Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Who could fail to take pleasure in the revelation that this right-wing SOB--who wanted to steal medical care from the needy--has been indulging himself...

...on public money?  Of course, that's what the entire ruling class does, but not so obviously!

Thus spake Heinrich Heine

As memorably quoted by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents:

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies -- but not before they have been hanged.

Plutocracy watch: Koch Brothers demand results from legislators before bribes will be paid

Details here.

Tyler Cowen, representative of the "complacent intellectual class"

Philosopher-turned-journalist David V. Johnson skewers the economist's latest book, and makes several nice points along the way, e.g.:

Cowen shrouds his core thesis, which is a causal claim: America’s stasis and stagnation is caused by the complacent class. It is because people make the choices and behave the way they do that our society lacks dynamism. Is this causal claim true?

I believe that it is false. In fact, I would maintain the converse is true: It is because our society is suffering from stagnation—a stagnation upheld by vast inequalities of wealth and income that empower the preferences of the wealthy at the expense of everyone else’s power—that people behave in ways that Cowen labels “complacent” but which are more accurately described in different ways, depending on the class of people in question. People who are in the “stuck” class are people who lack money; they tend to “choose” not to move to more economically robust parts of the country, for example, because they don’t have the money or social capital to move. “Dug in” people don’t launch new businesses, for example, because the risk of failure in a society without an adequate safety net and an economy dominated by powerful monopolies is too great. “Privileged” people actively make choices that uphold the status quo. They may be overlooking the social upheaval that may result from stagnation, but they may be betting—like so many elites before them in history—that their money and power can keep such upheaval at bay.

Perhaps I am wrong about the causality here. But I haven’t written a book on it. The important point for Cowen is that he needs to argue for his causal claim, rather than rhetorically confuse his basic terms in ways that make his bold thesis seem intuitive when it actually goes unargued—and laughably so. On a superficial read, Cowen’s book may seem like a substantive bit of economic, social and cultural criticism, but it really amounts to the worst form of sophistry....

Cowen delights in making bold claims without argument or evidence that are transparently ridiculous. And shockingly for an economist, they often involve what I have elsewhere labelled “sentimentalism”: the tendency to attribute structural economic and social problems to moral and psychological causes—in this case, complacency.

Capitalism is the problem

A younger generation is noticing.  The quote from Nancy Pelosi, spokesperson for the more-or-less prudent wing of the ruling class, is priceless.

"Chicago Carnage" from the Rebel Pundit

This is bracing, and makes a couple of good points:

UPDATE:  Philosopher John Casey (Northeastern Illinois) points out to me that "Rebel Pundit" is a front organization for a Breitbart wacko named Jeremy Segal, whose purpose is obviously to suppress African-American voting.  Unlike most of the Breitbart crew, this guy isn't that stupid, since he manages to work in some sound points.  But this explanation now makes clear to me why there were only "a couple of good" points and that some of it seemed quite weird.

 

On Cedric Robinson

This is interesting, from the always interesting Boston Review.  It does involve some misunderstandings of Marx, however.

Haley Kossek has a message for Chelsean Clinton...

...and it's priceless.  Please dear God, even if you don't exist, banish these Clintons from our lives.

Jeffrey Sachs on Ronald Reagan

This, of course, is quite right, though it does suggest he reads this blog!

Thus spake Rousseau

"Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate and fraud lie constantly concealed under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness."

                    --Rousseau, First Discourse

Reaction formation watch: anti-LGBT state senator in Oklahoma arrested for solilciting sex with underage gay prostitute

Ralph Shortey, Dr. Freud is waiting for you.

The first critic of "identity politcs": Karl Marx in "On the Jewish Question"

A propos the long excerpt from political theorist Adolph Reed I posted two weeks ago, a PhD student in German philosophy elsewhere wrote with this very apt analysis of Marx's own contribution to the debate in this famous, early essay:

Marx's surprising claim in OtJQ is that, while calls for equal treatment of disenfranchised ethnic and religious minorities may seem to subvert the prevailing social and economic order, they are actually often welcomed by it for reasons having to do with the logic of capitalism.  Calls for the emancipation of German Jews in the 1840s merely seem revolutionary, and, to a certain extent, are revolutionary - especially because of the prevailing Christian anti-semitism of the times, an anti-semitism only abetted by the Christian state. Anti-semitism is a real phenomenon, and its abolition urgently needed. What could be more obvious than that? However, these calls for emancipation are, in another respect, regressive. The extension of formal legal equality to disenfranchised groups is perfectly in keeping with the logic of capitalism, which seeks to erode all ethnic, national religious and ideological barriers among people so as to integrate them more effectively into a world market - one in which the only division left is the class division between laborer and capitalist (a division the market itself masks). Concretely, the ability to own property and participate in markets should be as widespread as possible for this to function, and that ability is unthinkable without legally protected rights of various kinds. So the call for emancipation, though partially emancipatory, is, in this instance, something of a capitalist ruse.  "Political emancipation", the granting of formal legal equality, and other less tangible forms of equal status to disenfranchised religious and ethnic minorities, would never be sufficient for true, human emancipation - a fact evidenced for Marx by the fact that the most formally egalitarian nation on earth (the USA) remained among the most religious, and therefore, most alienated (here, Marx is relying on Feuerbach's insight that the persistence of religion is evidence of frustrated human aspirations). True human emancipation would come about not through the inclusion of disenfranchised minorities into the prevailing social and economic order but, rather, through its revolutionary overthrow and the replacement of a mode of production driven by the interest of a particular class by one governed by the general will. 

