Showing posts with label Thompson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thompson. Show all posts
Times of adjustment
Progressive history: 'the past was generally worse'
Cyclical history: 'certain points in the past were worse for certain things'
These include 'times of adjustment' e.g. when we were beginning to solve some of the problems inherent to living in cities, or problems associated with industrialisation, etc. Life was 'better' after these problems were solved, but was also better before any of them emerged.
Each big change necessitates a period of adjustment and problem solving.
It can be argued that Britain in the Industrial Revolution was encountering the problems of "take-off"; heavy long-term investment - canals, mills, railways, foundries, mines, utilities - was at the expense of current consumption; the generations of workers between 1790 and 1840 sacrificed some, or all, of their prospects of increased consumption to the future.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.223
Related posts:
Little Masters & Big Masters
Global - Local
"When the spinning of cotton was in its infancy, and before those terrible machines for superseding the necessity of human labour, called steam engines, came into use, there were a great number of what were then called little masters; men who with a small capital, could procure a few machines, and employ a few hands, men and boys (say to twenty or thirty), the produce of whose labour was all taken to Manchester central mart, and put into the hands of brokers …The brokers sold it to the merchants, by which means the master spinner was enabled to stay at home and work and attend to his workmen.
The cotton was then always given out in its raw state from the bale to the wives of the spinners at home, when they heat and cleansed it ready for the spinners in the factory. By this they could earn eight, ten, or twelve shillings a week, and cook and attend to their families.
But none are thus employed now; for all the cotton is broke up by a machine, turned by the steam engine, called a devil: so that the spinners wives have no employment, except they go to work in the factory all day at what can be done by children for a few shillings, four or five per week.
If a man then could not agree with his master, he left him, and could get employed elsewhere. A few years, however, changed the face of things. Steam engines came into use, to purchase which, and to erect buildings sufficient to contain them and six or seven hundred hands, required a great capital. The engine power produced a more marketable (though not a better) article than the little master could at the same price.
The consequence was their ruin in a short time; and the overgrown capitalists triumphed in their fall; for they were the only obstacle that stood between them and the complete control of the workmen.”
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.220-1
Homo economicus
"Capitalism is what humans do when they are left alone": In other words, when they are alienated from a meaningful context, of customs and traditions.
The statecraft which constructed the free market in England turned to its purposes the effects of a centuries-long development. In the course of this historical movement, market forces had come to be a dominant force in social life.
Market exchange there had always been, and in England a market economy had existed for several hundred years; but it was at this juncture in history that the truly free market came into being, thereby creating a market society.
Karl Polanyi notes that, ‘Ultimately … the control of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organisation of society; it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.’
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.11-12
As some economists have recognised, the pursuit of economic efficiency without regard to social costs is itself unreasonable and in effect ranks the demands of the economy over the needs of society.
That is precisely what drives competition in a global free market. The neglect of social costs which is a professional deformation of economists, has become an imperative of the entire system.
[…] the economic argument for unregulated global free trade involves a wild abstraction from social realities. It is true that restraints on global free trade will not enhance productivity; but maximal productivity achieved at the cost of social desolation and human misery is an anomalous and dangerous social ideal.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.83
The spread of new technologies throughout the world is not working to advance human freedom. Instead it has resulted in the emancipation of market forces from social and political control.
By allowing that freedom to world markets we ensure that the age of globalisation will be remembered as another turn in the history of servitude.
Jospeh Schumpeter understood capitalism better than any other twentieth century economist. He saw that it did not work to preserve the cohesion of society. Left to itself it could well destroy liberal civilisation.
That is why he accepted that capitalism must be tamed. Government intervention was needed to reconcile the dynamism of capitalism with social stability.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.208, 210
The laissez-faire policies which produced the Great Transformation in nineteenth-century England were based on the theory that market freedoms are natural and political restraints on markets are artificial.
The truth is that free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression.
[…] The parliamentarians who passed Factory Acts in the 1860s and 1870s were not reconstructing society or the economy according to a plan. They were responding to problems of working life - danger, squalor, inefficiencies - as they become aware of them. Laissez-faire withered away as the unintended consequence of a multitude of such uncoordinated responses.
[…] The market is not, as New Right thinkers have imagined or claimed, a gift of social evolution. It is an end-product of social engineering and unyielding political will. It was feasible in nineteenth-century England only because, and for so long as, functioning democratic institutions were lacking.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p17
In a capitalist world, violent debates about truth—whether they concern questions of religion and virtue or questions about the nature of humanity— interfere with the productive conduct of commerce. It is therefore best for such questions to be eliminated or obscured.
“Capitalism,” concludes Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, “is simply what humans do when they are left alone.”
[Peter Thiel]
‘The Straussian Moment’
Paine's writings were in no special sense aimed at the working people, as distinct from farmers, tradesmen and professional men. His was a doctrine suited to agitation among "members unlimited"; but he did not challenge the property rights of the rich nor the doctrines of laissez faire.
[…] they were aimed at the great landed aristocracy, where the hereditary principle involved in the custom of primogeniture gave him offence. In terms of political democracy he wished to level all inherited distinctions and privileges; but he gave no countenance to economic levelling.
In political society every man must have equal rights as a citizen: in economic society he must naturally remain employer or employed, and the State should not interfere with the capital of the one or the wages of the other.
The aristocracy were the main target; their property might be threatened - even as far as Land Nationalisation or Henry George's Single Tax - and their rents regarded as a feudal exaction dating from "a French bastard" and his "armed banditti"; but - however hard trade unionists might fight against their employers - industrial capital was assumed to be the fruit of enterprise and beyond reach of political intrusion.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.104-5
[…] the final years of the 18th century saw a last desperate effort by the people to reimpose the older moral economy as against the economy of the free market.
The classic exploitative relationship of the Industrial Revolution is depersonalised, in the sense that no lingering obligation of mutuality - of paternalism or deference, or of the interests of ‘the Trade’ - are admitted.
There is no whisper of the ‘just’ price, or of a wage justified in relation to social or moral sanctions, as opposed to the operation of free market forces.
Antagonism is accepted as intrinsic to the relations of production. Managerial or supervisory functions demand the repression of all attributes except those which further the expropriation of the maximum surplus value from labour. This is the political economy which Marx anatomised in Das Kapital. The worker has become an "instrument", or an entry among other items of cost.
[…] in the overstocked outwork industries, where there was always a sufficiency of unorganised "hands" competing for employment, these considerations did not operate. Here, as old customs were eroded, and old paternalism was set aside, the exploitive relationship emerged supreme.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.73, 222-3
[…] what was ‘perfectly proper’ in terms of capitalist property-relations involved, none the less, a rupture of the traditional integument of village custom and of right: and the social violence of enclosure consisted precisely in the drastic, total imposition upon the village of capitalist property definitions.
Copyhold and even vaguer customary family tenancies (which carried common rights) might prove to be invalid at law although they were endorsed by the collective memory of the community.
Enclosure, indeed, was the culmination of a long secular process by which men’s customary relations to the agrarian means of production were undermined. It was of profound social consequence because it illuminates, both backwards and forwards, the destruction of the traditional elements in English peasant society.
[…] one finds a dense cluster of claims and usages, which stretch from the common to the market-place and which, taken together, made up the economic and cultural universe of the rural poor.
[…] But whereas it fitted the conditions of the Industrial Revolution like a glove, in agriculture it contested (at best) with older paternalist traditions (the squire's duty to his labourers) and with the tradition of earnings based on need (the older customs of differentials according to age, marital status, children, etc., which were perpetuated under the Speenhamland system of poor relief) […]
The doctrine that labour discovers its own "natural" price, according to the laws of supply and demand, had long been ousting the notion of the "just" wage.
[…] the perpetuation of Speenhamland and "rounds man" systems, in all their variety, was ensured by the demand of the larger farmers - in an industry which has exceptional requirements for occasional or casual labour - for a permanent cheap labour reserve.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.238-9, 244
Related posts:
The Technological Paradigm
Few people deny that technological change has political consequences; yet equally few people seem to realize that the present "system," in the widest sense, is the product of technology and cannot be significantly changed unless technology is changed.
“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities ... has agglomerated population, centralized means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.”
If the bourgeoisie did all this, what enabled it to do so? The answer cannot be in doubt; the creation of modern technologies.
Once a process of technological development has been set in motion it proceeds largely by its own momentum, irrespective of the intentions of its originators. It demands an appropriate "system," for inappropriate systems spell inefficiency and failure. Whoever created modern technology, for whatever purpose, this technology or, to use the Marxian term, these modes of production, now demand a system that suits them, that is appropriate to them.
Maybe what is most wrong is that which has been and continues to be the strongest formative force - the technology itself.
If our technology has been created mainly by the capitalist system, is it not probable that it bears the marks of its origin, a technology for the few at the expense of the masses, a technology of exploitation, a technology that is class-orientated, undemocratic, inhuman, and also unecological and nonconservationist?
I never cease to be astonished at the docility with which people - even those who call themselves Socialists or Marxists - accept technology uncritically, as if technology were a part of natural law.
The implicit assumption is that you can have a technological transplant without getting at the same time an ideological transplant; that technology is ideologically neutral; that you can acquire the hardware without the software that lies behind it, has made the hardware possible, and keeps it moving.
People still say: It is not the technology; it is the "system." Maybe a particular "system" gave birth to this technology; but now it stares us in the face that the system we have is the product, the inevitable product, of the technology. As I compare the societies which appear to have different "systems," the evidence seems to be overwhelming that where they employ the same technology they act very much the same and become more alike every day. Mindless work in office or factory is equally mindless under any system.
I suggest therefore that those who want to promote a better society, achieve a better system, must not confine their activities to attempts to change the "super-structure” rules, agreements, taxes, welfare, education, health services, etc. The expenditure incurred in trying to buy a better society can be like pouring money into a bottomless pit. If there is no change in the base - which is technology - there is unlikely to be any real change in the superstructure.
In other words, the new technologies will be in the image of the system that brings them forth, and they will reinforce the system. If the system is ruled by giant enterprises - whether privately or publicly owned - the new technologies will tend to be "gigantic" in one way or another, designed for "massive breakthroughs," at massive cost, demanding extreme specialization, promising a massive impact - no matter consequences." The slogan is "A breakthrough a day keeps the crisis at bay."
[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 38-44
"The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."
And it was not only the mill-owner but also the working population brought into being within and around the mills which seemed to contemporaries to be "new". "The instant we get near the borders of the manufacturing parts of Lancashire," a rural magistrate wrote in 1808, "we meet a fresh race of beings, both in point of manners, employments and subordination…”; while Robert Owen, in 1815 , declared that "the general diffusion of manufactures throughout a country generates a new character in its inhabitants . . . an essential change in the general character of the mass of the people."
The steam-engine had "drawn together the population into dense masses" and already Gaskell saw in working-class organisations an " 'imperium in imperio' of the most obnoxious description"
“The steam-engine had no precedent, the spinning-jenny is without ancestry, the mule and the power-loom entered on no prepared heritage : they sprang into sudden existence like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter.”
“The manufacturing population is not new in its formation alone: it is new in its habits of thought and action, which have been formed by the circumstances of its condition, with little instruction, and less guidance, from external sources…”
For Engels, describing the Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 it seemed that "the first proletarians were engendered by it … the factory hands, eldest children of the industrial revolution, have from the beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the Labour Movement.”
The physical instruments of production were seen as giving rise in a direct and more-or-Iess compulsive way to new social relationships, institutions, and cultural modes.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.208
People form warped conclusions because they [make-]believe worldviews begin and end with content, however content (e.g., "meaning") is just a secondary effect of human organisation.
All content lives within a pre-established organisational paradigm. In other words, the distance between people, the rate at which people communicate and the number of people communicating *determines* the content they produce.
We'll express frustration about the incoherence of anti-racism content, but it's futile because we're mistaking a competitive or organisational effect for incoherence.
Yes, much of it *is* incoherent, but incoherence isn't a content problem, it's an organisational problem.
This is why I increasingly retreat from online debates. I see the same effects in the context of moral debates (ie, they mistake a motive problem for an idea/truth problem). Modern "morality" isn't a content problem, it's an organisational problem.
People's problems with my views often begin at a failure to understand we're speaking from diff. vantage points: they're fixated on content, I'm speaking about prior [organisational] effects that determine content.
For example, while you're talking about "what is compassion?" or "is this compassionate?" (content), I'm talking about the organisational paradigm which precedes "compassion".
In other words, how does rate of communication, population size and proximity affect "compassion"?
Population size obviously determines the trajectory and strength of compassion. Compassion will be stronger and more authentic in a proximate population of five (eg, a family) than a widely dispersed population of 1B (social network).
The competitive effects are also different. The population of 1B is naturally more competitive than the population of five (or even a small tribe), which precipitates "competitive compassion".
Remote "compassion" is also significantly more likely to be falsified.
Lastly, is "compassion" even scalable in a population of 1B? There must be a saturation point because we can't be infinitely compassionate.
For me, this (scalability) is the real breaking point of the modern organisational paradigm imposed by mass comm.
I speak about this a lot, but inclusion is the trajectory of dissolution. No category can include in perpetuity without stripping itself of its raison detre.
[Antidotal]
Related posts:
Narrow Contexts
Closed system - Open system
Narrow - Wide
Independent - Dependent
Quantity - Quality
Science only ever deals with abstracted, narrow contexts which give partial views. It must always be nested within a tradition, a wider story that weaves all contexts into a cohesive whole, and that doesn’t allow the extremes of constructivism (all nurture) or biological determinism (all nature).
