What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity, standard of living, self-realisation, fulfilment? Is it a matter of goods, or of people? Of course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups.
If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness, and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.
[E.F. Schumacher]
By contrast, Indigenous science deals in direct experience and these things do matter.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.172
Unlike Western science, the importance of the landscape, and specific places in it, is a characteristic of all Indigenous science.
A mound, rock, medicine wheel, river, or tree may be of deep significance to a people. Even the language spoken by a people arises out of the land they live in and and of the "map in the head" they all carry.
Within Indigenous science there is an association of spirit or energy with particular places, and it is important to visit these places and carry out ceremonies there. Fasts and vision quests are carried out on particular hilltops. At other locations, medicine wheels can be found whose alignments connect to movements and harmonies within the sky.
This idea of the significance of place and the energies associated with it is common to Indigenous sciences all over the world.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.265-6
We should also recognize that raising our own food has many benefits beyond healthy eating. Most importantly, it is a skilled practice rooted firmly in reality.
In the words of Matthew B. Crawford, adopting such practices creates a
“situated” man (or woman), one who understands that he is not autonomous or able to escape reality, making him a more rounded individual with far more strength than the desiccated, massified individuals who make up our population today.
[Charles Haywood]
'The Eggs Benedict Option (Raw Egg Nationalist)',
The Worthy House
Across Western Europe, ideological battles between the left and right have centered on this tension between universalism and parochialism.
Universalism refers to moral regard directed toward more socially distant and structurally looser targets, relative to socially closer and structurally tighter targets.
Parochialism refers to moral regard directed toward socially closer and structurally tighter targets, relative to socially more distant and structurally looser targets.
Liberals care about harm and fairness (
individualizing values), whereas conservatives care more about loyalty, authority, and sanctity (
binding values). This research again suggests a differing focus such that liberals tend to express compassion toward
individuals broadly construed, whereas conservatives emphasize compassion toward their
immediate social groups.
Supporting this idea, separate work indeed found that endorsement of individualizing values is positively correlated with moral expansiveness (moral consideration for entities, including plants and animals, beyond one’s immediate in group) whereas endorsement of binding values is negatively correlated with moral expansiveness.
Universalism may reflect favorability toward policies that promote open borders (and encourage immigration) and that promote diplomacy toward ostensibly hostile nations. Such policies represent extending moral regard beyond one’s immediate group (e.g., the nation) and to the world more broadly.
Similarly, parochialism may reflect favorability toward stricter immigration policies and defense spending to protect one’s nation—these policies represent prioritizing the well-being of one’s own nation at the potential expense of others.
[Jonathan Haidt]
‘Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle’, p.2
If the cortex consisted only of a homogeneous mass of neurons, it would have been impossible for any structure to develop.
On the other hand, neurons by themselves are incapable of performing complex functions. Neural groups therefore have an optimum size, but unfortunately it is not constant or known a priori.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.103
There may indeed be a crisis of knowledge, but, and this must be underscored, the crisis is not the result of the disruptive activity of 'subversive' theoreticians like Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida.
It is a direct result of the complexity of our postmodern society.
This is the point Lyotard also makes when he insists that the
conditions for knowledge are locally determined.
Reflexivity does lead to paradox, but this is only a problem if all paradox has to be resolved at a meta-level. If one has to remain at the level of the network, one has to cope with the paralogy of the postmodern condition.
The implication is
not that it is impossible to interpret information; it merely means that all interpretations are contingent and provisional, pertaining to a certain context and a certain time-frame.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.121-2
Lyotard claims that Habermas’s approach, consisting of what he calls a ‘dialogue of argumentation’, rests on two assumptions: in the first place, it assumes that ‘it is possible for all speakers to come to agreement on which rule or metaprescriptions are universally valid for all language games’; and in the second place, it assumes ‘
that the goal of dialogue is consensus.’