The lesson for today: identity politics, though potentially emancipatory, risks unwitting complicity with the dominant capitalist order, since there is a natural, economically driven tendency in this system towards the inclusion of ever more excluded groups, not for the sake of liberation, but, rather, as a means of integrating them into the prevailing economic system.

"Strangers to Ourselves": Themes from German Philosophy and Cognitive Science

I'll be occupied with this conference my Center is hosting here this weekend, so there won't be much new until Monday.  (For those interested, the program:  Download Strangers to Oursevles German Phil Cog Sci--I predict this will be the new growth field!)

Reed on the identity politics "left," which is really part of the neoliberal right

Philippe Lemoine called to my attention another interesting piece by Adolf Reed, Jr..  I know some readers are sometimes puzzled by my position on the far left in rather obvious ways with my rather limited tolerance for "identity politics," "diversity" blather, and the like.  Reed's piece might help explain why; here's an excerpt:

[A]ntiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice, articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious distinctions....

A thread for further comments on the misconduct by the Hypatia editors and the defamation of Prof. Tuvel

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MAY 4--FURTHER DISCUSSION INVITED

I continue to get e-mail from readers related to this earlier thread; I think it will be more efficient to open a discussion thread here for further contributions.  Do look at the earlier contributions by Debra Satz, Jose Bermudez, Matt Kotzen et al. to get an idea what is sought.  I will moderate and edit for substance and discursive relevance.  Thanks.  (Signed comments only, valid e-mail address, which will not appear.)

ADDENDUM:  Trying to moderate two threads, I've lost track about which permitted pseudonyms, which didn't.  I do still require a valid e-mail address, that won't be published, and please try to keep it substantive.

Does Trump suffer from narcissistic personality disorder?

A psychiatrist responsible for the DSM definition says he does not, but the reasons given are not very good ones.  (See an earlier discussion of this topic here.)  He claims that Trump does not suffer distress and impairment connected to his personality traits (note that the psychiatrist does not deny he manifests those traits).   He appears to confuse the fact that money and lawyers shield him from the worst consequences of his psychological peculiarities with the fact that he does not appear to be severely impaired in his profession.  But the impairment is apparent in other ways:  he doesn't appear to have real human relationships (he's on his third purchased wife), his relations with others are wholly instrumental, and despite inheriting a huge fortune and investing in New York real estate in the 1970s, he was never able to become a real player in the New York real estate market because others avoided him because of his problems.  (This bears emphasizing:  he was never one of the top ten developers in New York, and those folks would not deal with him.  Anyone familiar with the NYC real estate market knows this!)  We have less evidence about the distress he suffers, but it is hard not to interpret the bizarre tweeting and other outbursts as signs of serious distress, which he then tries to mend via public displays of various kinds.

Psychiatry is an epistemically feeble discipline, and the connotations of "mental illness" complicate things further.  Let's drop the question of whether his narcissistic personality disorder is a mental illness.  What's useful about the personality disorders, when they are useful at all, is that they do identify stable patterns of behavior that some people do exemplify.  Trump is one.  Having a narcissistic personality disorder may or may not be incompatible with being President--so far, the evidence is that he's quite impaired in his ability to govern, but that's all to the good given the mischief he would otherwise pursue were he more competent.

How Bannon thinks

We know how Trump thinks, and a distinguishing feature of it is that it includes precious few ideas, and no ideology:  it is driven mainly by personal relationships and loyalties, plus the quirks of his psychological disturbance.   Bannon, by contrast, has ideas and an ideology, and this is the best synthesis of what they are.  (See also this and this, and recall an earlier post about his speech to the Vatican traditionalists.) It is a strange brew, about what you would expect from a working-class Irish-Catholic kid without any real intellectual discipline or sophistication.  He notices real events--e.g., Wall Street bankers being bailed out after the 2008 fiasco while working-class Americans see their retirement savings or their property values collapse--but has no serious diagnosis about cause and effect, instead interjecting as an interpretive rubric various petty bigotries and prejudices that he probably learned in his youth with crackpot theories about the "real" trends of history.  He correctly sees that there are elites, but fails to see that he shares with them the most crucial commitment, namely, to capitalist relations of production.  He understands too little about capitalism to realize that his silly nationalist bromides are actually incompatible with the capitalism he cherishes, that the "Davos class" of elites he bemoans are the necessary consequence of the economic system he still supports.   This is apparent to other members of the ruling class, e.g., this billionaire investor:

“President [sic] Trump may be able to temporarily hold off the sweep of automation and globalization by cajoling companies to keep jobs at home, but bolstering inefficient and uncompetitive enterprises is likely to only temporarily stave off market forces,” he continued. “While they might be popular, the reason the U.S. long ago abandoned protectionist trade policies is because they not only don’t work, they actually leave society worse off.”