Within tradition there must be a good reason to inquire, a reason that relates to the wider context and worldview of the tradition. Inquiry for the sake of inquiry, out of mere curiosity, is foreign to tradition.
Perhaps for many scientists their motivation is a progressive worldview, albeit unconscious in some cases.
Theorists - such as Descartes - have been tempted to try and find a standard entity for [the word ‘self’] to refer to. They have hoped for a Procrustean bed guaranteed to fit all [its many] uses. And in modern times the hope has been that something narrower and simpler still would emerge - a concept modelled on the most abstract scientific terms such as the names of physical particles.
This is surely a mistake because these scientific terms are designed only for a specially abstract context.
Even in biology it has not proved possible to standardise terms like 'species' in this way because they refer to things in the world which have to be looked at in a variety of lights, and this is still more true of notions that play an important part in the jungle of human life.
Attempts to impose simple, arbitrary definitions on the subtle and versatile words that play an important part there – words such as person, reason and feeling - are inevitably futile.
What is needed in such cases is rather to make clear just what the context of the particular enquiry is – why this particular question is arising.
[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.120
There are [doctrines], popular today, which do allow for a social context but deny a bodily one.
In sociology for instance, there is still quite a widespread belief that human behaviour can only have social causes, not biological ones, so that the constitution of people's bodies can have no effect on their personality.
[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.122
Jung imagined the psyche as being structured in a way that is similar to that of the sacred hoop, with the four psychological functions lying along the sacred directions. Ideally, the human psyche should occupy a point of balance within the center of the hoop, but most of us live out of balance.
A person who approaches different events, including human relationships, only in a rational, logical way can be seen as living from the thinking function, having consigned the feeling function to the shadow world. Eventually this underdeveloped and undifferentiated feeling function will begin to exert its subversive power on the personality.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.164
If Huxley's definition is what most people mean by science, then it is probably true that Indigenous people do not possess a science.
After all, why should people whose philosophy speaks of relationship, the primacy of direct experience, and the interconnectedness of all things ever wish to divorce themselves from their world and fragment their experience though such acts of abstraction?
If there were to be an Indigenous science then it would deal not in abstraction, weighing, and measuring; but in relationship, holism, quality, and value.
[…] it is not possible to separate Indigenous science from other areas of life such as ethics, spirituality, metaphysics, social order, ceremony, and a variety of other aspects of daily existence. Thus it can never be a "branch" or a "department" of knowledge, but rather remains inseparable from the cohesive whole, from a way of being and of coming-to-knowing.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.240-1
The poet and philosopher Goethe had pointed out the artificial nature of scientific experiments for, in their retreat from the fullness of phenomena, they have the effect of isolating and tricking nature.
So while experiment is the key to Western science it has also been criticized as being artificial, as increasing our sense of distance from nature, and possibly even leading to a fundamental distortion in the way we relate to the world.
Within Indigenous science there does not seem to be that same deliberate attempt to move beyond observation by setting constraints on nature. Indeed, from within its holistic viewpoint in which everything is connected to everything else, experiment would have to take on a new role.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.251
[…] dissolving sociological dualisms clears the ground for post-anthropocentric (Braidotti, 2011: 327) sociology, shifting humans from the central focus of sociological attention and facilitating a posthuman sociology to engage productively with the world beyond the human: with other living things, and with the wider environment of matter and things.
By challenging any distinction between the materiality of the physical world and the social constructs of human thoughts and desires, it enables exploration of how each affects the other, and how things other than humans (for instance, a tool, a technology or a building) can be social ‘agents’, making things happen.
This flattening of the nature/culture dualism is applicable not only when exploring topics such as environmental change, technology or science, but also to re-think the part that the non-human and non-animate, matter and meaning play in social production more generally (Karakayali, 2015), for instance in education (Alldred and Fox, 2017) or public health (Fox and Alldred, 2016).
[Nick J. Fox & Pam Alldred]
‘Social structures, power and resistance in monist sociology: (New) materialist insights’
[...] the notion of human happiness is not a unitary, simple notion and cannot provide us with a criterion for making our key choices.
If someone suggests to us, in the spirit of Bentham and Mill, that we should guide our own choices by the prospects of our own future pleasure or happiness, the appropriate retort is to enquire: 'But which pleasure, which happiness ought to guide me?' For there are too many different kinds of enjoyable activity, too many different modes in which happiness is achieved.
For different pleasures and different happinesses are to a large degree incommensurable: there are no scales of quality or quantity on which to weigh them. Consequently appeal to the criteria of pleasure will not tell me whether to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a soldier.
To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for the reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all.
It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.77-8
Utilitarianism cannot accommodate the distinction between goods internal to and goods external to a practice.
[...] internal goods and external goods are not commensurable with each other. Hence the notion of summing goods - and a fortiori in the light of what I have said about kinds of pleasure and enjoyment the notion of summing happiness - in terms of one single formula or conception of utility, whether it is Franklin's or Bentham's or Mill's, makes no sense.
Nonetheless we ought to note that although this distinction is alien to J.S. Mill's thought, it is plausible and in no way patronizing to suppose that something like this is the distinction which he was trying to make in Utilitarianism when he distinguished between 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures.
At the most we can say 'something like this'; for J.S. Mill's upbringing had given him a limited view of human life and powers, had unfitted him, for example, for appreciating games just because of the way it had fitted him for appreciating philosophy.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.231
[…] the term "standard" leads us from data amenable to statistical measurement (wages or articles of consumption) to those satisfactions which are sometimes described by statisticans as "imponderables".
From food we are led to homes, from homes to health, from health to family life, and thence to leisure, work-discipline, education and play, intensity of labour, and so on.
From standard-of-life we pass to way-of-life. But the two are not the same. The first is a measurement of quantities; the second a description (and sometimes an evaluation) of qualities. Where statistical evidence is appropriate to the first, we must rely largely upon "literary evidence" as to the second.
A major source of confusion arises from the drawing of conclusions as to one from evidence appropriate only to the other. It is at times as if statisticians have been arguing: "the indices reveal an increased per capita consumption of tea, sugar, meat and soap, therefore the working class was happier", while social historians have replied: "the literary sources show that people were unhappy, therefore their standard-of-living must have deteriorated".
[…] It is quite possible for statistical averages and human experiences to run in opposite directions. A per capita increase in quantitative factors may take place at the same time as a great qualitative disturbance in people's way of life, traditional relationships, and sanctions. People may consume more goods and become less happy or less free at the same time.
[…] we might cite those trades, such as coal mining, in which real wages advanced between 1790 and 1840, but at the cost of longer hours and a greater intensity of labour, so that the breadwinner was "worn out" before the age of forty. In statistical terms, this reveals an upward curve. To the families concerned it might feel like immiseration.
Thus it is perfectly possible to maintain two propositions which, on a casual view, appear to be contradictory. Over the period 1790-1840 there was a slight improvement in average material standards. Over the same period there was intensified exploitation, greater insecurity, and increasing human misery.
By 1840 most people were "better off" than their forerunners had been fifty years before, but they had suffered and continued to suffer this slight improvement as a catastrophic experience.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.230-1
Related posts:
Science only ever deals with abstracted, narrow contexts which give partial views. It must always be nested within a tradition, a wider story that weaves all contexts into a cohesive whole, and that doesn’t allow the extremes of constructivism (all nurture) or biological determinism (all nature).
Within tradition there must be a good reason to inquire, a reason that relates to the wider context and worldview of the tradition. Inquiry for the sake of inquiry, out of mere curiosity, is foreign to tradition.
Perhaps for many scientists their motivation is a progressive worldview, albeit unconscious in some cases.
Theorists - such as Descartes - have been tempted to try and find a standard entity for [the word ‘self’] to refer to. They have hoped for a Procrustean bed guaranteed to fit all [its many] uses. And in modern times the hope has been that something narrower and simpler still would emerge - a concept modelled on the most abstract scientific terms such as the names of physical particles.
This is surely a mistake because these scientific terms are designed only for a specially abstract context.
Even in biology it has not proved possible to standardise terms like 'species' in this way because they refer to things in the world which have to be looked at in a variety of lights, and this is still more true of notions that play an important part in the jungle of human life.
Attempts to impose simple, arbitrary definitions on the subtle and versatile words that play an important part there – words such as person, reason and feeling - are inevitably futile.
What is needed in such cases is rather to make clear just what the context of the particular enquiry is – why this particular question is arising.
[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.120
There are [doctrines], popular today, which do allow for a social context but deny a bodily one.
In sociology for instance, there is still quite a widespread belief that human behaviour can only have social causes, not biological ones, so that the constitution of people's bodies can have no effect on their personality.
[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.122
Jung imagined the psyche as being structured in a way that is similar to that of the sacred hoop, with the four psychological functions lying along the sacred directions. Ideally, the human psyche should occupy a point of balance within the center of the hoop, but most of us live out of balance.
A person who approaches different events, including human relationships, only in a rational, logical way can be seen as living from the thinking function, having consigned the feeling function to the shadow world. Eventually this underdeveloped and undifferentiated feeling function will begin to exert its subversive power on the personality.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.164
If Huxley's definition is what most people mean by science, then it is probably true that Indigenous people do not possess a science.
After all, why should people whose philosophy speaks of relationship, the primacy of direct experience, and the interconnectedness of all things ever wish to divorce themselves from their world and fragment their experience though such acts of abstraction?
If there were to be an Indigenous science then it would deal not in abstraction, weighing, and measuring; but in relationship, holism, quality, and value.
[…] it is not possible to separate Indigenous science from other areas of life such as ethics, spirituality, metaphysics, social order, ceremony, and a variety of other aspects of daily existence. Thus it can never be a "branch" or a "department" of knowledge, but rather remains inseparable from the cohesive whole, from a way of being and of coming-to-knowing.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.240-1
The poet and philosopher Goethe had pointed out the artificial nature of scientific experiments for, in their retreat from the fullness of phenomena, they have the effect of isolating and tricking nature.
So while experiment is the key to Western science it has also been criticized as being artificial, as increasing our sense of distance from nature, and possibly even leading to a fundamental distortion in the way we relate to the world.
Within Indigenous science there does not seem to be that same deliberate attempt to move beyond observation by setting constraints on nature. Indeed, from within its holistic viewpoint in which everything is connected to everything else, experiment would have to take on a new role.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.251
[…] dissolving sociological dualisms clears the ground for post-anthropocentric (Braidotti, 2011: 327) sociology, shifting humans from the central focus of sociological attention and facilitating a posthuman sociology to engage productively with the world beyond the human: with other living things, and with the wider environment of matter and things.
By challenging any distinction between the materiality of the physical world and the social constructs of human thoughts and desires, it enables exploration of how each affects the other, and how things other than humans (for instance, a tool, a technology or a building) can be social ‘agents’, making things happen.
This flattening of the nature/culture dualism is applicable not only when exploring topics such as environmental change, technology or science, but also to re-think the part that the non-human and non-animate, matter and meaning play in social production more generally (Karakayali, 2015), for instance in education (Alldred and Fox, 2017) or public health (Fox and Alldred, 2016).
[Nick J. Fox & Pam Alldred]
‘Social structures, power and resistance in monist sociology: (New) materialist insights’
[...] the notion of human happiness is not a unitary, simple notion and cannot provide us with a criterion for making our key choices.
If someone suggests to us, in the spirit of Bentham and Mill, that we should guide our own choices by the prospects of our own future pleasure or happiness, the appropriate retort is to enquire: 'But which pleasure, which happiness ought to guide me?' For there are too many different kinds of enjoyable activity, too many different modes in which happiness is achieved.
For different pleasures and different happinesses are to a large degree incommensurable: there are no scales of quality or quantity on which to weigh them. Consequently appeal to the criteria of pleasure will not tell me whether to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a soldier.
To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for the reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all.
It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.77-8
Utilitarianism cannot accommodate the distinction between goods internal to and goods external to a practice.
[...] internal goods and external goods are not commensurable with each other. Hence the notion of summing goods - and a fortiori in the light of what I have said about kinds of pleasure and enjoyment the notion of summing happiness - in terms of one single formula or conception of utility, whether it is Franklin's or Bentham's or Mill's, makes no sense.
Nonetheless we ought to note that although this distinction is alien to J.S. Mill's thought, it is plausible and in no way patronizing to suppose that something like this is the distinction which he was trying to make in Utilitarianism when he distinguished between 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures.
At the most we can say 'something like this'; for J.S. Mill's upbringing had given him a limited view of human life and powers, had unfitted him, for example, for appreciating games just because of the way it had fitted him for appreciating philosophy.
[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.231
[…] the term "standard" leads us from data amenable to statistical measurement (wages or articles of consumption) to those satisfactions which are sometimes described by statisticans as "imponderables".
From food we are led to homes, from homes to health, from health to family life, and thence to leisure, work-discipline, education and play, intensity of labour, and so on.
From standard-of-life we pass to way-of-life. But the two are not the same. The first is a measurement of quantities; the second a description (and sometimes an evaluation) of qualities. Where statistical evidence is appropriate to the first, we must rely largely upon "literary evidence" as to the second.
A major source of confusion arises from the drawing of conclusions as to one from evidence appropriate only to the other. It is at times as if statisticians have been arguing: "the indices reveal an increased per capita consumption of tea, sugar, meat and soap, therefore the working class was happier", while social historians have replied: "the literary sources show that people were unhappy, therefore their standard-of-living must have deteriorated".
