Richard Wolin, a professor of history and comparative literature at City University of New York, has written an interesting book entitled The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism. Although its title is cumbersome (it seems authors these days must include explanatory subtitles, as it were, following colons, in every book title) the writing is not. It's a lengthy book, but unfortunately there's much to tell.
The title of the book is, shall we say, suggestive of its argument. If it had been written by an American or English philosopher, continental philosophers and their followers here would likely ignore it. But perhaps the author's status as a professor of comparative literature will lure them into reading at least summaries of the book, comparative literature buffs being far more capable philosophers than actual philosophers almost by definition as far as postmodernists are concerned.
It's not clear to me that the romance of intellectuals with autocracy began with Nietzsche. I think certain philosophers have always had a fondness for "enlightened" despotism. Even J.S. Mill in his more Romantic moments thought this would be beneficial, and under the influence of such as Coleridge dreamt up a kind of elite, a "clerisy", which would govern humanity wisely. This pernicious view has been with us since Plato, at least.
But fascism is a peculiar, modern form of autocracy, a hodgepodge of political, racial, quasi-religious, quasi-philosophical and nationalistic mumbo-jumbo, and as such grew out of what I think can fairly be called the "unreason" which resulted from the reaction to the Enlightenment which has been called (not very creatively) the Counter-Enlightenment. I personally prefer calling it the Un-Enlightenment. Some thought that because reason, in and of itself, didn't produce a paradise here on Earth, it's opposite should be unleashed upon the world.
It turns out reason's opposite could be all kinds of things when considered by European intellectuals. The emotions, the instincts, Jungian collective unconscious, the erotic, the spirit inherent in a particular race or purported race or nation. Whatever was unreasonable in human beings was glorified at least as much as reason, or what was thought reason, was glorified by other European intellectuals during the Enlightenment. This intellectual environment was ideal for the growth of fascism, a political/social/cultural philosophy dependent on the unreasonable, dismissive of moderation and tolerance, devoted to the irrational in humanity.
This led to what was extremely goofy in some cases, as Wolin points out. There is Georges Bataille, for example, a follower of Nietzsche who was fascinated with human sacrifice. He and others formed a little society which was devoted to the idea, if not the practice, of human sacrifice. It seems its members were willing to be sacrificed but not inclined to perform the sacrifice, sadly. Bataille was an influence on Foucault, who favored the Iranian revolution and the religious fascism of the Islamic clerics who took control after the Shah was overthrown, and others. I'm not sure what was going on in the case of Bataille and sacrifice, but suspect he thought this was the sort of thing unreasonable people would and should do, which is undeniable, and that there was something mystic and pagan involved in it.
Goofiness aside, though, the emphasis on unreason motivated the endorsement of Hitler's Nazism and Mussolini's fascism by a number of thinkers dissatisfied with liberal democratic politics and values. This is pretty well documented, and Wolin of course goes into some detail regarding famous Nazis and fellow travelers such as Heidegger and Paul de Man.
Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany were once considered models of efficiency and, it's hard to believe, physical and mental health. It was thought that these nations had a vigor and intensity lacking in liberal democracies, for what may be considered spiritual reasons. They were one, a people united, not chaotic in the manner of the democracies and especially the Weimer Republic. Most importantly it seems to their intellectual devotees, they had abandoned liberal values as well; freedom, individuality, the conflict of ideas and worst of all, materialism. Money and business have always been the subjects of contempt for the learned as well as the aristocratic. Of course, the learned were also inclined to associate them with Jews, themselves yet another subject of contempt.
It's quite possible to overestimate reason, and to impute too much importance to it. It's also quite possible to underestimate the significance of the irrational in our lives. Man cannot live by reason alone, and it may be said that the Enlightenment thinkers erred in their zealous emphasis and reliance on it to the exclusion of all else. I think sometimes that those of the Enlightenment were drunk on their sudden freedom from the dominance of the Church.
But I find it impossible to blame the Enlightenment for the ills of our society, as it seems members of the Un-Enlightenment are inclined to do. It isn't reason or science which motivated the Holocaust, for example. Essential to that horror were concepts of the Volk and German Romanticism and mysticism. They were also essential to German expansionism and sense of mastery and special purpose; to rule the world and thereby save it. Heidegger warned against technology but eagerly joined in the glorification of Hitler and in according him the status of a demigod.