Bannon once professed that, like Lenin, he wanted to destroy the system.  He should read some more Lenin, and then he might even develop a coherent world view and understand the actual role of Republican policies in it.

Cassirer on fascism and "mythological thinking"

This is quite interesting.

(Thanks to Daniel Buk for the pointer.)

Philosophical parochialism on display while protesting philosophical parochialism

Philosopher Meena Krishnamurthy (Michigan) challenges the standard Anglophone narrative that nothing of note happened in political philosophy between Mill and Rawls--at least initially, the challenge is to the idea that nothing happened in "analytic political philosophy" of note between these two giants of the genre.  But later Professor Krishnamurthy drops the "analytic," leaving me a bit uncertain about the claim she is making.

The clearly correct claim she makes is that there was a lot of theorizing about questions of political and moral importance by Dubois, Ghandi, King, and others during this period; it is less clear, however, that the contributions of these writers were a contribution to "analytic political philosophy," at least as one might have thought that stylistic genre is defined with Mill and Rawls as reference points (she returns to this issue near the end of her essay).  But once we drop "analytic," then it seems even more parochial to notice Dubois and Ghandi, say, but not to notice Lenin and Luckas and Adorno and Marcuse.  Now the latter, of course, are all figures of note in the broadly Marxists tradition of political thought, ones that are heavily disfavored in both Anglophone philosophy and in Anglophone philosophy's recent cyber-romance with identity politics.  (The only identities that count are those related to gender, race, and ethnicity.)  Indeed, while many top 25 departments have made a significant faculty investment in philosophy of race in recent years, not a single one of these departments has appointed anyone working in the Marxian traditions during this same time period--and not because they already had large numbers of experts with primary appointments in philosophy on staff (the only ones I can think of are Peter Railton at Michigan, Tommie Shelby at Harvard, Elliott Sober at Wisconsin, Daniel Brudney at Chicago, Richard Miller at Cornell, and Allen Wood at Indiana--and most of these philosophers have  not written on Marx in ages, let alone on the Frankfurt School or other figures in the 20th-century Marxian traditions).  

ADDENDUM:  Professor Krishnamurthy writes (and kindly gave me permission to share):

First, I would like to thank you for engaging with my post. Second, as a point of clarification, I was focusing on “analytic political philosophy” throughout the post. Third, I would agree that Marxism has been ignored by analytic political philosophy to some extent, though I would argue this it is less so than the thinkers I mentioned. And, of course, I would think that the mechanisms underlying this exclusion are different. I’d be curious to hear from those who are more familiar with Marx about what these mechanisms might be. Why would Marxists be excluded? 

Parochialism  plays a role in both cases, I suspect; the lack of interest in Marxism strikes me as more startling, though, in part because many of the theorists noted above were clearly working in philosophical idioms, if not the usual analytic ones.  But I agree that different considerations probably explain the relative neglect in the different cases.  As the recent investment in philosophy of race by leading PhD programs, noted above, shows, it is a lot easier to be working on DuBois than Adorno these days in Anglophone philosophy!  (I am in favor of both; the obvious relevance of the Marxian tradition to recent real-world developments would be a good occasion for departments to invest as much in those areas too!)

ANOTHER:  A young philosopher (currently on the job market) writes with an interesting observation:

The people [Prof. Krishnamurthy] mentions are, I think, "philosophical", and so reasonably subject to discussion in a philosophy class without too much trouble, but not philosophers, so it's not surprise they are not discussed - it takes a lot of work to transform them into forms easily dealt with by philosophical analysis as main subjects or texts, and then you have to ask why to do so.  I mean, it's not that much different from the fact that very few political philosophy classes read Tocqueville, or Ben Franklin, or Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Paine, or Hobhouse, etc. (to take just a list of people who are included in the Cambridge History of Political Thought books.)  So, I'm not sure that the sort of "parochialism" she has in mind is the clear explanation.  (I should mention that I have read, enjoyed, and learned from not only Paine and Hobhouse, but also du Bois, etc.  If we are going to complain about philosophers not reading or teaching du Bois, why not his teacher, Weber, who is also rarely taught in a political philosophy class?)

Trump is infantile--literally, not figuratively

Robert Paul Wolff explains.