[…] It is quite possible for statistical averages and human experiences to run in opposite directions. A per capita increase in quantitative factors may take place at the same time as a great qualitative disturbance in people's way of life, traditional relationships, and sanctions. People may consume more goods and become less happy or less free at the same time.
[…] we might cite those trades, such as coal mining, in which real wages advanced between 1790 and 1840, but at the cost of longer hours and a greater intensity of labour, so that the breadwinner was "worn out" before the age of forty. In statistical terms, this reveals an upward curve. To the families concerned it might feel like immiseration.
Thus it is perfectly possible to maintain two propositions which, on a casual view, appear to be contradictory. Over the period 1790-1840 there was a slight improvement in average material standards. Over the same period there was intensified exploitation, greater insecurity, and increasing human misery.
By 1840 most people were "better off" than their forerunners had been fifty years before, but they had suffered and continued to suffer this slight improvement as a catastrophic experience.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.230-1
Related posts:
Innovate / Endure
Innovate - Endure
Novel - Traditional
Achievement - Limits
Aspire - Accept
Dynamic - Static
‘Ambition’ and ‘stagnation’ are peculiarly modern, Faustian concepts.
The son of a 14th century blacksmith does not have ‘ambitions’ to become a blacksmith - he understands that to become a blacksmith is his lot in life, and so has no uncertainty in this regard. He does not need to aspire to the role - he needs merely to show the requisite level of application and industry, and his destiny will be secured.
Ambition is only relevant within a dynamic system, in which individuals are ‘mobile’ and free to choose their lot; and in which there are few limits on the size of your chosen lot.
From the perspective of modern man, the 14th century blacksmith is ‘unambitious’ - he has no desire to improve or change his lot, and so appears to be content to ‘stagnate’ - which is really just a modern way of saying ‘staying the same over time.’
We can, then, see the celebration of aspiration and ambition as a sign of a wider dissolution, encapsulated by the ubiquitous pattern of runaway growth - all of which is driven by the Faustian bio-spirit and its incessant push towards infinity.
In every field, economic, political, and cultural, Athens welcomed the new and was ready for any adventure.
After the defeat of Persia at Salamis, Athens could not return to the old ways. Taking immediate advantage of the fleet which had been built up for the war, she went on to establish her commercial empire in the eastern Mediterranean. When the tribute from the alliance was no longer needed for war, it was used to build the wonderful temples and statues. Philosophers and poets were honored for attacking the old, traditional ways of life.
But her glories were comparatively short-lived. She was always weakened from within by the numerous Class I individuals who were constantly forming factions, plotting with internal or external enemies, and organizing rebellions […]
Sparta, in extreme contrast, was a nation where Class II residues were wholly predominant both in the general population and in the élite.
Innovation in Sparta was a crime; everything was regulated by ancient custom and religion and time-sanctified tradition. The individual counted for nothing, the group for all. Adventure was always to be distrusted. From these roots Sparta derived a tremendous power of endurance when faced with adversity.
But she always stopped short of anything spectacular. She produced no philosophy, no liquid wealth, and little art. She never tried to establish a great empire. Her own armies went home after the Persians were defeated.
In spite of defeats and crushing hardships, she finally conquered in the Peloponnesian Wars; but in the 4th century, when the conditions of life and warfare greatly changed, she too was lost. Because of her lack of Class I residues, Sparta could not adapt herself to new ways; so, defending the old, she perished.
The social combination that is strongest against external enemies, and at the same time able to bring about a fairly high internal level of culture and material prosperity, is that wherein (1) Class II residues are widespread and active among the masses (the non-élite); (2) the individuals with a high level of Class I residues are concentrated in the élite; (3) a fair percentage of Class II residues nevertheless still remains within the élite; (4) the élite is comparatively open, so that at least a comparatively free circulation can take place.
The meaning of this optimum combination can be translated as follows into more usual terms: (1) The masses have faith in an integrating myth or ideology, a strong sense of group solidarity, a willingness to endure physical hardship and sacrifice. (2) The best and most active brains of the community are concentrated in the élite, and ready to take advantage of whatever opportunities the historical situation presents.
[James Burnham]
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, p.192-3
[…] in the second volume of Democracy in America, he presents the energy of democratic society as fueled, in large part, by a certain kind of unhappiness. This unhappiness did not have the character of misery or despair; rather, Tocqueville observed a pervasive unease. The name he gave to this unease was restlessness (inquiétude).
For Pascal, restlessness is an expression of the human need for God. It derives from man’s desire to be immortal. Since man cannot be immortal, “he has decided to prevent himself from thinking about it.” All men have a “secret instinct to seek external diversion and occupation, coming from their feeling of constant wretchedness.”
[...] Tocqueville identifies two main sources of modern restlessness: the democratic preoccupation with material well-being and democratic envy.
Tocqueville argues that, in places untouched by progress, in which one finds a poor and uneducated populace, one finds hardship but also tranquility and resilience amid difficult circumstances. In America, where there is great material prosperity, relatively speaking, and great hopefulness of achieving still more prosperity, one finds widespread discontent.
He describes Americans moving, changing, and shifting from one place to another, from one occupation to another, from one life to another. He describes people buying land and houses only to sell them quickly and changing professions multiple times in their careers.
The phenomena he describes here overlap quite extensively with the universal change and motion that he praised in volume 1. What had been described as expressions of dynamic energy now become expressions of dissatisfaction and discontent.
[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.441-2, 447
[...] it is an essential characteristic of the personal and modifiable technics of Man, in contrast to the genus technics of animals, that every discovery contains the possibility and necessity of new discoveries, every fulfilled wish awakens a thousand more, every triumph over Nature incites to yet others.
The soul of this beast of prey is ever hungry, his will never satisfied - that is the curse that lies upon this kind of life, but also the greatness inherent in its destiny.
It is precisely its best specimens that know the least quiet, happiness, or enjoyment.
[Oswald Spengler]
Man and Technics, p. 58
To rise in the social scale, even in calm and normal times, the prime requisite, beyond any question, is a capacity for hard work, but the requisite next in importance is ambition, a firm resolve to get on in the world, to outstrip one's fellows.
Now those traits hardly go with extreme sensitiveness or, to be quite frank, with ‘goodness' either. For 'goodness' cannot remain indifferent to the hurts of those who must be thrust behind if one is to step ahead of them [….] If one is to govern men, more useful than a sense of justice and much more useful than altruism, or even than extent of knowledge or broadness of view—are perspicacity, a ready intuition of individual and mass psychology, strength of will and, especially, confidence in oneself.
With good reason did Machiavelli put into the mouth of Cosimo dei Medici the much quoted remark, that states are not ruled with prayer-books.
[Gaetano Mosca]
The Ruling Class, p. 449-50
Lucretius and Epicurus did not promise this kind of complete knowledge at all and took no interest in the technology that might grow from it. Their belief in chance went deeper, making them much more radically sceptical.
They had no confidence in any practical attempt to improve human life. Epicurus himself actually despised the pursuit of theoretical knowledge for its own sake as one more distraction from the pursuit of inner peace and warned his followers against it. 'Set your sail, O happy youth,' he cried, ‘and flee from every form of education.'
Lucretius is indeed more interested in details about atoms, but for him too knowledge itself is not the aim. Knowledge is a means not an end, a means to inward peace, not to improved outward activity. Primarily it is a cure for anxiety, a path to ataraxia, peace of mind.
What the Epicureans were preaching was essentially a fatalistic quietism. They did not think that human happiness could be increased at all either by political activity or by the satisfactions of love, or indeed by knowledge either.
Instead, they put their faith in a stern limitation of human ambition, a concentration on what little is possible to us here and now.
They thought that people who had once fully grasped that they could not change the world at all, either by sacrificing to the gods or by any other kind of effort, would cease their anxious striving, would compose their minds, would be able to enjoy the satisfactions that life actually gave them in the present, and would console themselves for their sorrows by admiring the cosmos.
[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.37-8
Contrasting free societies with those that are not free, Tocqueville writes that the former are “all bustle and activity,” while the latter are static and self-satisfied. In the former, “improvement and progress are on everyone’s mind.”
He thus seems to have judged that the constant change to which Americans were exposed made them adventurous and innovative, and this drove them to success in commercial pursuits. Even Lawler, whose book The Restless Mind greatly illuminated the influence of Pascal’s profoundly negative view of restlessness on Tocqueville, acknowledged that “Tocqueville sees greatness in the restlessness of the Americans.”
While Tocqueville spoke admiringly of the energy he observed in Americans, and of the lively, vibrant pace of their economic and political life, his praise for the spiritual effects of the “universal movement” occurring in America culminates in the suggestion that it gives rise to excellence in commercial pursuits.
Lower-middle-class culture, now as in the past, is organized around the family, church, and neighborhood. It values the community's continuity more highly than individual advancement, solidarity more highly than social mobility.
Conventional ideals of success play a less important part in lower-middle-class life than the maintenance of existing ways. Parents want their children to get ahead, but they also want them to respect their elders, resist the temptation to lie and cheat, willingly shoulder the responsibilities that fall to them, and bear adversity with fortitude. More concerned with honor than with worldly ambition, they have less interest in the future than do upper-middle-class parents, who try to equip their children with the qualities required for competitive achievement. They do not subscribe to the notion that parents ought to provide children with every possible advantage.
The desire to preserve their way of life," as E. E. LeMasters writes in a study of construction workers, takes precedence over the desire to climb the social ladder.
In his historical studies of nineteenth-century Massachusetts, Stephan Thernstrom found that neither the Irish nor the Italians thought of schooling primarily as a means for their children to climb into a higher social class and to leave their old neighborhoods behind. In Newburyport, Irish parents sometimes sacrificed their children to their passion for home ownership, forcing them into the workplace instead of sending them to school. Irrational by upper-middle-class standards, this choice made sense to people bent on holding their communities together and on assuring the continuation of their own way of life in the next generation.
Social workers and educators, however, condemned child labor and sought to create a system of universal education, which would make it possible for children to surpass their parents, break the old ties, and make their own way in the larger world beyond the ethnic ghetto. In the same way, civil service reformers tried to replace the tribal politics of the Irish-American machine with a system more consistent with the principles of meritocracy and administrative efficiency.
Sociologists observed, usually with a suggestion of disapproval, that working people seemed to have no ambition.
According to Lloyd Warner, who studied Newburyport in the 1930s, working-class housewives set the dominant tone of cultural conservatism. They adhered to a "rigid" and "conventional" code of morality and seldom dared to "attempt anything new." They took no interest in long-range goals. “Their hopes are basically centered around carrying on [and] take the form of not wanting their present routine disturbed - they want to continue as they are, but, while doing so, better their circumstances and gain more freedom."
Anthony Lukas, a journalist, made the same point in his account of the Boston school conflicts of the mid-seventies. Lukas contrasted the "Charlestown ethic of getting by” with the "American imperative to get ahead." The people of Charlestown, deserted by the migration of more ambitious neighbors to the suburbs, had renounced "opportunity, advancement, adventure” for the “reassurance of community, solidarity, and camaraderie."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.487-8
By shifting attention from unionization to the study of working-class culture, the new labor historians have shown that a whole way of life was at stake in the struggle against industrialism. Workers were defending not just their economic interests but their crafts, families, and neighborhoods.
The recognition that economic interests are not enough to inspire radical or revolutionary agitation or to make people accept its risks suggests a more sweeping conclusion.
‘Ambition’ and ‘stagnation’ are peculiarly modern, Faustian concepts.
The son of a 14th century blacksmith does not have ‘ambitions’ to become a blacksmith - he understands that to become a blacksmith is his lot in life, and so has no uncertainty in this regard. He does not need to aspire to the role - he needs merely to show the requisite level of application and industry, and his destiny will be secured.
Ambition is only relevant within a dynamic system, in which individuals are ‘mobile’ and free to choose their lot; and in which there are few limits on the size of your chosen lot.
From the perspective of modern man, the 14th century blacksmith is ‘unambitious’ - he has no desire to improve or change his lot, and so appears to be content to ‘stagnate’ - which is really just a modern way of saying ‘staying the same over time.’
We can, then, see the celebration of aspiration and ambition as a sign of a wider dissolution, encapsulated by the ubiquitous pattern of runaway growth - all of which is driven by the Faustian bio-spirit and its incessant push towards infinity.
In every field, economic, political, and cultural, Athens welcomed the new and was ready for any adventure.
After the defeat of Persia at Salamis, Athens could not return to the old ways. Taking immediate advantage of the fleet which had been built up for the war, she went on to establish her commercial empire in the eastern Mediterranean. When the tribute from the alliance was no longer needed for war, it was used to build the wonderful temples and statues. Philosophers and poets were honored for attacking the old, traditional ways of life.
But her glories were comparatively short-lived. She was always weakened from within by the numerous Class I individuals who were constantly forming factions, plotting with internal or external enemies, and organizing rebellions […]
Sparta, in extreme contrast, was a nation where Class II residues were wholly predominant both in the general population and in the élite.
Innovation in Sparta was a crime; everything was regulated by ancient custom and religion and time-sanctified tradition. The individual counted for nothing, the group for all. Adventure was always to be distrusted. From these roots Sparta derived a tremendous power of endurance when faced with adversity.
But she always stopped short of anything spectacular. She produced no philosophy, no liquid wealth, and little art. She never tried to establish a great empire. Her own armies went home after the Persians were defeated.
In spite of defeats and crushing hardships, she finally conquered in the Peloponnesian Wars; but in the 4th century, when the conditions of life and warfare greatly changed, she too was lost. Because of her lack of Class I residues, Sparta could not adapt herself to new ways; so, defending the old, she perished.