We're at out best when we think, and as Dewey said we think when we're presented with problems. Thinking involves problem solving and is essential to it. We don't think when we rely on mysticism, our so-called inherent nature, our "being", our vigor, our unity, religion, our race in making decisions. It's when we abandon reason as a means to solve problems that we produce monsters and follow them. We become followers only, in fact, as we don't think but rather feel; followers only follow, some better than others. Reason provides the best chance of understanding and solving the problems we face in life.
Unreason doesn't require justification. There's no process by which those seduced by it test its results, no questions are asked as unreason isn't subject to question or for that matter definition. Questioning, defining, testing have no place when reason isn't employed, but is instead shunned. The result is certainty, but at a terrible price, as the certain are thoughtless, intolerant and cruel.
Monday, October 26, 2015
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Now, the World Really is too Much with Us
Wordsworth's poem The World is too Much with Us is I think an admirable one. I'm afraid that I can't normally think of Wordsworth without envisioning Bullwinkle reciting "I wandered lonely as a cloud"; but I think this Romantic English poet did a good job in the case of this one poem, at least.
The poem has been construed as being a condemnation by Wordsworth of a materialistic culture resulting from the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting disconnection of people, and civilization, from nature. I can't complain about love of nature; as a Stoic, or struggling Stoic, I seek to live "in accordance with nature." But I suspect most Romantics of having aristocratic, even elitist, leanings, and so tend to believe that their disgust with industry and "trade" was combined with a contempt of the "common folk." Those folk were no longer content to be the simple, jolly peasants the Romantics dreamt they were, dancing around the Maypole when not tending the grounds and flocks of their betters through hard and uncompensated labor. They were becoming men of business, and business was an abomination to those wandering lonely as clouds, swooning over daffodils.
What exactly Wordsworth meant by "with us" is unclear to me. However, I feel the world is much more "with us" than it was in his day, when the world intruded upon him and others via printed word, or through trains and the telegraph. By the world being "with us" I refer, even if Wordsworth did not, not merely to our access to information about people, places, things, events, acts, opinions, beliefs, but that such information is foisted on us by others regardless of our desires.
No doubt the ubiquity of newspapers and journals, travel and communication by train and telegraph, was remarkable to many living in the first half of the 19th century. It may well have felt to them that the world was growing too small as a consequence compared to how it felt when travel and communication was by horseback, or perhaps by semaphore. Perhaps they also felt that something more was lost to them than their relative isolation.
If so, they would be horrified by the accelerating reduction of the world we experience in our time. I'm not sure they could even imagine a world in which people can obtain whatever information they seek in a matter of seconds and communicate whatever thoughts, desires, opinions, feelings they have to everyone else in the world in roughly the same period of time and in the same manner.
The world is there, with us, at all times unless we make the effort to disengage from it. All of the world, good and bad, but most especially the bad because of the media, our politicians and the pundits who are professionally outraged and have the means to tell us so. They seem to delight in telling us what is bad, why it is bad, and what it is they think someone else should do about it.
There certainly is bad in the world, but is there more bad than there has been in the past? More people, more bad; this seems an unobjectionable inference, at least to a cynic. But if one accepts such a conclusion, is there proportionately more bad now? I don't think we can make that assumption (which is what I think it must be, absent evidence). Because we can learn, or are told, of bad people, bad things, all over the world, constantly, and because bad people can make themselves known to others with great ease, and this was not the case not all that long ago, there may have been just as many bad people and things in the past.
In the past, however, we did not know of them as we didn't have the means to know of them. We knew of some, but had neither the capacity nor the desire to know of others, nor were we as vulnerable--exposed--to them as we are now. They can appear before us at any time. We need only participate in a social network, or expose ourselves, as it were, via Twitter, or read or make comments on some media post or blog post, to be subjected to people at their worst.
We humans seem to be unable to improve ourselves to any significant extent except in extraordinary circumstances, or indeed to change ourselves at all for good or ill, so I doubt we are any better or worse now than we have been in our relatively long and bloody history. The difference is that when we are bad now, as we are all too frequently, it is nearly impossible for people throughout the world to be ignorant of our evil thoughts and deeds. We, or someone else, will intrude upon their blissful ignorance and tell them all about it.
Knowledge may be good. It may even be power, sometimes. But knowledge of everything done or thought by other people, everywhere, is oppressive, and can lead to despair, which can in turn lead to danger. Philosophical considerations aside, I think Stoicism as a way of life provides a means by which we can avoid being overwhelmed and unduly influenced by the world which is constantly with us. There are so many things beyond our control which should not disturb us. We must do the best we can with what we have and take the rest as it happens.
