” blogpost resonates at an even more abstract level because it acknowledges that, while the means of scholarship are (ideally) rational, the initial motivations are (in general) not. The most coldly rational motivation for pursuing a particular line of academic research is the availability of funding sources whose allocations are very much dependent on the political goals of the granting agencies. Of course, many scholars take pride in biting the hands that feed them, while others pursue their own political agendas even without external material inducement.

In my experience, the prime motivator for the scholarly output of untenured academics is ambition/fear of failure. Since I’ve never had the carrot of academic tenure dangled in front of me, I’ve only experienced the level of paranoia typical of tenure-chasing academics vicariously, most notably in Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania, where similar levels of fear seemed to pervade not just academia, but the rest of society as well.

Meanwhile, the prime motivators for tenured academics seem to be (1) collegiality, (2) personal rivalry, and (3) guilt. At least that’s what motivates the fits and starts of my lackadaisical output as an academic hobbyist.

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by | 5 June 2006 · 2:24 pm

Role of Altruistic Punishment in Genocide

Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter have introduced the concept of altruistic punishment to explain cooperation [in group projects for the “public good”]. Following Fehr and Gächter, I define altruistic punishment as punishment inflicted on a defector from cooperation, which is costly to the punisher and without material gain. In a series of public goods experiments that pitted private return against public welfare requiring cooperation in a group project, cooperation was found to flourish when altruistic punishment was possible and to break down when it was ruled out.

Subjects were given the opportunity to invest in a group project with monies handed to them, or to keep the funds. Individually, if they chose to invest, they would receive less than if they kept the money, but collectively the group as a whole would receive more, if all invested…. Subjects could punish others after information was provided as to how much each had invested. But each punishment of another subject was costly. Specifically, subjects who chose to punish were required to forfeit an amount equal to one-third of the monetary punishment imposed on a defector. Thus, the punishment is altruistic. Defectors – those who refused to cooperate – were punished even when material self-interest was sacrificed by cooperators. Participants who chose to punish defectors by withholding monies themselves had to sacrifice monetary rewards….

“Negative emotions towards the defectors are the proximate mechanics behind altruistic punishment.” Concerning altruistic punishment, Fehr remarks, “It’s a very potent force for establishing large-scale cooperation, every citizen is a little policeman in a sense. There are so many social norms that we follow almost unconsciously, and they are enforced by the moral outrage we expect if we were to violate them.” The greater the extent of deviation from cooperation by defectors, the more heavily they were punished by cooperators. It was “punishment per se [that] provided the motivation, not some consequence anticipated by the player.” Instrumentality was not especially relevant….

Altruistic punishment has been robustly established. These findings stem from public goods experiments, but are readily generalizable to social groups seeking a basis for cooperation in the absence of a functioning external authority. Given an extreme, even life-threatening environment, such as massive economic failure followed by war, the particular form of altruistic punishment chosen can be severe.

Even as they were clearly losing their respective wars, Hitler proceeded mercilessly with his extermination campaign, Enver Paşa lent his approval to the Armenian genocide, and the Hutu extremists were rapidly eliminating Rwandan Tutsi. Hitler would die by his own hand, Enver in battle to unite Turkic peoples against the Soviets, and many of the Hutu génocidaires in the refugee camps of northern Congo.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 108-109

In a chapter somewhat disturbingly redolent of “the freakonomics of genocide” Midlarsky highlights altruistic punishment as a factor that not only motivates followers to cooperate in a genocidal project they otherwise find extremely distasteful (or worse), but also motivates leaders to persist in genocide at the expense of losing larger battles against their enemies.

On a more familiar level, “altruistic punishment” might well describe the motivations of political activists who would rather purge their party of defectors than win the next election.

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by | 4 June 2006 · 1:18 am

Utopianism as a Basis for Genocide

In addition to rational choice, utopianism is a current theory that could serve as a starting point for comprehending the onset of genocide. In contrast to rational choice, which provides a social scientific basis, a focus on utopianism would provide an ideological source of genocide as a uniform substratum. This emphasis on ideology is the basis of a recently published well-written comparison of four genocides by Eric Weitz. Focusing on the concept of utopia at the core of genocidal ideologies, Weitz argues for its salience as an explanation of the Soviet, Cambodian, Nazi, and Bosnian atrocities.