The social combination that is strongest against external enemies, and at the same time able to bring about a fairly high internal level of culture and material prosperity, is that wherein (1) Class II residues are widespread and active among the masses (the non-élite); (2) the individuals with a high level of Class I residues are concentrated in the élite; (3) a fair percentage of Class II residues nevertheless still remains within the élite; (4) the élite is comparatively open, so that at least a comparatively free circulation can take place.
The meaning of this optimum combination can be translated as follows into more usual terms: (1) The masses have faith in an integrating myth or ideology, a strong sense of group solidarity, a willingness to endure physical hardship and sacrifice. (2) The best and most active brains of the community are concentrated in the élite, and ready to take advantage of whatever opportunities the historical situation presents.
[James Burnham]
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, p.192-3
[…] in the second volume of Democracy in America, he presents the energy of democratic society as fueled, in large part, by a certain kind of unhappiness. This unhappiness did not have the character of misery or despair; rather, Tocqueville observed a pervasive unease. The name he gave to this unease was restlessness (inquiétude).
For Pascal, restlessness is an expression of the human need for God. It derives from man’s desire to be immortal. Since man cannot be immortal, “he has decided to prevent himself from thinking about it.” All men have a “secret instinct to seek external diversion and occupation, coming from their feeling of constant wretchedness.”
[...] Tocqueville identifies two main sources of modern restlessness: the democratic preoccupation with material well-being and democratic envy.
Tocqueville argues that, in places untouched by progress, in which one finds a poor and uneducated populace, one finds hardship but also tranquility and resilience amid difficult circumstances. In America, where there is great material prosperity, relatively speaking, and great hopefulness of achieving still more prosperity, one finds widespread discontent.
He describes Americans moving, changing, and shifting from one place to another, from one occupation to another, from one life to another. He describes people buying land and houses only to sell them quickly and changing professions multiple times in their careers.
The phenomena he describes here overlap quite extensively with the universal change and motion that he praised in volume 1. What had been described as expressions of dynamic energy now become expressions of dissatisfaction and discontent.
[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.441-2, 447
[...] it is an essential characteristic of the personal and modifiable technics of Man, in contrast to the genus technics of animals, that every discovery contains the possibility and necessity of new discoveries, every fulfilled wish awakens a thousand more, every triumph over Nature incites to yet others.
The soul of this beast of prey is ever hungry, his will never satisfied - that is the curse that lies upon this kind of life, but also the greatness inherent in its destiny.
It is precisely its best specimens that know the least quiet, happiness, or enjoyment.
[Oswald Spengler]
Man and Technics, p. 58
To rise in the social scale, even in calm and normal times, the prime requisite, beyond any question, is a capacity for hard work, but the requisite next in importance is ambition, a firm resolve to get on in the world, to outstrip one's fellows.
Now those traits hardly go with extreme sensitiveness or, to be quite frank, with ‘goodness' either. For 'goodness' cannot remain indifferent to the hurts of those who must be thrust behind if one is to step ahead of them [….] If one is to govern men, more useful than a sense of justice and much more useful than altruism, or even than extent of knowledge or broadness of view—are perspicacity, a ready intuition of individual and mass psychology, strength of will and, especially, confidence in oneself.
With good reason did Machiavelli put into the mouth of Cosimo dei Medici the much quoted remark, that states are not ruled with prayer-books.
[Gaetano Mosca]
The Ruling Class, p. 449-50
Lucretius and Epicurus did not promise this kind of complete knowledge at all and took no interest in the technology that might grow from it. Their belief in chance went deeper, making them much more radically sceptical.
They had no confidence in any practical attempt to improve human life. Epicurus himself actually despised the pursuit of theoretical knowledge for its own sake as one more distraction from the pursuit of inner peace and warned his followers against it. 'Set your sail, O happy youth,' he cried, ‘and flee from every form of education.'
Lucretius is indeed more interested in details about atoms, but for him too knowledge itself is not the aim. Knowledge is a means not an end, a means to inward peace, not to improved outward activity. Primarily it is a cure for anxiety, a path to ataraxia, peace of mind.
What the Epicureans were preaching was essentially a fatalistic quietism. They did not think that human happiness could be increased at all either by political activity or by the satisfactions of love, or indeed by knowledge either.
Instead, they put their faith in a stern limitation of human ambition, a concentration on what little is possible to us here and now.
They thought that people who had once fully grasped that they could not change the world at all, either by sacrificing to the gods or by any other kind of effort, would cease their anxious striving, would compose their minds, would be able to enjoy the satisfactions that life actually gave them in the present, and would console themselves for their sorrows by admiring the cosmos.
[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.37-8
Contrasting free societies with those that are not free, Tocqueville writes that the former are “all bustle and activity,” while the latter are static and self-satisfied. In the former, “improvement and progress are on everyone’s mind.”
He thus seems to have judged that the constant change to which Americans were exposed made them adventurous and innovative, and this drove them to success in commercial pursuits. Even Lawler, whose book The Restless Mind greatly illuminated the influence of Pascal’s profoundly negative view of restlessness on Tocqueville, acknowledged that “Tocqueville sees greatness in the restlessness of the Americans.”
While Tocqueville spoke admiringly of the energy he observed in Americans, and of the lively, vibrant pace of their economic and political life, his praise for the spiritual effects of the “universal movement” occurring in America culminates in the suggestion that it gives rise to excellence in commercial pursuits.
That is certainly noteworthy, but Tocqueville himself did not regard excellence in commercial pursuits as the highest kind of human excellence.
[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.446
[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.446
Lower-middle-class culture, now as in the past, is organized around the family, church, and neighborhood. It values the community's continuity more highly than individual advancement, solidarity more highly than social mobility.
Conventional ideals of success play a less important part in lower-middle-class life than the maintenance of existing ways. Parents want their children to get ahead, but they also want them to respect their elders, resist the temptation to lie and cheat, willingly shoulder the responsibilities that fall to them, and bear adversity with fortitude. More concerned with honor than with worldly ambition, they have less interest in the future than do upper-middle-class parents, who try to equip their children with the qualities required for competitive achievement. They do not subscribe to the notion that parents ought to provide children with every possible advantage.
The desire to preserve their way of life," as E. E. LeMasters writes in a study of construction workers, takes precedence over the desire to climb the social ladder.
In his historical studies of nineteenth-century Massachusetts, Stephan Thernstrom found that neither the Irish nor the Italians thought of schooling primarily as a means for their children to climb into a higher social class and to leave their old neighborhoods behind. In Newburyport, Irish parents sometimes sacrificed their children to their passion for home ownership, forcing them into the workplace instead of sending them to school. Irrational by upper-middle-class standards, this choice made sense to people bent on holding their communities together and on assuring the continuation of their own way of life in the next generation.
Social workers and educators, however, condemned child labor and sought to create a system of universal education, which would make it possible for children to surpass their parents, break the old ties, and make their own way in the larger world beyond the ethnic ghetto. In the same way, civil service reformers tried to replace the tribal politics of the Irish-American machine with a system more consistent with the principles of meritocracy and administrative efficiency.
Sociologists observed, usually with a suggestion of disapproval, that working people seemed to have no ambition.
According to Lloyd Warner, who studied Newburyport in the 1930s, working-class housewives set the dominant tone of cultural conservatism. They adhered to a "rigid" and "conventional" code of morality and seldom dared to "attempt anything new." They took no interest in long-range goals. “Their hopes are basically centered around carrying on [and] take the form of not wanting their present routine disturbed - they want to continue as they are, but, while doing so, better their circumstances and gain more freedom."
Anthony Lukas, a journalist, made the same point in his account of the Boston school conflicts of the mid-seventies. Lukas contrasted the "Charlestown ethic of getting by” with the "American imperative to get ahead." The people of Charlestown, deserted by the migration of more ambitious neighbors to the suburbs, had renounced "opportunity, advancement, adventure” for the “reassurance of community, solidarity, and camaraderie."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.487-8
By shifting attention from unionization to the study of working-class culture, the new labor historians have shown that a whole way of life was at stake in the struggle against industrialism. Workers were defending not just their economic interests but their crafts, families, and neighborhoods.
The recognition that economic interests are not enough to inspire radical or revolutionary agitation or to make people accept its risks suggests a more sweeping conclusion.
Resistance to innovation, it appears, is an important, perhaps indispensable ingredient in revolutionary action, along with a tendency to identify innovation with the disruption of older communities by invasive forces from outside.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.215
While Native science respects the wisdom of its Elders, Western science seeks to overthrow the ideas of the previous generation, although this is generally done in limited ways so that the major paradigms of science persist from generation to generation.
Nevertheless, the battle between father and son continues with every generation.
[...]
A belief in the need for constant progress and change, along with the accumulation of wealth and material resources, is generally absent from Indigenous societies, which place more emphasis upon balance, harmony, and the circular passage of time.
Social value and personal prestige are gained in other ways, and people sometimes appear conservative about adopting new technologies. In addition, those technologies that have been developed, or adopted, generally tend to be used in ways that do not disrupt the particular environment and way of life.
Systems of farming, the working of artifacts, the design and building of great earthworks in the southeastern United States, as well as the temples and cities of Central America all imply considerable technological support. But these changes have generally come about within an environment of balance and do not represent "advances" in the sense of being a forward movement and a split and separation from tradition.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.261-2, 271
Which are the possible coping mechanisms open to a system faced with changing external conditions?
Two extreme positions can be identified. At the one extreme, the structure of the system is fully defined a priori. This would mean that the system is 'hard-wired', and that all possible eventualities will have to be catered for in the fixed, internal structure of the system.
Apart from the loss in adaptivity, such systems may become too cumbersome in complex situations. Under less complex conditions, 'hard-wired' systems, operating on simple control principles, may be an adequate solution, but this is not a plausible option for the kind of complex systems we are interested in.
At the other extreme we may have systems with no independent internal structure at all, but where the structure is fully determined by the conditions in the environment. A system which merely mimics the environment directly will not be capable of acting in that environment since it will be fully at its mercy.
To be able to interpret its environment, the system must have at least the following two attributes: some form of resistance to change, and some mechanism for comparing different conditions in order to determine whether there has been enough change to warrant some response.
Both these attributes merely translate into the need for a form of memory - without resistance to change, memory is impossible. If the self-organising capabilities of such a system are adequate, it will then learn to cope with a changing environment.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.99
The model can be made more complex networks by imposing certain 'biases' on the nodes.
These will suppress signals below a certain threshold - another example of non-linear interaction. The size of the bias has an important effect: if it is too high, the network will be too stable, if it is too low, the network will be chaotic.
The bias therefore provides a mechanism through which the system can adjust itself to remain at the critical level even when the complexity of the external world fluctuates.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.98
Complex systems operate under conditions far from equilibrium [and] need a constant flow of energy to change, evolve and survive as complex entities. Equilibrium, symmetry and complete stability mean death.
Just as the flow of energy is necessary to fight entropy and maintain the complex structure of the system, society can only survive as a process. It is defined not by its origins or its goals, but by what it is doing.
In postmodern society this constant activity, this lack of equilibrium, is pushed to ever higher levels, particularly through the role of the mass media. This has an unsettling effect on many, and undeniably one has to develop certain skills to cope with these conditions, but to yearn for a state of complete equilibrium is to yearn for a sarcophagus.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.122
If you had a million dollars in a bank at 5%, your income would be $50,000 a year. Now if you chose to live on 50,000 a year, you could live in perpetuity. This is what we would call sustainable income because you haven't touched your capital.
Well, ecosystems, the soils, the fisheries, forests, grasslands, are capable each year of producing an annual output. If human beings were content to live on that annual output, we could live in perpetuity without destroying the capital base, as it were. But instead, we've continued to grow and grow and grow under the illusion that there are no limits, because trade flows abolish the illusion of limits, for example. It's only one of many things. Technology helps to do that as well.
So what we've done is managed to grow the human economy beyond the biocapacity of the planet. But that's why fisheries are being depleted. That's why we've eliminated 94% of the mammalian biomass on the planet and replaced it with humans and our domestic livestock and so on.
So we are living literally by liquidating the basic natural capital base that we are utterly dependent upon. Growth is destructive once you're beyond carrying capacity.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
If you look into the historical record, a very simple little society called Tikopia - an island in the South Pacific, just a few square kilometers - for some 3000 years, it seems, managed to control its population in the vicinity of 1200 people. 1200 people over 3000 years.
But they did it using seven forms of birth control, including by the way, when things got tough in the lean years, the old guys like me would set themselves out into the ocean and disappear. The Inuit in Northern Canada and the US did the same thing, departed on ice flow so that there'd be more resources for young people.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
Rituals stabilize life.
To paraphrase Antoine Saint-Exupéry, we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space. For Hannah Arendt it is the durability of things that gives them their 'relative independence from men'. They 'have the function of stabilizing human life'. Their 'objectivity lies in the fact that ... men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table'.
In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life. They make life last [haltbar].
The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit]: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.3
As the middle classes and their commercialization of all human relationships spread through Western society in the centuries from the twelfth to the twentieth, they largely modified and, to some extent, reversed the values of Western society earlier. In some cases, the old values, such as future preference or self-discipline, remained, but were redirected.
Future preference ceased to be transcendental in its aim, and became secularized. Self-discipline ceased to seek spirituality by restraining sensuality, and instead sought material acquisition. In general, the new middle-class outlook had a considerable religious basis, but it was the religion of the medieval heresies and of puritanism rather than the religion of Roman Christianity.