The poem has been construed as being a condemnation by Wordsworth of a materialistic culture resulting from the Industrial Revolution, and the resulting disconnection of people, and civilization, from nature. I can't complain about love of nature; as a Stoic, or struggling Stoic, I seek to live "in accordance with nature." But I suspect most Romantics of having aristocratic, even elitist, leanings, and so tend to believe that their disgust with industry and "trade" was combined with a contempt of the "common folk." Those folk were no longer content to be the simple, jolly peasants the Romantics dreamt they were, dancing around the Maypole when not tending the grounds and flocks of their betters through hard and uncompensated labor. They were becoming men of business, and business was an abomination to those wandering lonely as clouds, swooning over daffodils.
What exactly Wordsworth meant by "with us" is unclear to me. However, I feel the world is much more "with us" than it was in his day, when the world intruded upon him and others via printed word, or through trains and the telegraph. By the world being "with us" I refer, even if Wordsworth did not, not merely to our access to information about people, places, things, events, acts, opinions, beliefs, but that such information is foisted on us by others regardless of our desires.
No doubt the ubiquity of newspapers and journals, travel and communication by train and telegraph, was remarkable to many living in the first half of the 19th century. It may well have felt to them that the world was growing too small as a consequence compared to how it felt when travel and communication was by horseback, or perhaps by semaphore. Perhaps they also felt that something more was lost to them than their relative isolation.
If so, they would be horrified by the accelerating reduction of the world we experience in our time. I'm not sure they could even imagine a world in which people can obtain whatever information they seek in a matter of seconds and communicate whatever thoughts, desires, opinions, feelings they have to everyone else in the world in roughly the same period of time and in the same manner.
The world is there, with us, at all times unless we make the effort to disengage from it. All of the world, good and bad, but most especially the bad because of the media, our politicians and the pundits who are professionally outraged and have the means to tell us so. They seem to delight in telling us what is bad, why it is bad, and what it is they think someone else should do about it.
There certainly is bad in the world, but is there more bad than there has been in the past? More people, more bad; this seems an unobjectionable inference, at least to a cynic. But if one accepts such a conclusion, is there proportionately more bad now? I don't think we can make that assumption (which is what I think it must be, absent evidence). Because we can learn, or are told, of bad people, bad things, all over the world, constantly, and because bad people can make themselves known to others with great ease, and this was not the case not all that long ago, there may have been just as many bad people and things in the past.
In the past, however, we did not know of them as we didn't have the means to know of them. We knew of some, but had neither the capacity nor the desire to know of others, nor were we as vulnerable--exposed--to them as we are now. They can appear before us at any time. We need only participate in a social network, or expose ourselves, as it were, via Twitter, or read or make comments on some media post or blog post, to be subjected to people at their worst.
We humans seem to be unable to improve ourselves to any significant extent except in extraordinary circumstances, or indeed to change ourselves at all for good or ill, so I doubt we are any better or worse now than we have been in our relatively long and bloody history. The difference is that when we are bad now, as we are all too frequently, it is nearly impossible for people throughout the world to be ignorant of our evil thoughts and deeds. We, or someone else, will intrude upon their blissful ignorance and tell them all about it.
Knowledge may be good. It may even be power, sometimes. But knowledge of everything done or thought by other people, everywhere, is oppressive, and can lead to despair, which can in turn lead to danger. Philosophical considerations aside, I think Stoicism as a way of life provides a means by which we can avoid being overwhelmed and unduly influenced by the world which is constantly with us. There are so many things beyond our control which should not disturb us. We must do the best we can with what we have and take the rest as it happens.
Friday, October 2, 2015
The Banality of our Responses to Evil
I've read that there are some who feel that Hannah Arendt, in referring to "the banality of evil" in her book regarding Eichmann in Israel, fiddled somewhat with the facts and the record to better support the accuracy of that neat little phrase describing what took place in Nazi Germany. It wouldn't be the first time someone has altered facts to support a theory, or arrived at a theory and found facts, or something less than factual, to support it.
Arendt's taste in men may certainly be questioned in light of her fondness for her morally and physically repulsive seducer, Heidegger. But what I've read of her work seems to me to indicate she was sensible and insightful in various other respects, so I reserve judgment on her claim about evil specifically as it relates to what took place in the twelve years the Nazis ruled Germany and wrecked havoc on Europe and its non-Germanic peoples. I think, though, that evil need not be banal and often is not banal. What seems clearly banal is our response to it here in God's favorite country.