Obama: friend of the capitalist ruling class

Shocking!  But the proof is in the policies.

(Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer.)

The future of (wage-slavery) work

It is grim.  Of course, it could also prove liberating if productive power were put in the service of human well-being rather than profit.

Cornel West on Obama's legacy

There's something to this.

Enough blather about the superstructure...

...let's take a look at what's going on with the relations of production in America (everything below comes from the linked article, no commentary of my own):

The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements – defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers – rose from 10.1 percent [of all employed workers] in February 2005 to 15.8 percent in late 2015.

That is a huge jump, especially since the percentage of workers with alternative work arrangements barely budged over the period February 1995 to February 2005; it was only 9.3 in 1995.

But their most startling finding is the following:

A striking implication of these estimates is that all of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements. Total employment according to the CPS increased by 9.1 million (6.5 percent) over the decade, from 140.4 million in February 2005 to 149.4 in November 2015. The increase in the share of workers in alternative work arrangements from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015 implies that the number of workers employed in alternative arrangement increased by 9.4 million (66.5 percent), from 14.2 million in February 2005 to 23.6 million in November 2015. Thus, these figures imply that employment in traditional jobs (standard employment arrangements) slightly declined by 0.4 million (0.3 percent) from 126.2 million in February 2005 to 125.8 million in November 2015.

Take a moment to let that sink in—and think about what that tells us about the operation of the US economy and the future for working people.  Employment in so-called traditional jobs is actually shrinking. The only types of jobs that have been growing in net terms are ones in which workers have little or no security and minimal social benefits....

There is a clear age gradient that has grown stronger, with older workers more likely to have nonstandard employment than younger workers.  In 2015, 6.4 percent of those aged 16 to 24 were employed in an alternative work arrangement, while 14.3 percent of those aged 25-54 and 23.9 percent of those aged 55-74 had nonstandard work arrangements.

The percentage of women with nonstandard work arrangements grew dramatically from 2005 to 2015, from 8.3 percent to 17 percent.  Women are now more likely to be employed under these conditions than men.

Workers in all educational levels experienced a jump in nonstandard work, with the increase greatest for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.  “Occupational groups experiencing particularly large increases in the nonstandard work from 2005 to 2015 include computer and mathematical, community and social services, education, health care, legal, protective services, personal care, and transportation jobs.”

The authors also tested to determine “whether alternative work is growing in higher or lower wage sectors of the labor market.”  They found that “workers with attributes and jobs that are associated with higher wages are more likely to have their services contracted out than are those with attributes and jobs that are associated with lower wages. Indeed, the lowest predicted quintile-wage group did not experience a rise in contract work.”

The take-away

The take-away is pretty clear.  Corporate profits and income inequality have grown in large part because US firms have successfully taken advantage of the weak state of unions and labor organizing more generally, to transform work relations.  Increasingly workers, regardless of their educational level, find themselves forced to take jobs with few if any benefits and no long-term or ongoing relationship with their employer.  Only a rejuvenated labor movement, one able to build strong democratic unions and press for radically new economic policies will be able to reverse existing trends. 

It may be the end of "progressive neoliberalism"...

...as philosopher Nancy Fraser (New School) writes, but that's no guarantee of a better alternative, to put it mildly.

Here's what we can look forward to

An apt diagnosis, I fear.  An excerpt:

There is no sign that 2017 will be much different from 2016.

Under Israeli occupation for decades, Gaza will still be the biggest open prison on Earth..

In the United States, the killing of black people at the hands of the police will proceed unabated and hundreds of thousands more will join those already housed in the prison-industrial complex that came on the heels of plantation slavery and Jim Crow laws.

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inRead invented by Teads

Europe will continue its slow descent into liberal authoritarianism or what cultural theorist Stuart Hall called authoritarian populism. Despite complex agreements reached at international forums, the ecological destruction of the Earth will continue and the war on terror will increasingly morph into a war of extermination between various forms of nihilism.

Inequalities will keep growing worldwide. But far from fuelling a renewed cycle of class struggles, social conflicts will increasingly take the form of racism, ultra nationalism, sexism, ethnic and religious rivalries, xenophobia, homophobia and other deadly passions.

The denigration of virtues such as care, compassion and kindness will go hand in hand with the belief, especially among the poor, that winning is all that matters and who wins — by whatever means necessary — is ultimately right.

With the triumph of this neo-Darwinian approach to history-making, apartheid under various guises will be restored as the new old norm. Its restoration will pave the way to new separatist impulses, the erection of more walls, the militarisation of more borders, deadly forms of policing, more asymmetrical wars, splitting alliances and countless internal divisions including in established democracies.

None of the above is accidental. If anything, it is a symptom of structural shifts, which will become ever more apparent as the new century unfolds. The world as we knew it since the end of World War II, the long years of decolonisation, the Cold War and the defeat of communism has ended.