In considering Weitz’s argument, though, it is apparent that the Marxist-Leninist cases are conflated with cases that have entirely different etiologies. The Soviets had an elaborate ideational class-based justification for mass murder, as did the Cambodians, while the Nazi and Bosnian instances were based on ethnoreligious criteria without elaborate justification. Thus, the concept of utopia does not go very far in explaining these latter two cases. The Nazis had utopian visions of a distant past including an ostensibly racially pure Ottonian Germany, while the Communists (Soviets and Cambodians) possessed a rigorous, if deeply flawed, ideational structure that predicted a future free of class oppression and conflict.

The consequences of ethnoreligious hostilities are vastly different from those of overtly political ideation. In the former, complete eradication is most frequently the goal, while in the latter elimination of incorrigible political enemies along with reeducation of the remainder constitutes the core of the governmental program. Victimization rates, therefore, differ substantially, ranging from the approximately 67 percent of Jews murdered in Nazi-targeted areas of Europe to at most 10 percent of the Soviet and Chinese populations, and 20 percent of the Cambodian. Moreover, possibilities for reconstituting cultural and religious life were sharply circumscribed for Jews (and Armenians) after their genocides. Such limitations were much less pronounced in the Soviet and Cambodian instances; contemporary Russia, indeed, has seen a massive Orthodox revival after the earlier decimation of church officials by the Bolsheviks….

Even more problematic in applying utopianism is the Armenian genocide. Neither in their past nor in any realistically conceived future could the Young Turks imagine a state “purified” of other nationalities, so that an ideology justifying mass murder could not be used effectively as motivation. Certainly at the time of the Armenian genocide in 1915–16, the Greeks, who were somewhat more numerous than the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and even more dominant in its economic life, were not subject to genocide….

Beyond the problem of generalizability, difficult as it is, the concept of utopianism itself certainly is not sufficient to explain genocide as a behavioral category. There have been utopian socialists of every stripe, for example, from cosmopolitans in the nineteenth-century United States and Europe, to more nationalistic ones in the kibbutzim in Israel. Hardly any had advocated, let alone participated in, genocide. In other words, utopianism can just as readily invoke benign, even reclusive, visions (e.g., the Hutterites), where the last thing any of these utopians wanted to do was to kill or even bother other people.

Where utopianism does get into trouble is in its juncture with the state and especially with state power. The conjoining of the two can lead to genocidal consequences, but it is the state that is the driving force behind the utopian vision or whatever related genocidal motivation (e.g., state security) may exist at the moment of decision. Utopian belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding the origins of genocide although, if strongly held, it certainly can provide the ideational basis for genocidal thinking.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 75-76

UPDATE: In a comment, reader Otto Pohl objects:

The percentages compared between Nazi Germany and the USSR and Cambodia are apples and oranges. The total percentage of people under Nazi rule murdered is quite small compared to the Soviet and Cambodian cases. Why compare a targeted minority in one case, Jews, and ignore it in the Soviet and Cambodian cases? Stalin murdered over a third of the Chechen, Crimean Tatar and Mennonite populations of the USSR. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge completely eliminated the ethnic Vietnamese population. Very high percentages of Chams and Chinese also perished. Socialist racism was quite real and no less deadly than the Nazi variant.

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by | 12 March 2006 · 12:59 am

Pamuk on Two Kinds of Communists

There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only bad can come of them. But the innocents? They feel so guilty about the suffering of the poor, and are so keen to share it, that they make their lives miserable on purpose.

SOURCE: Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, 2004), p. 115

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by | 1 December 2005 · 6:01 pm

Hari on Berman’s Power and the Idealists

In last Sunday’s New York Times Review of Books, Johann Hari reviews Paul Berman’s latest book, Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer, and its Aftermath (Soft Skull Press, 2005), about the ideological split in the generation of ’68 captured by Hari’s title, “The Red and the Green.”