This complex outlook that we call middle class or bourgeois is, of course, the chief basis of our world today. Western society is the richest and most powerful society that has ever existed largely because it has been impelled forward along these lines, beyond the rational degree necessary to satisfy human needs, by the irrational drive for achievement in terms of material ambitions.
To be sure, Western society always had other kinds of people, and the majority of the people in Western society probably had other outlooks and values, but it was middle-class urgency that pushed modern developments in the direction they took.
There were always in our society dreamers and truth-seekers and tinkerers. They, as poets, scientists, and engineers, thought up innovations which the middle classes adopted and exploited if they seemed likely to be profit-producing. Middle-class self-discipline and future preference provided the savings and investment without which any innovation—no matter how appealing in theory— would be set aside and neglected.
But the innovations that could attract middle-class approval (and exploitation) were the ones that made our world today so different from the world of our grandparents and ancestors.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.784
Sovereign states today act in an environment so transformed by market forces that no institution - not even the largest transnational corporation or sovereign state - can master it.
In this environment the most unimaginable forces spring from a torrent of technological innovations, unfettered market competition and weak or fractured social institutions that produces the global economy of our times.
As management gurus never cease reminding us, nation-states and multinational corporations can survive and prosper today only by using new technologies to achieve a competitive edge over their rivals. What most of them fail to note is that competitive advantage is inherently fleeting in the anarchic environment of disorganised global capitalism.
In the late twentieth century there is no shelter - for corporations or for governments - from the global gale of creative destruction.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.76
Paine also who saw that in the constitutional debates of the 18th century "the Nation was always left out of the question".
By bringing the nation into the question, he was bound to set in motion forces which he could neither control nor foresee. That is what democracy is about.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.110
Related posts:
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.215
While Native science respects the wisdom of its Elders, Western science seeks to overthrow the ideas of the previous generation, although this is generally done in limited ways so that the major paradigms of science persist from generation to generation.
Nevertheless, the battle between father and son continues with every generation.
[...]
A belief in the need for constant progress and change, along with the accumulation of wealth and material resources, is generally absent from Indigenous societies, which place more emphasis upon balance, harmony, and the circular passage of time.
Social value and personal prestige are gained in other ways, and people sometimes appear conservative about adopting new technologies. In addition, those technologies that have been developed, or adopted, generally tend to be used in ways that do not disrupt the particular environment and way of life.
Systems of farming, the working of artifacts, the design and building of great earthworks in the southeastern United States, as well as the temples and cities of Central America all imply considerable technological support. But these changes have generally come about within an environment of balance and do not represent "advances" in the sense of being a forward movement and a split and separation from tradition.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.261-2, 271
Which are the possible coping mechanisms open to a system faced with changing external conditions?
Two extreme positions can be identified. At the one extreme, the structure of the system is fully defined a priori. This would mean that the system is 'hard-wired', and that all possible eventualities will have to be catered for in the fixed, internal structure of the system.
Apart from the loss in adaptivity, such systems may become too cumbersome in complex situations. Under less complex conditions, 'hard-wired' systems, operating on simple control principles, may be an adequate solution, but this is not a plausible option for the kind of complex systems we are interested in.
At the other extreme we may have systems with no independent internal structure at all, but where the structure is fully determined by the conditions in the environment. A system which merely mimics the environment directly will not be capable of acting in that environment since it will be fully at its mercy.
To be able to interpret its environment, the system must have at least the following two attributes: some form of resistance to change, and some mechanism for comparing different conditions in order to determine whether there has been enough change to warrant some response.
Both these attributes merely translate into the need for a form of memory - without resistance to change, memory is impossible. If the self-organising capabilities of such a system are adequate, it will then learn to cope with a changing environment.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.99
The model can be made more complex networks by imposing certain 'biases' on the nodes.
These will suppress signals below a certain threshold - another example of non-linear interaction. The size of the bias has an important effect: if it is too high, the network will be too stable, if it is too low, the network will be chaotic.
The bias therefore provides a mechanism through which the system can adjust itself to remain at the critical level even when the complexity of the external world fluctuates.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.98
Complex systems operate under conditions far from equilibrium [and] need a constant flow of energy to change, evolve and survive as complex entities. Equilibrium, symmetry and complete stability mean death.
Just as the flow of energy is necessary to fight entropy and maintain the complex structure of the system, society can only survive as a process. It is defined not by its origins or its goals, but by what it is doing.
In postmodern society this constant activity, this lack of equilibrium, is pushed to ever higher levels, particularly through the role of the mass media. This has an unsettling effect on many, and undeniably one has to develop certain skills to cope with these conditions, but to yearn for a state of complete equilibrium is to yearn for a sarcophagus.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.122
If you had a million dollars in a bank at 5%, your income would be $50,000 a year. Now if you chose to live on 50,000 a year, you could live in perpetuity. This is what we would call sustainable income because you haven't touched your capital.
Well, ecosystems, the soils, the fisheries, forests, grasslands, are capable each year of producing an annual output. If human beings were content to live on that annual output, we could live in perpetuity without destroying the capital base, as it were. But instead, we've continued to grow and grow and grow under the illusion that there are no limits, because trade flows abolish the illusion of limits, for example. It's only one of many things. Technology helps to do that as well.
So what we've done is managed to grow the human economy beyond the biocapacity of the planet. But that's why fisheries are being depleted. That's why we've eliminated 94% of the mammalian biomass on the planet and replaced it with humans and our domestic livestock and so on.
So we are living literally by liquidating the basic natural capital base that we are utterly dependent upon. Growth is destructive once you're beyond carrying capacity.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
If you look into the historical record, a very simple little society called Tikopia - an island in the South Pacific, just a few square kilometers - for some 3000 years, it seems, managed to control its population in the vicinity of 1200 people. 1200 people over 3000 years.
But they did it using seven forms of birth control, including by the way, when things got tough in the lean years, the old guys like me would set themselves out into the ocean and disappear. The Inuit in Northern Canada and the US did the same thing, departed on ice flow so that there'd be more resources for young people.
[William Rees]
‘William E. Rees: "The Fundamental Issue - Overshoot" | The Great Simplification #53’, Nate Hagens, YouTube
Rituals stabilize life.
To paraphrase Antoine Saint-Exupéry, we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space. For Hannah Arendt it is the durability of things that gives them their 'relative independence from men'. They 'have the function of stabilizing human life'. Their 'objectivity lies in the fact that ... men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table'.
In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life. They make life last [haltbar].
The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit]: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.3
As the middle classes and their commercialization of all human relationships spread through Western society in the centuries from the twelfth to the twentieth, they largely modified and, to some extent, reversed the values of Western society earlier. In some cases, the old values, such as future preference or self-discipline, remained, but were redirected.
Future preference ceased to be transcendental in its aim, and became secularized. Self-discipline ceased to seek spirituality by restraining sensuality, and instead sought material acquisition. In general, the new middle-class outlook had a considerable religious basis, but it was the religion of the medieval heresies and of puritanism rather than the religion of Roman Christianity.
This complex outlook that we call middle class or bourgeois is, of course, the chief basis of our world today. Western society is the richest and most powerful society that has ever existed largely because it has been impelled forward along these lines, beyond the rational degree necessary to satisfy human needs, by the irrational drive for achievement in terms of material ambitions.
To be sure, Western society always had other kinds of people, and the majority of the people in Western society probably had other outlooks and values, but it was middle-class urgency that pushed modern developments in the direction they took.
There were always in our society dreamers and truth-seekers and tinkerers. They, as poets, scientists, and engineers, thought up innovations which the middle classes adopted and exploited if they seemed likely to be profit-producing. Middle-class self-discipline and future preference provided the savings and investment without which any innovation—no matter how appealing in theory— would be set aside and neglected.
But the innovations that could attract middle-class approval (and exploitation) were the ones that made our world today so different from the world of our grandparents and ancestors.
[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.784
Sovereign states today act in an environment so transformed by market forces that no institution - not even the largest transnational corporation or sovereign state - can master it.
In this environment the most unimaginable forces spring from a torrent of technological innovations, unfettered market competition and weak or fractured social institutions that produces the global economy of our times.
As management gurus never cease reminding us, nation-states and multinational corporations can survive and prosper today only by using new technologies to achieve a competitive edge over their rivals. What most of them fail to note is that competitive advantage is inherently fleeting in the anarchic environment of disorganised global capitalism.
In the late twentieth century there is no shelter - for corporations or for governments - from the global gale of creative destruction.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.76
Paine also who saw that in the constitutional debates of the 18th century "the Nation was always left out of the question".
By bringing the nation into the question, he was bound to set in motion forces which he could neither control nor foresee. That is what democracy is about.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.110
Related posts:
Instrumentalism
[Ariel] Rubenstein refuses to claim that his knowledge of theoretical matters can be translated - by him - into anything directly practical.
To him, economics is like a fable - a fable writer is there to stimulate ideas, indirectly inspire practice perhaps, but certainly not to direct or determine practice.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 211
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 211
All things organic are dying in the grip of organisation. An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. Civilisation has itself become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fashion.
We think only in horsepower now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power; we cannot survey a countryside full of pasturing cattle without thinking of its exploitation as a source of meat supply; we cannot look at the beautiful old handwork of a lively and primitive people without wishing to replace it by modern technical process.
[Oswald Spengler]
Man and Technics, p. 72
With the decline of metaphysics, ethics has outgrown its status as a subordinate element in abstract theory. Henceforth it is philosophy, the other divisions being absorbed into it and practical living becoming the centre of consideration.
The passion of pure thought sinks down. Metaphysics, mistress yesterday, is handmaid now; all it is required to do is to provide a foundation for practical views. And the foundation becomes more and more superfluous.
It becomes the custom to despise and mock at the metaphysical, the unpractical, the philosophy of “stone for bread."
There is exactly the same difference in Classical philosophy before and after Aristotle - on the one hand, a grandly conceived Cosmos to which a formal ethic adds almost nothing, and, on the other, ethics as such, as programme, as necessity with a desultory ad hoc metaphysic for basis.
[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p.366
It is because the inner being is extinct in the modern scientist, leaving him with only gross physical perceptions and an abstract, mathematical intellect, that the relationship between the I and the not-I grows rigid and soulless, so that his detachment can only act negatively.
His science is only good for grasping and manipulating the world, not for understanding it or for enlarging his knowledge in a qualitative way.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p.142
Iain: I believe there are different levels of purpose. In one sense you can say a daily purpose might be to get food and no longer be hungry, but that is not to exhaust the purposes of an animal.
It seems unsatisfactory to say that the purpose of the animal is just to make other animals like itself. It seems more that there must be something purposeful about being a deer, that it demonstrates one of the ways in which the verb to be can be inflected.
It creates a much richer idea of what it means to be, and that seems to me close to the purpose of an animal, that the lioness is not just killing and eating, which is certainly a daily purpose, and not just producing more lioness cubs or lion cubs, but actually just being the lion is the purpose of a lion.
Jim: […] I would say that part of the being of a white-tailed deer, at least for those who appreciate them, is we find them beautiful as well or something about their form that’s really quite elegant, the coloring, the shape, athleticism and all that.
But is that a purpose? I guess a purpose from what perspective? What’s the perspective of the purpose of the deer who plays and the deer that is beautiful?
Iain: Well, obviously not a utilitarian purpose, and that’s why I begin by differentiating intrinsic purposes from manipulation that reaches a certain goal at a lower level and at a utilitarian level and as an external extrinsic purpose.
So, there seems to be something about the way evolution works, that it’s not just about creating a creature that can last longer, has better survival power, because there are, for example, actinobacteria at the bottom of the sea. Single examples of which may be a million years old. Human beings do rather poorly in this competition because we live through only 70 years old. Trees can live to be a thousand years old.
But as you get more complex, you find that actually the survival value of the individual and even its ability to propagate many examples of itself may be diminishing. So it seems to me that the idea of fitness must encourage us to think in terms of something other than mere mathematically calculable survival.
[Iain McGilchrist]
‘EP 155 Iain McGilchrist Part 2: The Matter With Things’, The Jim Rutt Show, YouTube
The interesting and significant point is that this argument against vitalism is not concerned with its truth but with its fertility. To confuse these two is a very common error and causes a great deal of damage.
A methodological principle - ‘fertility' - which is perfectly legitimate as a methodological principle is substituted for the idea of truth and expanded into a philosophy with universal claims. As Karl Stern puts it, ‘methods become mentalities'.
A statement is considered untrue not because it appears to be incompatible with experience, but because it does not serve as a guide in research and has no heuristic value; and, conversely, a theory is considered true, no matter how improbable it may be on general grounds, simply because of 'superior heuristic value'.
In the ideal case, the structure of a man's knowledge would match the structure of reality.
At the highest level, there would be ‘knowledge for understanding’ in its purest form; at the lowest, there would be ‘knowledge for manipulation’. Understanding is required to decide what to do; the help of ‘knowledge for manipulation’ is needed to act effectively in the material world.
For successful action, we need to know what will be the results or alternative courses of action, so as to be able to select the course most suitable for our purposes. At this level, therefore, it is correct to say that the goal of knowledge is prediction and control.
[E. F. Schumacher]
A Guide for the Perplexed, p.69, 127
I have thought often about the role of the tool-making instinct in the history and prehistory of our race. And I have associated this instinct with a more general characteristic of our people which I -- and others also -- have called the Faustian spirit.