Another long and deadlier game has started. The main clash of the first half of the 21st century will not oppose religions or civilisations. It will oppose liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism, the rule of finance and the rule of the people, humanism and nihilism.

If there's anything wrong with this diagnosis is that it understates the role of capitalist logic in everything that came before too.  And from the conclusion:

Neoliberal capitalism has left in its wake a multitude of destroyed subjects, many of whom are deeply convinced that their immediate future will be one of continuous exposure to violence and existential threat.

They genuinely long for a return to some sense of certainty, the sacred, hierarchy, religion and tradition. They believe that nations have become akin to swamps that need to be drained and the world as it is should be brought to an end. For this to happen, everything should be cleansed off. They are convinced that they can only be saved in a violent struggle to restore their masculinity, the loss of which they attribute to the weaker among them, the weak they do not want to become.

In this context, the most successful political entrepreneurs will be those who convincingly speak to the losers, to the destroyed men and women of globalisation and to their ruined identities.

In the street fight politics will become, reason will not matter. Nor will facts. Politics will revert into brutal survivalism in an ultracompetitive environment.

That sounds familiar.

One piece of good news at the end of an otherwise very bad year

Religion is on the decline in America:

Fewer American adults, especially those under 30, attend church — or even belong to a church.  They tell interviewers their religion is “none.” They ignore faith.

Since 1990, the “nones” have exploded rapidly as a sociological phenomenon — from 10 percent of U.S. adults, to 15 percent, to 20 percent. Now they’ve climbed to 25 percent, according to a 2016 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.

That makes them the nation’s largest faith category, outstripping Catholics (21 percent) and white evangelicals (16 percent).  They seem on a trajectory to become an outright majority.   America is following the secular path of Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and other modern places.  The Secular Age is snowballing.

Good work capitalism!  Of course, the "nones" make up an even bigger part of certain elite institutions, such as universities.  I would guess the percentage of "nones" on the law faculty here, for example, is on the order of 75%.

Trump Psychological Disturbance watch: Adler weighs in...

...with the help of a mediary.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

Why there will not be a socialist *revolution*

Robert Paul Wolff explains.

Capitalism in action

Chances of earning more than your parents in America used to be over 90% and declined to 50% by 1980 (I bet money it is even lower today).

(Thanks to Bill Edmundson for the pointer.)

The Frankfurt School, the "culture industry," and Trump...

...in The New Yorker.

Breaking news: turns out Trump will represent the short-term interests of his economic class after all

Shocking!

The real meaning of Trump's deal with Carrier in Indiana

Senator Sanders cuts to the chase.

Ruling class regroups after Trump victory

Another former Goldman Sachs banker will be Secretary of the Treasury.  Markets will rally tomorrow.  God Bless America!

(My real hope, I confess, is that he picks the retired Marine General James Mattis for Defense Secretary--this matters, because a career military officer like Mattis understands what nuclear weapons are, unlike Dopey Donald Chump.)

NY Times on Fidel Castro

NYT obituaries are often more informative about the ideology of imperialism and the American ruling class than they are about their subjects, and the obituary of Castro does not disappoint in that regard; the very first paragraph (the revealing parts in bold):

Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died Friday.

Last I looked, Cuba was a sovereign nation not under U.S. control, so what can it possibly mean for the leader of that nation to "defy" the U.S., unless of course one assumes that a sovereign nation close to the U.S. must do the bidding of the U.S. as it had done under the fascist Batista.  Even more remarkably, it is Castro whose agency is credited with bringing "the world to the brink of nuclear war," not the "best and the brightest" of the imperial power whose self-serving provocations actually created the crisis.

If Castro had been a student of Marx, he would, shortly after overthrowing the fascist Batista, have created a social democracy, with robust private markets to fuel the development of productive forces in his underdeveloped nation and combined that with a generous welfare state to promote and protect human well-being.  He tried to do the latter, but could only sustain it with support from the Soviet Union (since the U.S. economic blockade deprived Cuba of it primary trading partner), which ended when the latter did.   As Marx had observed, communism "presuppose[s] a great increase in productive power, a high degree of development," which only capitalism can produce; this is, he said, "an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced," as, indeed, it was tragically in "communist" Cuba.

UPDATE:  Roger Albin (Michigan) writes:

The NYT obit doesn’t mention what was likely Castro’s greatest achievement- the important role played by the Cubans in the demise of apartheid.  Cuban military action, which included battles with the South African Defense Force, prevented the apartheid regime from maintaining a cordon sanitaire around South Africa.  This was a major factor in the De Klerk regime’s decision to seek some kind of accommodation.  Since our lazy media are committed to the facile view of the end of apartheid as an example of non-violent change, this will not be mentioned in any descriptions of Castro’s life.  Mandela knew better.  Shortly after his release from prison, he visited Havana to express gratitude to Castro.

A short and sweet materialist analysis of Brexit, Trump, the National Front, Corbyn...