In the years since 1968, the New Left had acquired a sepia glow, with nostalgia mopping up any blood and broken teeth. Now the old conservative criticism – that 1968 and its children staged a thuggish, apolitical tantrum, with no lasting legacy – resurfaced.

If anyone can put this dispute into its historical context, it’s Berman. He is not only an alumnus of the rebellion; he is the keeper of its yearbook and its funeral director. In this free-standing sequel to his superb “Tale of Two Utopias,” he revisits the European graduating class of Rebellion High.

Behind those horrible images [of Joschka Fischer beating a policeman], Berman explains, lies a complex history. These self-styled revolutionaries were the children of a Europe that had failed to resist fascism. Their parents had lowered their gaze and sleepwalked in a Europe littered with gas chambers. So, for this generation, “the way to judge anyone’s moral character … was to pose a hypothetical question…. To wit, what would you have done, in France under the German occupation?” …

Liberal democracy (and capitalism, and Zionism) became, to them, cunning veils for a new Hitler. So when, during the Munich Olympics of 1972, the Palestinian Black September cell murdered 11 Israeli athletes, Ulrike Meinhof (along with much of the radical left) declared herself thrilled. And the deformations of morality multiplied. In 1976, a group called the Revolutionary Cells hijacked a plane, flew it to Entebbe in Uganda, and separated the passengers: Jews and non-Jews. The Jews – “capitalists” and “Zionists” – were selected for death. The leader turned out to be a man named Wilfried Böse, who was much admired on the Frankfurt left. Fischer knew him well. This was the point of Fischer’s desillusionierung.…

As Fischer was retreating from his police-beating days, a string of soixante-huitard European intellectuals began to use the vocabulary of the New Left to create nothing less than a political philosophy opposed to all dictatorship, everywhere. Waving his copy of Solzhenitsyn, the French philosopher André Glucksmann tossed a dynamite-packed question to his New Left comrades. If we want to resist every variant of Hitlerism and every streak of authoritarianism, he asked, might we not at least recognize it in the empire to our east, where 20 million people have died in gulags and free speech is a cruel joke?

The conservative pessimists jeered, claiming Glucksmann would be left alone and humiliated. But slowly, steadily, many of the most famous children of 1968 rallied to his side, from Daniel Cohn-Bendit (“Danny the Red”) to Bernard-Henri Lévy. Berman argues that – at this moment – the spirit of the rebellions solidified into its most enduring form: an antitotalitarianism of the liberal-left….

This antitotalitarian ’68 went on to shape the actions of European governments at a turning point for the continent. In the 1990’s, it was the soixante-huitards – now close to the chancelleries and palaces of much of Europe – who led the fight against the New Left’s old fascist enemy when it emerged in the form of Serbian ultranationalism. When a program of ethnic extermination began just two days’ drive from Auschwitz, it was the old barricadier Joschka Fischer who made Germany’s wrenching involvement – its first lurch into postpacificism – possible, explaining to a shocked audience of fellow Greens, “I learned not only ‘No more war’ but also ‘No more Auschwitz.'” In Europe at least, Kosovo was the New Left’s war – the street fight against fascism now directed against a target worthy of the name.

via Cliopatria

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by | 15 March 2005 · 8:36 pm

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Princeton emeritus professor of philosophy Harry G. Frankfurt has published a book On Bullshit (Princeton U. Press, 2005).

With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

The Press’s website also includes video clips of an interview with the straight-talking bullshitologist. Here’s my transcription of clip 7.

Q: You mentioned democratization as a function of bullshit. What about education? Are more highly educated people more likely to engage in bullshit just because they have the faculties to do so? I mean, are we more likely to be twits here at Princeton University than in some other part of the country?

A: I think it’s not only that highly educated people have the linguistic and intellectual gifts that enable them to create bullshit. But also I think that a lot of people who are highly educated acquire a kind of arrogance that leads them to be negligent about truth and falsity. They have a lot of confidence in their own opinions, and this may also encourage them to produce bullshit.

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