That's the spirit which drives us not only to build things and to invent things but to explore and to try to understand ourselves and the world around us. It is a spirit which makes us seek power not just for the sake of mere power, but also for the sake of progress, for the sake of building new things. It leads us to conquer not merely for the sake of conquest, but also to improve and develop that which we conquer.
It leads us to value truth over and above any practical value that truth may have; to value knowledge above any monetary gain that knowledge may yield.
[William Pierce]
'The Faustian Spirit and Political Correctness'
These words help to clarify what Edwards meant by "consent and good will to Being in general" - the essence of "true virtue," as he called it in his treatise on that subject.
"Consent" implied a love of God's creation in and for itself, without regard to the ways it thwarted or seemed to encourage human designs.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.249
There was much to be said for Mailer's contention that "the life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far" in the postwar years and that the times demanded a leader who could "engage" once again the “myth of the nation" and thus bring a new “impetus ... to the arts, to the practices, to the lives and to the imaginations of the American."
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.469
Prediction is given the highest value in the physical sciences. Indeed, it has become the crucial test of any theory; for it is not sufficient to explain a wide range of phenomena - one must also be able to predict some new effect that can then be tested.
However [thinkers] such as Paul Feyerabend and David Bohm, do not go along with this current fashion for predictability and suggest that understanding is the true criterion of science.
The current emphasis on prediction, in their opinion, has become an obsession and, by itself, does not lead to understanding. Indeed, in some cases it simply confirms what is in effect a closed system of thought.
While Native scientists have concerned themselves with prediction, this comes about within a different metaphysics. Prediction does not so much involve something new in the future but a celebration of return and renewal. What we take for prediction could, in the case of Indigenous science, be closer to an expression of the harmonies and relationships between things.
Within Mayan science, for example, great emphasis was placed upon the wheels of time and upon the exact dates of eclipses and planetary movements.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.252
In ancient Greek, 'school' is scholé, that is, leisure. Schools of higher education would thus be schools of higher leisure. Today, they are no longer places of high leisure. They have become places of production, factories of human capital.
They pursue professional training rather than formative education [Bildung]. Formative education is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Through formative education spirit relates to itself instead of subordinating itself to an external purpose.
The university of the Middle Ages was anything but a place to receive professional training. It was a place of ritual. Sceptres, seals, doctoral caps, chains of office and gowns were the accoutrements of academic ritual.
Today, universities are abandoning rituals. The modern university, understood as a business that has to serve its customers, no longer has any need for them. Rituals conflict with work and production […]
Where everything is subordinated to production, ritual disappears.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.41-2
[…] the rise of a master-class without traditional authority or obligations; the growing distance between master and man; the transparency of the exploitation at the source of their new wealth and power; the loss of status and above all of independence for the worker, his reduction to total dependence on the master's instruments of production; the partiality of the law; the disruption of the traditional family economy; the discipline, monotony, hours and conditions of work; loss of leisure and amenities; the reduction of the man to the status of an "instrument".
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.221
Related posts:
Old / New
New - Old
Future - Past
Rationalism - Tradition
Top Down - Bottom Up
Top Down - Bottom Up
Nurture - Nature
Constructivist - Essentialist
Tradition is anchored in the past, via a foundational myth that remains accessible in the present. Rationalism is anchored in the future, via the quest for ‘Truth’, a progress towards the One True Path.
The modern political divide of the past three centuries has essentially boiled down to these two camps: whether the past is a source of wisdom or an era of horrors; whether culture and tradition were fortifications against decline or barriers to progress; whether politics was the means to preservation of imperfect decencies and virtues, or a tool of human perfectibility.
Tradition is anchored in the past, via a foundational myth that remains accessible in the present. Rationalism is anchored in the future, via the quest for ‘Truth’, a progress towards the One True Path.
Reason allows a way out of tradition because it subverts the originary will of the founder. It births critique.
Revolution attempts a clean break with the past, but must always subsequently work to prevent the past from re-emerging - via doctoring, censorship, and various other forms of denial.
The left is characterized by a preference for change and reform, a commitment to liberty and equality, an orientation toward progress and the future, while the right is the party of order and tradition, hierarchy, and a disposition to valorize the past.
Whether described as left vs. right, blue vs. red, or liberal vs. conservative, this basic division seems to capture a permanent divide between two fundamental human dispositions, as well as two worldviews that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of political options.
[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.43
The left is characterized by a preference for change and reform, a commitment to liberty and equality, an orientation toward progress and the future, while the right is the party of order and tradition, hierarchy, and a disposition to valorize the past.
Whether described as left vs. right, blue vs. red, or liberal vs. conservative, this basic division seems to capture a permanent divide between two fundamental human dispositions, as well as two worldviews that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of political options.
[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.43
The modern political divide of the past three centuries has essentially boiled down to these two camps: whether the past is a source of wisdom or an era of horrors; whether culture and tradition were fortifications against decline or barriers to progress; whether politics was the means to preservation of imperfect decencies and virtues, or a tool of human perfectibility.
[Patrick J. Deneen]
Things that have worked for a long time are preferable - they are more likely to have reached their ergodic states. At the worst we don't know how long they'll last.
Remember that the burden of proof lies on someone disturbing a complex system, not on the person protecting the status quo.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 371
We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks […] - these are the scientists trying to impose the solutions on us.
But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to the conclusions endorsed by anti-environmentalists and pro-market fundamentalists. Quite the contrary: we need to be hyper-conservationists ecologically, since we do not know what we are harming with now.
That’s the sound policy under conditions of ignorance and epistemic opacity.
To those who say “We have no proof that we are harming nature,” a sound response is “We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either”; the burden of proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system.
Furthermore we should not “try to correct” the harm done, as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 316
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
In Greek legend, there were two Titan brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus means “fore-thinker” while Epimetheus means “after-thinker,” equivalent to someone who falls for the retrospective distortion of fitting theories to past events in an ex post narrative manner.
Optionality is Promethean, narratives are Epimethean - one has reversible and benign mistakes, the other symbolises the gravity and irreversibility of the consequences of opening Pandora’s box.
You make forays into the future by opportunism and optionality […] It is a way - the only way - to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future, while reliance on narratives is the exact opposite: one is domesticated by uncertainty, and ironically set back. You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.
All this does not mean that tinkering and trial and error are devoid of narrative: they are just not overly dependent on the narrative being true - the narrative is not epistemological but instrumental. For instance, religious stories might have no value as narratives, but they may get you to do something convex and antifragile you otherwise would not do, like mitigate risks.
English parents controlled children with the false narrative that if they didn’t behave or eat their dinner, Boney (Napoleon Bonaparte) or some wild animal might come and take them away. Religions often use the equivalent method to help adults get out of trouble, or avoid debt. But intellectuals tend to believe their own b***t and take their ideas too literally, and that is vastly dangerous.
Consider the role of the heuristic (rule-of-thumb) knowledge embedded in traditions. Simply, just as evolution operates on individuals, so does it act on these tacit, unexplainable rules of thumb transmitted through generations - what Karl Popper has called evolutionary epistemology.
Accordingly, wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper). My sadness is that we have been moving farther and farther away from grandmothers.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 211-13, 215
It isn't always the future that people want; they are often, as it were rather ambivalent about the Promised Land. Indeed, it isn't the future they most want, it is the past.
Psychoanalysis, like education [...] is an attempt to lure people into the future, to tempt them to grow up.
What the analyst and the teacher and the political revolutionary come up against is people's refusal to sacrifice an apparently known pleasure for an apparently unknown one. Better the devil you know, because if you know him he can't be the devil.
[Adam Phillips]
Side Effects ('Learning to Live'), p.152, 154
Societies, like animals, evolve.
The ones that survive spawn memetic descendants – for example, the success of Britan allowed it to spin off Canada, Australia, the US, et cetera. Thus, we expect societies that exist to be somewhat optimized for stability and prosperity. I think this is one of the strongest conservative arguments.
Just as a random change to a letter in the human genome will probably be deleterious rather than beneficial since humans are a complicated fine-tuned system whose genome has been pre-optimized for survival – so most changes to our cultural DNA will disrupt some institution that evolved to help Anglo-American (or whatever) society outcompete its real and hypothetical rivals.
[Scott Alexander]
'Meditations on Moloch'
In all these writings, what interests us is not the routine polemics, the case against the abomination of mob rule and Jacobin slogans, but rather the counterrevolutionary argument in principle. This is invariably the rejection of the idea that law and the state could result from the methodical activity of individual human beings.
All important state institutions, and especially the constitutions that were altered so frequently during the French Revolution, are said to result automatically and in the course of time from prevailing circumstances and the nature of things. These institutions are the rational expression of such circumstances, and not their creator. Therefore, it would be absurd to propose to force things to conform to an abstract scheme.
The nation and society are not overnight products of doctrinaire "fabrication.” On the contrary, they are formed over long periods of time, in such a way that the individual persons involved could not survey them or even make an estimate of them.
On this point, Burke – in general phrases that are often powerfully rhetorical and emotional – stresses the growth of the national community that spans generations. De Maistre still sees the individual entirely from the perspective of the theological ideas of the classical age: in his insignificance in the presence of the transcendent providential power that governs us and in whose hands the active heroes of the Revolution appear to de Maistre as automatons.
Finally, as early as 1797, Bonald, a great systematic thinker, explains what is at stake with splendid precision: the opposition between liberal individualism and social solidarity. According to Bonald, the bearer of historical activity is not the individual person or the mass of individuals. It is instead society, which lives in history and constitutes itself according to definite laws, and which really constitutes the individual person as such.
All three - in a vehement rejection of the metaphysicians and the philosophers, Rousseau in particular - agree that the activity of the individual, based on rationalistic maxims, can create nothing. It can only delay, destroy, and abrogate the natural course of things; but it cannot produce anything of permanence.
[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 110
The historical situations in which romanticism and romantics can arise are epochs in which an antiquated culture confronts a new one […] At such watersheds of world history, persons in whom feeling and imagination outweigh clear thinking, spirits of more warmth than light, always turn backward, to what is old.
From the unbelief and prose that they see gaining ground around them, they will long for the world of the old faith and ancestral customs, a world that is agreeable and rich in forms; and they will attempt to restore this world for its own sake and, wherever possible, beyond itself as well.
But as children of their time, they too are dominated more than they know by the new principle that is repugnant to them.
Echoing Giambattista Vico, an early critic of the deracinated rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes, [Wendell] Berry defends what Vico named the sensus communis.
Such “common knowledge” is the result of the practice and experience, the accumulated store of wisdom born of trials and corrections of people who have lived, suffered, and flourished in local settings. Rules and practices based on a preconceived notion of right cannot be imposed absent prudential consideration and respect toward common sense.
This is not to suggest that traditions cannot be changed or altered, but, as Burke argued, they must be given the presumptive allowance to change internally, with the understanding and assent of people who have developed lives and communities based upon those practices.
[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.81
For that reason a real knowledge of the past, in Brandt's words, “requires something more than knowing how people used to make candles or what kind of bed they slept in. It requires a sense of the persistence of the past: the manifold ways in which it penetrates our lives.”
This persistence, of course, is what the nostalgic attitude denies.
Nostalgia evokes the past only to bury it alive. It shares with the belief in progress, to which it is only superficially opposed, an eagerness to proclaim the death of the past and to deny history's hold over the present. Those who mourn the death of the past and those who acclaim it both take for granted that our age has outgrown its childhood. Both find it difficult to believe that history still haunts our enlightened, disillusioned maturity.
Both are governed, in their attitude toward the past, by the prevailing disbelief in ghosts.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.118
In this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we (English) are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.
Instead of “exploding general prejudices,” philosophers would "better employ their sagacity,” Burke thought, “to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.” Prejudices guided conduct more reliably than reason, by making a "man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts.”
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.129
In the conservative sociological tradition, the tenacity of custom was seen as a useful check against innovation.
For Lynd, "folkways" meant "cultural lag." Habits and "values" failed to keep pace with economic and technological change. Americans retained the mental habits of pioneers even though their habits were now governed by elaborate organisations and complicated technologies.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.427
For this reason, Brownson opposed any theory of progress that implied a rejection of past.
Things that have worked for a long time are preferable - they are more likely to have reached their ergodic states. At the worst we don't know how long they'll last.
Remember that the burden of proof lies on someone disturbing a complex system, not on the person protecting the status quo.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 371
We have polluted for years, causing much damage to the environment, while the scientists currently making these complicated forecasting models were not sticking their necks out and trying to stop us from building these risks […] - these are the scientists trying to impose the solutions on us.
But the skepticism about models that I propose does not lead to the conclusions endorsed by anti-environmentalists and pro-market fundamentalists. Quite the contrary: we need to be hyper-conservationists ecologically, since we do not know what we are harming with now.
That’s the sound policy under conditions of ignorance and epistemic opacity.
To those who say “We have no proof that we are harming nature,” a sound response is “We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either”; the burden of proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system.
Furthermore we should not “try to correct” the harm done, as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 316
So the reader can see how the ancients saw naive rationalism: by impoverishing - rather than enhancing - thought, it introduces fragility. They knew that incompleteness - half knowledge - is always dangerous.
Many other people than the ancients have been involved in defending - and inviting us to respect - this different type of knowledge. First Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and political philosopher, who also countered the French Revolution for disrupting the “collected reasons of the ages.” He believed that large social variations can expose us to unseen effects and thus advocated the notion of small trial-and-error experiments (in effect, context tinkering) in social systems, coupled with respect for the complex heuristics of tradition.
Also Michael Oakeshot, the twentieth-century conservative political philosopher and philosopher of history who believed that traditions provide an aggregate of filtered collective knowledge.