...from economist Mark Blyth (Brown).   Real class warfare, here we come.

(Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

The workers at the Carrier plant in Indiana that Trump made famous react to his victory

This is a good piece of reporting, that makes clear that it was economics, and not racism, that drove a lot of the voting behavior of working-class whites (some of them, among other things, voted for Obama previously).   It makes a useful contrast with this dismissive comment by Justin Weinberg (South Carolina).

Understanding working-class voters

This is simply the best thing I've read about the collapse of working-class support for the Democrats and their flip to Trump.

(Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer.)

How Trump thinks

I am confident that in many countries right now, high government officials are compiling psychological profiles of the President-elect of the most dangerous nation on earth.  It will be to their advantage to understand him and how to manipulate him, since he is probably more obviously manipulable than any President in memory.

I've been commenting on his psychology and its disturbance for some time, but I think it can be summed up in terms of two personality traits that we've seen again and again during the campaign, and that mark the man going back to the 1980s, when he was merely the "short-fingered vulgarian" laughing-stock of New York City.

First, he is a textbook case of what DSM calls Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  Earlier on, I had described him as a sociopath, but after talking with some clinicians and reading more, it seems to me this is a mistake.  Like a sociopath, he is lacking in empathy, but that is true of extreme narcissists too: they are too busy with themselves to notice or care about how others feel.   The crucial fact is that sociopaths tend to "fly below the radar," they do not want to attract attention, so that they can proceed with their malign behaviors without detection.  Trump always wants to be the center of attention and adulation.  Extreme narcissists require adulation because they have no actual confidence in their worth or value:  they are entirely dependent on others confirming their grandiose self-image.  But the flipside is that when they do not get the external confirmation they seek, they react with irrational rage, that knows very few limits.  This is what makes Trump very dangerous:   irrational rage on twitter is one thing, irrational rage with U.S. military might at your disposal is another. 

What the leaked e-mails to and from John Podesta really show about the Democratic Party

This seems right:

The dramatis personae of the liberal class are all present in this amazing body of work: financial innovators. High-achieving colleagues attempting to get jobs for their high-achieving children. Foundation executives doing fine and noble things. Prizes, of course, and high academic achievement.

Certain industries loom large and virtuous here. Hillary’s ingratiating speeches to Wall Street are well known of course, but what is remarkable is that, in the party of Jackson and Bryan and Roosevelt, smiling financiers now seem to stand on every corner, constantly proffering advice about this and that. In one now-famous email chain, for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to name President Obama’s cabinet even before the great hope-and-change election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding why that greatest of zombie banks was never put out of its misery).

The far-sighted innovators of Silicon Valley are also here in force, interacting all the time with the leaders of the party of the people. We watch as Podesta appears to email Sheryl Sandberg. He makes plans to visit Mark Zuckerberg (who, according to one missive, wants to “learn more about next steps for his philanthropy and social action”). Podesta exchanges emails with an entrepreneur about an ugly race now unfolding for Silicon Valley’s seat in Congress; this man, in turn, appears to forward to Podesta the remarks of yet another Silicon Valley grandee, who complains that one of the Democratic combatants in that fight was criticizing billionaires who give to Democrats. Specifically, the miscreant Dem in question was said to be:

“… spinning (and attacking) donors who have supported Democrats. John Arnold and Marc Leder have both given to Cory Booker, Joe Kennedy, and others. He is also attacking every billionaire that donates to [Congressional candidate] Ro [Khanna], many whom support other Democrats as well.”

Attacking billionaires! In the year 2015! It was, one of the correspondents appears to write, “madness and political malpractice of the party to allow this to continue”.

"The Epistemology of the Hermeneutics of Suspicion"

My keynote address from the Bonn Summer School on "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion" from last June is now on-line courtesy of Bonn's Internationales Zentrum für Philosophie NRW.

Rapko on Geuss

Against "normativism."

Philosopher Sally Haslanger (MIT) on her sense of "ideology"

This interview gives a useful précis of Prof. Haslanger's distinctive sense of "ideology" that figures in her work about the social construction of race and gender (it also includes some interesting autobiographical details).  (I should say I found the interviewer a bit annoying at times:  he interjected too much I thought.)  From a Marxian point of view, it's an unusual conception (as I've noted before), in three respects in particular:   first, it doesn't necessarily involve beliefs which can be false, but seems to be centrally concerned with what Haslanger calls "practical consciousness" and "know-how"; second, its genesis does not matter (though it shares, loosely, with the Marxian sense the idea that an ideology has the functional property of supporting certain kinds of [oppressive] social relations); and third, there is no special explanatory role for economic relations in understanding ideology.   The first attribute is particularly connected, I take it, to Haslanger's emphasis on concrete, practical interventions to change our "ways of interacting" and to do so "together"  in particular communities (she even mentions academic disciplines as one locus for this activism).   I was surprised to learn from another interview that Prof. Haslanger was brought up as a Christian Scientist, though left that sect in high school.  That sect's emphasis on healing echoes, however, in some of her remarks later on the interview.