Lyotard finds neither of these assumptions acceptable, primarily because they deny the complexity of postmodern society—the nature of which he describes in the following way:
It is a monster formed by the interweaving of various networks of heteromorphous classes of utterances (denotative, prescriptive, performative, technical, evaluative, etc.).
There is no reason to think that it could be possible to determine metaprescriptives common to all of these language games or that a revisable consensus like the one in force at a given moment in the scientific community could embrace the totality of metaprescriptions regulating the totality of statements circulating in the social collectivity.
As a matter of fact, the contemporary decline of narratives of legitimation—be they traditional or ‘modern’ (the emancipation of humanity, the realization of the Idea)—is tied to the abandonment of this belief.
The first assumption of the Habermasian approach is directly opposed to Lyotard’s emphasis on the proliferation of heterogeneous discourses and the role of paralogy, while the second is opposed to his insistence on the importance of dissent.
Not that consensus is always impossible; it can be achieved, but only as a local phenomenon limited in both time and space.
Consensus as a goal would attempt to freeze the social system into a particular state. Since it is unlikely that this will be achieved (as well as undesirable), a better (and more just) policy would be to develop a sensitivity for the process of social transformation. This may indicate that ‘consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value’, but, claims Lyotard, ‘justice as a value is neither outmoded nor suspect.’
Given the complexity of postmodern society, the concept of justice is certainly a problematic one, but Lyotard recognises two important, if predictable, strategies: the recognition of the heteromorphous nature of language games; and the recognition of the fact that
all agreements on the rules of any discourse, as well as on the ‘moves’ allowed within that discourse, must be local, in other words, ‘agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation.’
This proposal sketches the outline for a practical theory of justice that can best be understood as follows. It becomes the responsibility of every player in any discursive practice to know the rules of the language game involved. These rules are local, i.e. ‘limited in time and space.’ In following such rules, one has to assume responsibility both for the rules themselves and for the effects of that specific practice. This responsibility cannot be shifted to any universally guiding principles or institutions—whether they be the State, the Church or the Club.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.136-7
Instead of looking for a simple discourse that can unify all forms of knowledge, we have to cope with a multiplicity of discourses, many different language games - all of which are determined locally, not legitimated externally. Different institutions and different contexts produce different narratives which are not reducible to each other.
[The] description of knowledge as the outcome of a multiplicity of local narratives, it must be stressed, is an argument not against scientific knowledge as such, but against a certain
understanding of such knowledge. Lyotard rejects an interpretation of science as representing the totality of all true knowledge.
He argues for a narrative understanding of knowledge, portraying it as a plurality of smaller stories that function well within the particular contexts where they apply.
Instead of claiming the impossibility of knowledge, 'it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy.’
Let me summarise Lyotard's position. Different groups (institutions, disciplines, communities) tell different stories about what they know and what they do. Their knowledge does not take the form of a logically structured and complete whole, but rather takes the form of narratives that are instrumental in allowing them to achieve their goals and to make sense of what they are doing.
Since these narratives are all local, they cannot be linked together to form a grand narrative which unifies all knowledge. The postmodern condition is characterised by the co-existence of a multiplicity of heterogeneous discourses - a state of affairs assessed differently by different parties.
Those who have a nostalgia for a unifying metanarrative - a dream central to the history of Western metaphysics - experience the post-modern condition as fragmented, full of anarchy and therefore ultimately meaningless. It leaves them with a feeling of vertigo. On the other hand, those who embrace postmodernism find it challenging, exciting and full of uncharted spaces. It fills them with a sense of adventure.
Which of these two evaluations apply is often determined by whether one feels comfortable without fixed points of reference. The choice between the two is determined by psychological just as much as theoretical considerations.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.113-4
These positions (which for conciseness, we henceforth refer to as ‘materialist’) have in common a commitment to immanence (Deleuze, 1988: 124); in other words,
‘a philosophy of becoming in which the universe is not dependent upon a higher power’ (Connolly, 2011: 178) – powers that might include God, fate, evolution,
life-force, Gaia, mechanisms, systems or structures.