Antifragile, p. 257-8
In Greek legend, there were two Titan brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus means “fore-thinker” while Epimetheus means “after-thinker,” equivalent to someone who falls for the retrospective distortion of fitting theories to past events in an ex post narrative manner.
Optionality is Promethean, narratives are Epimethean - one has reversible and benign mistakes, the other symbolises the gravity and irreversibility of the consequences of opening Pandora’s box.
You make forays into the future by opportunism and optionality […] It is a way - the only way - to domesticate uncertainty, to work rationally without understanding the future, while reliance on narratives is the exact opposite: one is domesticated by uncertainty, and ironically set back. You cannot look at the future by naive projection of the past.
All this does not mean that tinkering and trial and error are devoid of narrative: they are just not overly dependent on the narrative being true - the narrative is not epistemological but instrumental. For instance, religious stories might have no value as narratives, but they may get you to do something convex and antifragile you otherwise would not do, like mitigate risks.
English parents controlled children with the false narrative that if they didn’t behave or eat their dinner, Boney (Napoleon Bonaparte) or some wild animal might come and take them away. Religions often use the equivalent method to help adults get out of trouble, or avoid debt. But intellectuals tend to believe their own b***t and take their ideas too literally, and that is vastly dangerous.
Consider the role of the heuristic (rule-of-thumb) knowledge embedded in traditions. Simply, just as evolution operates on individuals, so does it act on these tacit, unexplainable rules of thumb transmitted through generations - what Karl Popper has called evolutionary epistemology.
Accordingly, wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper). My sadness is that we have been moving farther and farther away from grandmothers.
[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 211-13, 215
It isn't always the future that people want; they are often, as it were rather ambivalent about the Promised Land. Indeed, it isn't the future they most want, it is the past.
Psychoanalysis, like education [...] is an attempt to lure people into the future, to tempt them to grow up.
What the analyst and the teacher and the political revolutionary come up against is people's refusal to sacrifice an apparently known pleasure for an apparently unknown one. Better the devil you know, because if you know him he can't be the devil.
[Adam Phillips]
Side Effects ('Learning to Live'), p.152, 154
Societies, like animals, evolve.
The ones that survive spawn memetic descendants – for example, the success of Britan allowed it to spin off Canada, Australia, the US, et cetera. Thus, we expect societies that exist to be somewhat optimized for stability and prosperity. I think this is one of the strongest conservative arguments.
Just as a random change to a letter in the human genome will probably be deleterious rather than beneficial since humans are a complicated fine-tuned system whose genome has been pre-optimized for survival – so most changes to our cultural DNA will disrupt some institution that evolved to help Anglo-American (or whatever) society outcompete its real and hypothetical rivals.
[Scott Alexander]
'Meditations on Moloch'
Changes in the formula, if they are not to destroy the society, must be gradual, not abrupt. The formula is indispensable for holding the social structure together. A widespread skepticism about the formula will in time corrode and disintegrate the social order.
It is perhaps for this reason, half-consciously understood, that all strong and long-lived societies have cherished their “traditions,” even when, as is usually the case, these traditions have little relation to fact, and even after they can hardly be believed literally by educated men.
Rome, Japan, Venice, all such long-enduring states, have been very slow to change the old formulas, the time-honored ways and stories and rituals; and they have been harsh against rationalists who debunk them.
This, after all, was the crime for which Athens put Socrates to death. From the point of view of survival, she was probably right in doing so.
[James Burnham]
The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, p. 90
In all these writings, what interests us is not the routine polemics, the case against the abomination of mob rule and Jacobin slogans, but rather the counterrevolutionary argument in principle. This is invariably the rejection of the idea that law and the state could result from the methodical activity of individual human beings.
All important state institutions, and especially the constitutions that were altered so frequently during the French Revolution, are said to result automatically and in the course of time from prevailing circumstances and the nature of things. These institutions are the rational expression of such circumstances, and not their creator. Therefore, it would be absurd to propose to force things to conform to an abstract scheme.
The nation and society are not overnight products of doctrinaire "fabrication.” On the contrary, they are formed over long periods of time, in such a way that the individual persons involved could not survey them or even make an estimate of them.
On this point, Burke – in general phrases that are often powerfully rhetorical and emotional – stresses the growth of the national community that spans generations. De Maistre still sees the individual entirely from the perspective of the theological ideas of the classical age: in his insignificance in the presence of the transcendent providential power that governs us and in whose hands the active heroes of the Revolution appear to de Maistre as automatons.
Finally, as early as 1797, Bonald, a great systematic thinker, explains what is at stake with splendid precision: the opposition between liberal individualism and social solidarity. According to Bonald, the bearer of historical activity is not the individual person or the mass of individuals. It is instead society, which lives in history and constitutes itself according to definite laws, and which really constitutes the individual person as such.
All three - in a vehement rejection of the metaphysicians and the philosophers, Rousseau in particular - agree that the activity of the individual, based on rationalistic maxims, can create nothing. It can only delay, destroy, and abrogate the natural course of things; but it cannot produce anything of permanence.
[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 110
The historical situations in which romanticism and romantics can arise are epochs in which an antiquated culture confronts a new one […] At such watersheds of world history, persons in whom feeling and imagination outweigh clear thinking, spirits of more warmth than light, always turn backward, to what is old.
From the unbelief and prose that they see gaining ground around them, they will long for the world of the old faith and ancestral customs, a world that is agreeable and rich in forms; and they will attempt to restore this world for its own sake and, wherever possible, beyond itself as well.
But as children of their time, they too are dominated more than they know by the new principle that is repugnant to them.
That is why the old ways as they are reproduced in and through them are no longer the pure and primordial old ways. On the contrary, they are blended in many respects with what is new, and in this way they reveal the new in advance.
[David Friedrich Strauss]
Julian the Apostate: The Romantic on the Throne of the Caesars
Social facts, then, are entirely continuous with biological facts. They are part of life. This shows how misleading the metaphor of 'social construction' is if it is taken in its strong sense as meaning that we are omnipotent in inventing social practices.
Customs are not just an arbitrary product of our whim. Searle's central target is indeed the sense of artificiality and exaggerated power that this excessive constructivism suggests - the impression that it gives of human decisions taking place in a vacuum and dictating terms at will to the rest of the cosmos. He points out that human beings are not a separate entity detached from the natural world.
Different academic disciplines, therefore, should not behave as if they each owned their own private universe. Physics, literary criticism, political theory, geology and ethics should all notice that they share a world.
‘The traditional opposition that we tend to make between biology and culture is as misguided as the traditional opposition between body and mind … Culture is the form that biology takes.’
[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.192-3
[David Friedrich Strauss]
Julian the Apostate: The Romantic on the Throne of the Caesars
Social facts, then, are entirely continuous with biological facts. They are part of life. This shows how misleading the metaphor of 'social construction' is if it is taken in its strong sense as meaning that we are omnipotent in inventing social practices.
Customs are not just an arbitrary product of our whim. Searle's central target is indeed the sense of artificiality and exaggerated power that this excessive constructivism suggests - the impression that it gives of human decisions taking place in a vacuum and dictating terms at will to the rest of the cosmos. He points out that human beings are not a separate entity detached from the natural world.
Different academic disciplines, therefore, should not behave as if they each owned their own private universe. Physics, literary criticism, political theory, geology and ethics should all notice that they share a world.
‘The traditional opposition that we tend to make between biology and culture is as misguided as the traditional opposition between body and mind … Culture is the form that biology takes.’
[Mary Midgley]
Science and Poetry, p.192-3
Echoing Giambattista Vico, an early critic of the deracinated rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes, [Wendell] Berry defends what Vico named the sensus communis.
Such “common knowledge” is the result of the practice and experience, the accumulated store of wisdom born of trials and corrections of people who have lived, suffered, and flourished in local settings. Rules and practices based on a preconceived notion of right cannot be imposed absent prudential consideration and respect toward common sense.
This is not to suggest that traditions cannot be changed or altered, but, as Burke argued, they must be given the presumptive allowance to change internally, with the understanding and assent of people who have developed lives and communities based upon those practices.
[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.81
For that reason a real knowledge of the past, in Brandt's words, “requires something more than knowing how people used to make candles or what kind of bed they slept in. It requires a sense of the persistence of the past: the manifold ways in which it penetrates our lives.”
This persistence, of course, is what the nostalgic attitude denies.
Nostalgia evokes the past only to bury it alive. It shares with the belief in progress, to which it is only superficially opposed, an eagerness to proclaim the death of the past and to deny history's hold over the present. Those who mourn the death of the past and those who acclaim it both take for granted that our age has outgrown its childhood. Both find it difficult to believe that history still haunts our enlightened, disillusioned maturity.
Both are governed, in their attitude toward the past, by the prevailing disbelief in ghosts.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.118
In this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we (English) are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them.
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.
Instead of “exploding general prejudices,” philosophers would "better employ their sagacity,” Burke thought, “to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them.” Prejudices guided conduct more reliably than reason, by making a "man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts.”
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.129
In the conservative sociological tradition, the tenacity of custom was seen as a useful check against innovation.
For Lynd, "folkways" meant "cultural lag." Habits and "values" failed to keep pace with economic and technological change. Americans retained the mental habits of pioneers even though their habits were now governed by elaborate organisations and complicated technologies.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.427
For this reason, Brownson opposed any theory of progress that implied a rejection of past.
Having sided in his early writings with "efforts for progress," he proceeded to take his readers "aback by telling them they must not run away from the past." The future could no more be dissociated from the past than the spirit could be dissociated from the body.
"It is idle to war against the past. No man can be a reformer who has no tradition. Divest us of all tradition, of all that we have derived from the past... and we were mere naked savages." Brownson's unwillingness to choose between reform and conservatism or to equate political radicalism with a repudiation of the past was typical of the populist tradition.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.194
History has to have a happy ending.
“Are there no calamities in history?" Brownson asked in 1843. "Nothing tragic? May we never weep over the defeated? ... Must we always desert the cause as soon as fortune forsakes it, and bind ourselves to the cause which is in the ascendant, and hurrah in the crowd that throw up their caps in honor of the conqueror?"
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.221
The relationship of a plant or animal to the general ecology of its region is incredibly complicated.
It may be possible to make a computer model of, say, the introduction of a new bean hybrid upon a particular environment. But, as mathematicians would say, models are highly nonlinear, containing many feedback loops. Predictable behavior can suddenly change in abrupt ways, from gradual trends to wild oscillations or even chaos. It is beyond Western science to fully understand the impact that various aspects of genetic engineering could have upon the environment and our future.
Indigenous science, if we are to believe its metaphysics and its claims, moves in a slower way.
"It is idle to war against the past. No man can be a reformer who has no tradition. Divest us of all tradition, of all that we have derived from the past... and we were mere naked savages." Brownson's unwillingness to choose between reform and conservatism or to equate political radicalism with a repudiation of the past was typical of the populist tradition.
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.194
History has to have a happy ending.
“Are there no calamities in history?" Brownson asked in 1843. "Nothing tragic? May we never weep over the defeated? ... Must we always desert the cause as soon as fortune forsakes it, and bind ourselves to the cause which is in the ascendant, and hurrah in the crowd that throw up their caps in honor of the conqueror?"
[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.221
The relationship of a plant or animal to the general ecology of its region is incredibly complicated.
It may be possible to make a computer model of, say, the introduction of a new bean hybrid upon a particular environment. But, as mathematicians would say, models are highly nonlinear, containing many feedback loops. Predictable behavior can suddenly change in abrupt ways, from gradual trends to wild oscillations or even chaos. It is beyond Western science to fully understand the impact that various aspects of genetic engineering could have upon the environment and our future.
Indigenous science, if we are to believe its metaphysics and its claims, moves in a slower way.
It is based upon generations of painstaking observations and upon a perception that looks into the heart of things, upon knowledge that is given by the plants and animals to the two-legged. Thus, when changes take place they do so from within an acknowledged web of relationship.
Moreover, the power of the trickster is always acknowledged, for the People know that all human plans are subject to the forces of chance and transformation.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.183
Others are destined to find their own way; to rebel against the traditions which have been transmitted to them; to suffer anxiety and the fear which attends separation from the parents; and, finally, to win their way to a new individual point of view.
Such men are those whose genetic endowment makes it impossible for them to preserve the integrity of their own personalities and, at the same time, preserve the parental attitudes which they have introjected. They are compelled to fight their way to freedom; to find their own individual way of life; and to discard the traditions in which they have been reared.
For such people self-realization consists partly in becoming conscious of, and subsequently discarding, introjected parental attitudes: and the earlier some degree of emotional security is attained, the sooner will this discarding take place.
Emotional security is more likely to be attained in a household in which the parents are secure enough to be able to tolerate difference from themselves, and mature enough to make relationships with children who are not just little models of themselves, but individuals in their own right.
Part of the process of self-realization consists, therefore, in discarding introjected beliefs and attitudes which prove to be foreign to the developing personality: and this may be attended by considerable anxiety and depression.
Becoming free of identification with others is never completed; and most of us remain to some extent prisoners of our family background, of our social class, or of our nationality. The club, the old boys' reunion, the perpetuation of hierarchical social structure, are mechanisms of reassurance […] The sense of mutual support which men gain from such gatherings is matched by the loss of their individual characteristics, and the subtleties of personality disappear in the simplicities of the crowd.
[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.84-6
The neoliberal regime deploys emotions as resources in order to bring about heightened productivity and achievement.