Even if Clinton wins the election, we won't be done with Trump

This is worth emphasizing:  the Trump nightmare won't end with the election.  Even if (as I still expect) Clinton wins, we know (he's told us) that Trump won't be a graceful loser, since he's psychologically incapable of that.  The threat to the constitutional and democratic order will continue, as Trump hurls reckless accusatiosn of voter fraud and a stolen election, accusations that will be repeated by the increasingly openly fascist mass media--Fox on TV, Breitbart on-line--that threaten civilization.   Like any broken clock, or psychopath, Trump is occasionally right, and one thing he may be right about is that our speech laws permit too much falsehoods (he is wrong about what is false, obviously, which is also telling).  Until we can shut down Fox and Breitbart and Drudge, we are all in danger, not only in America, but in the world, since this benighted country continues to be the greatest threat to human well-being on the planet.  I have no faith, alas, that this country is capable of closing down only the sociopathic morons, so the libertarian legal regime that sanctions 24-hour lies and stupidity may mark the future for this dying empire.  

Still more on the irony of the evolution of standpoint epistemology

Following up on last week's post:  of course, the first standpoint epistemologist in the contemporary, "inverted" and unMarxian sense was Lukacs who, in the 1920s, proposed that, in fact, the proletariat, in virtue of their class position, had special epistemic access to the pathologies of capitalism.   The pedigree of that idea--an unabashed Left Young Hegelian who later became an unabashed Stalinist--would perhaps give one pause, but since most analytic philosophers, in their blissful historical ignorance, don't know anything about the pedigree, the unhappy history of 20th-century standpoint epistemology does not arise as a concern.

(Last week, I was in Vienna for a conference on relativism in German-speaking philosophy in what Martin Kusch (Vienna) calls, aptly enough, "the long 19th-century," roughly from Herder through the 1930s.  Among the things I learned, thanks to an excellent paper by Johannes Steizinger (also at Vienna), is that the Nazis, and their philosophers (there were a lot of them!), were also (in a way) standpoint epistemologists, though for them the relevant standpoint was defined by the racial group, with each racial group having its own epistemic criteria.  Since the Nazis also believed in an objective hierarchy of races, this required some philosophical gymnastics to square that with their epistemic relativism!)

It's time to take a stand against "ethical [sic] eating"!

Indeed:

We need to update the seven deadly sins. Take out gluttony — what’s wrong with the odd bit of gorging? — and replace it with ethical eating. Noble foodies, who refuse to pollute their bodies with what they view as ‘evil’ grub, are far greater irritants than compulsive cake-eaters.

Ethical eaters are everywhere. There’s the veggie army, those bunny-pitying meat-dodgers, which seems to grow every year. Vegans are on the march, too. In 2006, 150,000 Brits were engaged in the daily self–flagellation that is a plant-based diet; today, 542,000 are.

Trend analysts believe that social media — filtered photos on Instagram of a bowl of lentils looking deceptively delicious or Gwyneth Paltrow positively glowing after downing a test-tube of pureed spinach — plays a major role in coaxing naturally carnivorous humans to switch to leaves and nuts. I love how ethical eaters fancy themselves as brave resisters of the consumer culture that tells us all to scoff dead animals and yet they can be tempted into a lifetime of salad-only self-denial by the flutter of a celeb’s eyelashes.

Then there’s locavores, who only eat foodstuffs harvested in a 100-mile radius of where they live. Didn’t we used to call this protectionism? If ethical eaters think it’s good to prop up local industries by shunning the juicy, sun-dappled fare of dirt-poor African or Latin American farmers, then they and I have different takes on the word ‘ethical’....

There are now restaurants that promise ‘guilt-free dining’. Like The Grain Store in London, which offers diners an organic, carbon-neutral eating experience. So the grub doesn’t only nourish your body — it massages your ego; it flatters your moral pretensions. This is what I find so grating about ethical eating: it’s so self-regarding. It isn’t about changing the world. Hordes of caring teens opting for -beanburgers at Leon rather than Big Macs at McDonald’s are not going to overthrow The System, or even make much of a dent in the number of cows killed for meat. No, it’s about keeping oneself morally clean, unpolluted by the junk that other people eat.

It’s part of what the French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu called ‘distinction’, where one bigs up one’s moral status by contrasting it with the antics of the less switched-on. In this sense, vegans and freegans and locavores need McDonald’s to keep frying meat, and nasty corporations to continue flying fruit from Kenya to Tesco, because without all that wicked behavior they’d have nothing to distinguish themselves from.