Instead we are to explore events and interactions within a ‘plane of immanence’ that possesses ‘no supplementary dimension’ (Deleuze, 1988: 128).
[Nick J. Fox & Pam Alldred]
‘Social structures, power and resistance in monist sociology: (New) materialist insights’
Humans are an evolved species like the others and one thing that we have evolved to be is shortsighted. There's a number of wonderful papers on the nature of myopia […] economists have recognized this in the concept of discounting.
So we tend to prefer our present. We tend to prefer our close relatives and friends, and we tend to prefer our home places over distant futures, other people who are complete strangers in other places.
In fact, if you think of climate change, most people in our country or the United States or Canada think, well, it's probably important, but it's probably mostly going to hit somebody in India or in other lands far away.
If you're a politician, you would much rather risk future damage to somebody else somewhere else than to impose [constraints] on your own people today.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’,
Nate Hagens, YouTube
By equating capitalism and religion, Agamben puts pilgrims and tourists on the same plane: ‘To the faithful in the Temple - the pilgrims who would travel across the earth from temple to temple, from sanctuary to sanctuary correspond today the tourists who restlessly travel in a world that has been abstracted into a Museum.'
In reality,
pilgrims and tourists belong to entirely separate orders. Tourists travel through non-sites emptied of meaning, while pilgrims are bound to
sites that assemble and connect human beings. The assembly is the characteristic trait of sites […]
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.44
A haiku is subject to strict rules of play, and thus it cannot really be translated into another language. Forms which are proper to the Japanese language resist any kind of translation.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.63
The liberal will forever be unable to think outside of a universalist frame and must apply the rules equally to all. It's totally foreign to him that an action can be right for A but not for B simply by virtue that A is A and B is B.
So the simple and obvious morality of "it's good when we win and bad when we lose" will always elude him because he wants to boil justice down to a principle that can be abstracted away from the people involved. It guarantees his perpetual defeat and the rule of psychopaths who want to exploit that he "refuses to take his own side".
[Imperium Press]
Telegram
There is indeed in the vocabulary available to Homer's characters
no way for them to view their own culture and society as if from the outside. The evaluative expressions which they employ are mutually interdefined and each has to be explained in terms of the others.
[...] that it is only within their framework of rules and precepts that they are able to frame purposes at all [...] All questions of choice arise within the framework; the framework itself therefore cannot be chosen.
There is thus the sharpest of contrasts between the emotivist self of modernity and the self of the heroic age. The self of the heroic age lacks precisely that characteristic which we have already seen that some modern moral philosophers take to be an essential characteristic of human selfhood: the capacity to detach oneself from any particular standpoint or point of view, to step backwards, as it were, and view and judge that standpoint or point of view from the outside.
In heroic society there is no 'outside' except that of the stranger. A man who tried to withdraw himself from his given position in heroic society would be engaged in the enterprise of trying to make himself disappear.
Identity in heroic society involves particularity and accountability. I am answerable for doing or failing to do what anyone who occupies my role owes to others and this accountability terminates only with death. I have until my death to do what I have to do. Moreover this accountability is particular. It is to, for and with specific individuals that I must do what I ought, and it is to these same and other individuals, members of the same local community, that I am accountable. The heroic self does not itself aspire to universality even although in retrospect we may recognize universal worth in the achievements of that self.
The exercise of the heroic virtues thus requires both a particular kind of human being and a particular kind of social structure [...] If the heroic virtues require for their exercise the presence of a kind of social structure which is now irrevocably lost - as they do - what relevance can they possess for us? Nobody now can be a Hector or a Gisli.
The answer is that perhaps what we have to learn from heroic societies is twofold: first that
all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly that there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit them and our understanding of them from a series of predecessors in which series heroic societies hold first place.