Starting at a certain level of production, rationality - which is the medium of disciplinary society - hits a limit. Henceforth, it is experienced as a constraint, an inhibition. Suddenly, it seems rigid and inflexible. At this point, emotionality takes its place, which is attended by the feeling of liberty - the free unfolding of personality. After all, being free means giving free rein to emotions.
Rationality is defined by objectivity, generality and steadiness. As such, it stands opposed to emotionality, which is subjective, situative and volatile.
Emotions arise, above all, when circumstances change - and perception shifts. Rationality entails duration, consistency and regularity. It prefers stable conditions.
The neoliberal economy, increasingly dismantling continuity and progressively integrating instability in order to in order to enhance productivity, is pushing the emotionalization of the productive process forward. Accelerated communication also promotes its emotionalization.
Rationality is slower than emotionality; it has no speed, as it were. Thus, the pressure of acceleration now is leading to a dictatorship of emotion.
[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.46
Since we are in the midst of this process of change, a clear description of what is happening is not easy, but the heart of the matter is that our technologies have become more powerful than our theories.
We are capable of doing things that we do not understand. We can perform gene-splicing without fully understanding how genes interact.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.1
The social fabric is not 'designed' by means of some transcendental principle, but develops as a result of the way in which it responds to contingent information in a dynamic fashion.
The process is a complex one involving many individuals with complex, non-linear relationships between them, including feedback relations. Individuals co-operate to form clusters, but also compete for resources in the network. The system is therefore not, and can never be, symmetrical.
The history of the system is vitally important for the way in which meaning is generated in any part of it. The evolution of structures in the social fabric, causing continuous alterations, is an integral part of its dynamics.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.117
Traditional interpretations of the temporal nature of a system […] privilege the present.
The immense gain of the notion of différence is that it reminds us that not only the past has to be considered when we try to establish the meaning of (say) an event, but that since we cannot fully predict the effects of this event, the future has to be considered as well, despite the fact that we have no idea what this future might be.
Now, instead of throwing up his hands, and declaring that in such a case it is impossible to talk about meaning, and that therefore anything goes, Derrida insists that we should take responsibility for this unknowable future. In the case of ethical decisions, this leads to an aporia: we have to take responsibility for the future effects of our decisions, but we cannot know those effects, nor can we wait to see what they are. We have to make the decision now. How do we deal with this aporia?
To fall back on universal principles is to deny the complexity of the social system we live in, and can therefore never be just. To allow everything is to evade our responsibility. The first approach to the system is too rigid, the second too fluid.
Cornell’s suggestion (following Derrida, and reformulated in my terminology) is to take present ethical (and legal) principles seriously—to resist change—but to be keenly aware of when they should not be applied, or have to be discarded. We therefore do follow principles as if they were universal rules (Cornell and Derrida use the term ‘quasi-transcendental’), but we have to remotivate the legitimacy of the rule each time we use it.
To behave ethically means not to follow rules blindly—to merely calculate—but to follow them responsibly, which may imply that the rules must be broken.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.139
Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.
What is the origin of the intensity that characterizes repetition and protects it against becoming routine? For Kierkegaard, repetition and recollection represent the same movement but in opposite directions, 'because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards'.
Repetition, as a form of recognition, is therefore a form of completion. Past and present are brought together into a living present. As a form of completion, repetition founds duration and intensity. It ensures that time lingers.
Kierkegaard takes repetition to be opposed to hope as well as to recollection:
It is, Kierkegaard writes, 'only the new of which one tires. One never tires of the old.' The old is 'the daily bread that satisfies through blessing'. It brings happiness: 'and only a person who does not delude himself that repetition ought to be something new, for then he tires of it, is genuinely happy'.
Chasing new stimuli, excitement and experience, we lose the capacity for repetition.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.9
The Bolshevik project which the Soviet system embodied throughout its history was that of imposing a western modernity on Russia, but without capitalism.
Like the Utopia envisaged by Lenin, the global free market aims to bring into being a state of affairs that has never hitherto existed in human society - and which goes far beyond the mid-Victorian English free market and the liberal international economic order that existed until 1914.
Global laissez-faire and the communist project that animated the former Soviet Union have many of the same enemies. They are hostile to national and cultural differences in economic life and to the inheritances of tradition and history. They resent the backwardness of peasants and village life. They are intolerant of the unruly individualism of the bourgeoisie and the refractoriness of working people.
The chief victims of the global free market, as of War Communism and the Soviet system, are peasants and - to a lesser but still notable extent - urban industrial workers and the professional middle classes.
[...] Peasant traditional beliefs had been under siege since the communist victory in 1949, but it was in the Great Leap forward, and then the Cultural Revolution, that they were finally almost destroyed: ‘Everything connected with traditional beliefs was smashed up in the Great Leap Forward.’
The attack on traditional China was resumed in the Great Proleterian Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The ‘four olds’ - old customs, old habits, old culture and old thinking, as embodied in books, money, documents and antique art treasures - were assaulted in one of history’s greatest convulsions.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.140-1, 180
The global economy deskills people and organisations. It does so by making the environments in which they live and work unrecognisable to them. It thereby renders their stock of local and tacit knowledge less and less serviceable to them.
A major problem that has not been solved by business organisations - except partially Japanese companies - is that of combining the institutional continuity needed, if the local knowledge of employees is to be harnessed, with the capacity for organisational innovation required to make the most of new technologies.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.76
In his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) Burke supplemented the authority of precedent by that of wisdom and experience, and reverence for the Constitution by reverence for tradition - that "partnership … between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born".
Radical reformers "are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature”. “By their violent haste and their defiance of the process of nature, they are delivered over blindly to every projector and adventurer, to every alchymist and empiric."
[…]
"I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controuled, and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead."
Burke wished to "consign over the rights of posterity for ever, on the authority of a mouldy parchment", while Paine asserted that each successive generation was competent to define its rights and form of government anew.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.97, 99
Related posts:
Moreover, the power of the trickster is always acknowledged, for the People know that all human plans are subject to the forces of chance and transformation.
[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.183
Others are destined to find their own way; to rebel against the traditions which have been transmitted to them; to suffer anxiety and the fear which attends separation from the parents; and, finally, to win their way to a new individual point of view.
Such men are those whose genetic endowment makes it impossible for them to preserve the integrity of their own personalities and, at the same time, preserve the parental attitudes which they have introjected. They are compelled to fight their way to freedom; to find their own individual way of life; and to discard the traditions in which they have been reared.
For such people self-realization consists partly in becoming conscious of, and subsequently discarding, introjected parental attitudes: and the earlier some degree of emotional security is attained, the sooner will this discarding take place.
Emotional security is more likely to be attained in a household in which the parents are secure enough to be able to tolerate difference from themselves, and mature enough to make relationships with children who are not just little models of themselves, but individuals in their own right.
Part of the process of self-realization consists, therefore, in discarding introjected beliefs and attitudes which prove to be foreign to the developing personality: and this may be attended by considerable anxiety and depression.
Becoming free of identification with others is never completed; and most of us remain to some extent prisoners of our family background, of our social class, or of our nationality. The club, the old boys' reunion, the perpetuation of hierarchical social structure, are mechanisms of reassurance […] The sense of mutual support which men gain from such gatherings is matched by the loss of their individual characteristics, and the subtleties of personality disappear in the simplicities of the crowd.
[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.84-6
The neoliberal regime deploys emotions as resources in order to bring about heightened productivity and achievement.
Starting at a certain level of production, rationality - which is the medium of disciplinary society - hits a limit. Henceforth, it is experienced as a constraint, an inhibition. Suddenly, it seems rigid and inflexible. At this point, emotionality takes its place, which is attended by the feeling of liberty - the free unfolding of personality. After all, being free means giving free rein to emotions.
Rationality is defined by objectivity, generality and steadiness. As such, it stands opposed to emotionality, which is subjective, situative and volatile.
Emotions arise, above all, when circumstances change - and perception shifts. Rationality entails duration, consistency and regularity. It prefers stable conditions.
The neoliberal economy, increasingly dismantling continuity and progressively integrating instability in order to in order to enhance productivity, is pushing the emotionalization of the productive process forward. Accelerated communication also promotes its emotionalization.
Rationality is slower than emotionality; it has no speed, as it were. Thus, the pressure of acceleration now is leading to a dictatorship of emotion.
[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.46
Since we are in the midst of this process of change, a clear description of what is happening is not easy, but the heart of the matter is that our technologies have become more powerful than our theories.
We are capable of doing things that we do not understand. We can perform gene-splicing without fully understanding how genes interact.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.1
The social fabric is not 'designed' by means of some transcendental principle, but develops as a result of the way in which it responds to contingent information in a dynamic fashion.
The process is a complex one involving many individuals with complex, non-linear relationships between them, including feedback relations. Individuals co-operate to form clusters, but also compete for resources in the network. The system is therefore not, and can never be, symmetrical.
The history of the system is vitally important for the way in which meaning is generated in any part of it. The evolution of structures in the social fabric, causing continuous alterations, is an integral part of its dynamics.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.117
Traditional interpretations of the temporal nature of a system […] privilege the present.
The immense gain of the notion of différence is that it reminds us that not only the past has to be considered when we try to establish the meaning of (say) an event, but that since we cannot fully predict the effects of this event, the future has to be considered as well, despite the fact that we have no idea what this future might be.
Now, instead of throwing up his hands, and declaring that in such a case it is impossible to talk about meaning, and that therefore anything goes, Derrida insists that we should take responsibility for this unknowable future. In the case of ethical decisions, this leads to an aporia: we have to take responsibility for the future effects of our decisions, but we cannot know those effects, nor can we wait to see what they are. We have to make the decision now. How do we deal with this aporia?
To fall back on universal principles is to deny the complexity of the social system we live in, and can therefore never be just. To allow everything is to evade our responsibility. The first approach to the system is too rigid, the second too fluid.
Cornell’s suggestion (following Derrida, and reformulated in my terminology) is to take present ethical (and legal) principles seriously—to resist change—but to be keenly aware of when they should not be applied, or have to be discarded. We therefore do follow principles as if they were universal rules (Cornell and Derrida use the term ‘quasi-transcendental’), but we have to remotivate the legitimacy of the rule each time we use it.
To behave ethically means not to follow rules blindly—to merely calculate—but to follow them responsibly, which may imply that the rules must be broken.
[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.139
Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.
What is the origin of the intensity that characterizes repetition and protects it against becoming routine? For Kierkegaard, repetition and recollection represent the same movement but in opposite directions, 'because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards'.
Repetition, as a form of recognition, is therefore a form of completion. Past and present are brought together into a living present. As a form of completion, repetition founds duration and intensity. It ensures that time lingers.
Kierkegaard takes repetition to be opposed to hope as well as to recollection:
Hope is new attire, stiff and starched and splendid. Still, since it has not yet been tried on, one does not know whether it will suit one, or whether it will fit. Recollection is discarded clothing which, however lovely it might be, no longer suits one because one has outgrown it. Repetition is clothing that never becomes worn, that fits snugly and comfortably, that neither pulls nor hangs too loosely.
It is, Kierkegaard writes, 'only the new of which one tires. One never tires of the old.' The old is 'the daily bread that satisfies through blessing'. It brings happiness: 'and only a person who does not delude himself that repetition ought to be something new, for then he tires of it, is genuinely happy'.
Chasing new stimuli, excitement and experience, we lose the capacity for repetition.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.9
The Bolshevik project which the Soviet system embodied throughout its history was that of imposing a western modernity on Russia, but without capitalism.
Like the Utopia envisaged by Lenin, the global free market aims to bring into being a state of affairs that has never hitherto existed in human society - and which goes far beyond the mid-Victorian English free market and the liberal international economic order that existed until 1914.
Global laissez-faire and the communist project that animated the former Soviet Union have many of the same enemies. They are hostile to national and cultural differences in economic life and to the inheritances of tradition and history. They resent the backwardness of peasants and village life. They are intolerant of the unruly individualism of the bourgeoisie and the refractoriness of working people.
The chief victims of the global free market, as of War Communism and the Soviet system, are peasants and - to a lesser but still notable extent - urban industrial workers and the professional middle classes.
[...] Peasant traditional beliefs had been under siege since the communist victory in 1949, but it was in the Great Leap forward, and then the Cultural Revolution, that they were finally almost destroyed: ‘Everything connected with traditional beliefs was smashed up in the Great Leap Forward.’
The attack on traditional China was resumed in the Great Proleterian Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The ‘four olds’ - old customs, old habits, old culture and old thinking, as embodied in books, money, documents and antique art treasures - were assaulted in one of history’s greatest convulsions.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.140-1, 180
The global economy deskills people and organisations. It does so by making the environments in which they live and work unrecognisable to them. It thereby renders their stock of local and tacit knowledge less and less serviceable to them.
A major problem that has not been solved by business organisations - except partially Japanese companies - is that of combining the institutional continuity needed, if the local knowledge of employees is to be harnessed, with the capacity for organisational innovation required to make the most of new technologies.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.76
In his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) Burke supplemented the authority of precedent by that of wisdom and experience, and reverence for the Constitution by reverence for tradition - that "partnership … between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born".
Radical reformers "are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature”. “By their violent haste and their defiance of the process of nature, they are delivered over blindly to every projector and adventurer, to every alchymist and empiric."
[…]
"I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controuled, and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead."
Burke wished to "consign over the rights of posterity for ever, on the authority of a mouldy parchment", while Paine asserted that each successive generation was competent to define its rights and form of government anew.
[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.97, 99
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