On an irony about the evolution of "standpoint epistemology"

It was Marx and Marxists who were the inventers of "standpoint epistemology," the idea that one's "social" position--for Marxists, "class," for later writers, race, gender, and so on--exercises an important, sometimes decisive, influence on a person's beliefs.  For Marxists, the key thought was that the "standpoint" resulted in distortion of one's knowledge, because it was tainted by the interests associated with one's social position.  In the Marxist version of standpoint epistemology, the working classes did not have any special epistemic access to the actual facts about their situation--to the contrary, their understanding of the actual state of affairs was distorted by the ideology propagated by a different, dominant class, which systematically distorted social reality in its own interests.  Marxists, like Marx, assumed (correctly) that there is an epistemically superior description of social reality that is not tainted by standpoint, and which can serve as a check on the ideological delusions promoted by dominant groups.

By contrast, in recent bourgeois academic philosophy--that is, philosophizing by well-to-do professors who never challenge the prerogatives of the capitalist class, which is basically almost all of current philosophy in the Anglophone world--standpoint epistemology has, ironically, been turned on its head.   Now the social position of the purported "knower"--usually "race" or "gender" or "sexual orientation"--is not taken to be a distorting influence on cognition, but rather an epistemic advantage, one which even demands epistemic deference by others.  We have travelled rather far from Marx.

(I thank Clifford Sosis for a stimulating e-mail exchange on this topic, though the ideas are strictly my own!)

Why utilitarianism (and effective [sic] altruism?) are the ideology of capitalism

Well, perhaps:

What matters in the narcissistic world of late capitalism is not what you think or do but how you feel. And since how you feel can’t be argued against, it is conveniently insulated from all debate. Men and women can now stroll around in continuous self-monitoring mode, using apps to track their changes of mood. The brutal, domineering ego of an older style of capitalism has given way to the tender self-obsession of the new....

What Davies recognises is that capitalism has now in a sense incorporated its own critique. What the system used to regard with suspicion – feeling, friendship, creativity, moral responsibility – have all now been co-opted for the purpose of maximising profits. One commentator has even argued the case for giving products away free, so as to form a closer bond with the customer. Some employers have taken to representing pay increases they give to their staff as a gift, in the hope of extracting gratitude and thus greater effort from them. It seems that there is nothing that can’t be instrumentalised....

Happiness for the market researchers and corporate psychologists is a matter of feeling good. But it seems that millions of individuals don’t feel good at all, and are unlikely to be persuaded to buck up by technologies of mind control that induce them to work harder or consume more. You can’t really be happy if you are a victim of injustice or exploitation, which is what the technologists of joy tend to overlook. This is why, when Aristotle speaks of a science of well-being, he gives it the name of politics. The point is of little interest to the neuroscientists, advertising gurus or mindfulness mongers, which is why so much of their work is spectacularly beside the point.

 

(Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer.)

The latest capitalist defense of the "liberal arts"--and what all this really means

Reader Nick Gardner kindly calls to my attention this essay from The Atlantic.   I've noted a number of perfectly sensible pieces like this over the last couple of years, but let's step back a bit and ask what it all means:

1.  The cost of higher education in America is now quite extravagant, far more than most families in America can afford.   Tuition, room & board, miscellaneous expenses at a private liberal arts college can easily run $60,000 per year. 

2. The cost of higher education in America is not extravagant because of a vast conspiracy of malevolent actors:  it is extravagant because, for reasons the economist William Baumol diagnosed long ago, the cost of hiring highly educated individuals to work closely with young people in developing their knowledge of literature, science, and arts is expensive, and gets more expensive over time, because what they do can not be automated, yet these teachers still have to pay their bills. 

3.  One alternative, of course, is to turn the teaching over to people who will do it for less.  The unknown in the capitalist economics of higher education is what difference this makes.  We honestly do not know the answer to that question. Equally honestly, the experiment involved in finding out the answer--it is not natural, since it is dictated by the demands of capitalist efficiency--involves sacrificing people in a way that, I assume (perhaps naively), most ethics boards would not approve.

A new biography of Habermas

The intellectual historian Peter Gordon (Harvard) offers an informative review of the new biography of Habermas.  Among other things, I was struck by the irony that Habermas--always an admirable critic of post-Nazi complacency in Germany, as Gordon emphasizes--secured his habilitation and first academic post thanks to the influence of the disgusting Nazi and lifelong anti-semite Gadamer!  (I wonder if Habermas knew?  For a long time, Gadamer was quite good at keeping it under wraps.)  Gordon, in my view, significantly overstates Habermas's philosophical importance (in contrast to his invaluable role as a public intellectual holding post-War Germany to moral account).  When Marxism returns, as it no doubt will, in something more like Marx's form, Habermas will be remembered mainly as taking the philosophically feeble (and irrelevant) attack on instrumental reason that began with Horkheimer and expanding it to the point that so-called "Critical Theory" collapsed into precisely the kind of bourgeois moral theorizing Marx loathed.  (For anyone interested, I discuss this in a bit more detail here.)