If this is so, the contrast between the freedom of choice of values of which modernity prides itself and the absence of such choice in heroic cultures would look very different. For freedom of choice of values would from the standpoint of a tradition ultimately rooted in heroic societies appear more like the freedom of ghosts - of those whose human substance approached vanishing point - than of men.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.146-8
Thus the first massive fact that we have to reckon with is the difference that it makes to the conception of the virtues when the primary moral community is no longer the kinship group, but the city-state, and not merely the city-state in general, but the Athenian democracy in particular.
[...] the Homeric values no longer define the moral horizon, just as the household or kinship group are now
part of a larger and very different unit. There are no more kings, even though many of the virtues of kingship are still held to be virtues.
A second reason for not seeing the difference in the conception of the virtues simply in terms of changed social contexts is that
the conception of a virtue has now become strikingly detached from that of any particular social role.
Neoptolemus confronts Philoctetes in Sophocles' play in a way very different from that in which his father confronted Agamemnon in the
Iliad. In Homer the question of honor is the question of what is due to a king; in Sophocles the question of honor has become the question of what is due to a man.
To characterize a good man is in crucial part to characterize the relationship in which such a man stands to others and both poets and philosophers for the most part do not distinguish in their account of these relationships
what is universal and human from what is local and Athenian.
The claim is often explicit; Athens is praised because she
par excellence exhibits human life as it ought to be. Yet in these very acts of praise Athenian particularity is distinguished from Homeric particularity.
For Homeric man there could be no standard external to those embodied in the structures of his own community to which appeal could be made; for Athenian man, the matter is more complex.
His understanding of the virtues does provide him with standards by which he can question the life of his own community and enquire whether this or that practice or policy is just.
Nonetheless he also recognizes that he possesses his understanding of the virtues only because his membership in the community provides him with such understanding. The city is a guardian, a parent, a teacher, even though what is learnt from the city may lead to a questioning of this or that feature of its life. Thus the question of the relationship between
being a good citizen and
being a good man becomes central and knowledge of the variety of possible human practices, barbarian as well as Greek, provided the factual background to the asking of that question.
To be
dikaios in Homer is not to transgress that order; thus in Homer the virtue of the
dikaios is to do what the accepted order requires; and in this his virtue is like every other Homeric virtue. But by the latter part of the fifth century it is possible to ask if it is or is not
dikaiosune to do what the established order requires; and it is possible to disagree radically as to what it would be to act in accordance with dike, to be
dikaios.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.154-7
[...] the fact that the self has to find its moral identity in and through its membership in communities such as those of the family, the neighborhood, the city and the tribe does not entail that the self has to accept the moral limitations of the particularity of those forms of community.
Without those moral particularities to begin from there would never be anywhere to begin; but it is in moving forward from such particularity that the search for the good, for the universal, consists.
Yet particularity can never be simply left behind or obliterated. The notion of
escaping from it into a realm of entirely universal maxims which belong to man as such, whether in its eighteenth-century Kantian form or in the presentation of some modem analytical moral philosophies, is an illusion and an illusion with painful consequences.
When men and women identify what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too completely with the cause of some universal principle, they usually behave worse than they would otherwise do.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.256
Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable. How can you counterattack the information others have turned upon you?
There is no effective option other than competitive performance. For those individuals and cultures that cannot join or compete with our information empire, there is only inevitable failure …
The attempt of the Iranian mullahs to secede from modernity has failed, although a turbaned corpse still stumbles about the neighborhood. Information, from the internet to rock videos, will not be contained, and fundamentalism cannot control its children. Our victims volunteer.
It is fashionable among world intellectual elites to decry ‘American culture,’ with our domestic critics among the loudest in complaint. But traditional intellectual elites are of shrinking relevance, replaced by cognitive-practical elites–figures such as Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Madonna, or our most successful politicians – human beings who can recognize or create popular appetites, recreating themselves as necessary.
Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures. While some other cultures, such as those of East Asia, appear strong enough to survive the onslaught by adaptive behaviors, most are not.
The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience – ease – and it generates pleasure for the masses.
We are Karl Marx’s dream, and his nightmare.
Yes, foreign cultures are reasserting their threatened identities - usually with marginal, if any, success - and yes, they are attempting to escape our influence. But American culture is infectious,
a plague of pleasure, and you don’t have to die of it to be hindered or crippled in your integrity or competitiveness.
[Ralph Peters]
‘Constant Conflict’,
Parameters, Summer 1997, 4-14
Peters refers to certain cultures trying to reassert their traditions, and again emphasises that the globalist ‘culture’ that is being imposed primarily via US influence is one of ‘
infectious pleasure.’ The historical inevitably is re-emphasised, as the ‘rejectionist’ (sic) regimes will be consigned to what in Trotsky’s term is the ‘dustbin of history.’
[Kerry Bolton]
'Constant Conflict'
The economic system cannot not be a source of human conditioning; as such, it must condition (towards) omni-consideration, and in no ways condition towards psychopathy. It must simultaneously condition agency/uniqueness/self-actualization with communion/cooperation/care.
It must condition consideration beyond the dunbar number (similar to how Buddhism or Jainism achieved reliable abstract empathy deeply enough to determine behavior).
[Daniel Schmachtenberger]
'New Economics Series: Part 1',
Explorations on the Future of Civilisation
Although parliamentary regimes, in imitation of Britain and France, had been established throughout the Near East, as in much of the world, they never functioned as democratic or even constitutional systems because of the lack of organized political parties and of any traditions of civil and personal rights.
Political parties remained largely personal followings or blocs, and political power, based on the arbitrary autocracy of Semitic patriarchal family life, was also personal, and never took on the impersonal characteristics associated with Western rule of law and constitutional practices.
The weakness of any conception of rules, and of the material benefits which help rules to survive, made it impossible for the Near East to grasp the conventions associated with cooperation in opposition found in the Western two-party system, parliamentary practices, and sports.
The whole range of human and universal relations of the Arabs was
monistic,
personal, and
extralegal, in contrast to that of the West, which was
pluralistic,
impersonal, and
subject to rules. As a result, constitutional and two-party politics were incomprehensible to the Near East, and the parliamentary system, where it existed, was only a facade for an autocratic system of personal intrigues.
The whole of Iranian life was imprinted with leader-follower characteristics of a very personal character, with loyalty and honor two of the outstanding features of all human relationships. Where these did not operate, human relationships were precarious and filled with suspicion, so that many of the patterns of life which form the modern world, such as political or public relationships and impersonal business relationships, were very weak, and, without stable principles, fell readily into nepotism and corruption.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.668, 674
Behind all these ‘meanings’ of globalisation is a single underlying idea, which can be called de-localisation: the uprooting of activities and relationships from local origins and cultures.
Thus, domestic prices - of consumer goods, financial assets such as stocks and bonds, even labour - are less and less governed by local and national conditions; they all fluctuate along with global market prices. Multinational corporations break up the chain of production of their products and locate the links in different countries around the world, depending on which appears at any time to be the most advantageous to them. The products sold by multinationals are identified less and less with any single country and increasingly with a world brand or with the company itself; the same images are recognised - in advertising and entertainment - in many countries.
Globalisation means lifting social activities out of local knowledge and placing them in networks in which they are conditioned by, and condition, worldwide events.
Globalisation is often equated with a trend towards homogeneity. That, again, is just what globalisation is not. Global markets in which capital and production moves freely across frontiers work precisely because of the differences between localities, nations and regions.
Had wages, skills, infrastructure and political risks been the same throughout the world, the growth of world markets would not have occurred. There would not be profits to be made by investing and manufacturing worldwide if conditions were similar everywhere. Global markets thrive on differences between economies. That is one reason why the trend to globalisation has such an irresistible momentum.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.57-8