The statements we're hearing from the media and the politicians and pundits who beset us regarding the deaths and injuries in Oregon due to the shootings at a community college yesterday are examples of this banality. What is being said is determined by the political stance of the person/entity making the statement, and is easily inferred once that stance is known. The stance is already known, of course, in many cases. There are calls for more gun laws. There are calls for more guns. There are calls for more people carrying more guns. There are claims current laws are not being enforced. There are claims that no existing laws would have prevented the violence, and that no other laws will, or that other laws which would succeed in preventing gun violence cannot be adopted as they would violate the Second Amendment.
I've made it clear already in this place that I think those in charge of the NRA (not necessarily all those who are members of it) are mere shills for the gun manufacturing industry, and so are interested primarily if not solely in the selling of all guns which are manufactured by that industry. I've also made it clear I feel that those who believe the Second Amendment establishes an absolute right to bear arms of any kind are foolish if not deluded, and that those who think the government is plotting to take away their firearms are clearly deluded.
I've also noted I think those who feel that if teachers and other "regular" people carry guns (i.e. not merely police and other law enforcement offices) they will be able to protect themselves and others indulge in a fantasy. Trained law enforcement personnel have problems with accurately shooting firearms. Untrained people involved in a tense and frightful situation like a firefight will more likely be a danger to anyone near them than to a determined shooter.
As well rely on Elmer Fudd coming to the rescue.
But I don't want to dwell on these arguments. Instead, I write regarding the numbingly stupid, futile, ordinary, predictable nature of the debate which takes place after one of these sadly frequent events. Fox News, which always may be relied on to say something silly, seems to be characterizing this event as part of the "War Against Christianity" it keeps maintaining is taking place. Indeed, what else would it say under the circumstances? Certainly nothing which is not superficial and not good for a headline.
Some pathetic, deranged, perhaps narcissistic loser/loner has firearms and uses them against others and away we go, off on the merry-go-round of rhetoric. Though all those involved in the posturing which takes place are banal in their response, one can at least sympathize with those who seek an answer, who want some king of substantive response to be made. Those who say such things just happen, or sell more guns, however, are despicable in their complacency and presumption.
I'm now a gun owner. I have a shotgun, with which I try to blow flying clay discs out of the air. It's a pastime requiring a certain skill, and which I enjoy. I don't feel that in owning a shotgun I'm exercising some sacred right, however. I find the thought of using my shotgun to defend myself from a tyrannical government laughable. My ownership of a firearm has not imbued me with the desire that all should own one, or the belief that they should not be regulated. Why should it?
Tired rhetoric is no effective response to evil, but it's the only response we seem to have to evil of this kind. What does it say about our country when murder and massacre are grounds only for more of the same posturing?
Arendt's taste in men may certainly be questioned in light of her fondness for her morally and physically repulsive seducer, Heidegger. But what I've read of her work seems to me to indicate she was sensible and insightful in various other respects, so I reserve judgment on her claim about evil specifically as it relates to what took place in the twelve years the Nazis ruled Germany and wrecked havoc on Europe and its non-Germanic peoples. I think, though, that evil need not be banal and often is not banal. What seems clearly banal is our response to it here in God's favorite country.
The statements we're hearing from the media and the politicians and pundits who beset us regarding the deaths and injuries in Oregon due to the shootings at a community college yesterday are examples of this banality. What is being said is determined by the political stance of the person/entity making the statement, and is easily inferred once that stance is known. The stance is already known, of course, in many cases. There are calls for more gun laws. There are calls for more guns. There are calls for more people carrying more guns. There are claims current laws are not being enforced. There are claims that no existing laws would have prevented the violence, and that no other laws will, or that other laws which would succeed in preventing gun violence cannot be adopted as they would violate the Second Amendment.
I've made it clear already in this place that I think those in charge of the NRA (not necessarily all those who are members of it) are mere shills for the gun manufacturing industry, and so are interested primarily if not solely in the selling of all guns which are manufactured by that industry. I've also made it clear I feel that those who believe the Second Amendment establishes an absolute right to bear arms of any kind are foolish if not deluded, and that those who think the government is plotting to take away their firearms are clearly deluded.
I've also noted I think those who feel that if teachers and other "regular" people carry guns (i.e. not merely police and other law enforcement offices) they will be able to protect themselves and others indulge in a fantasy. Trained law enforcement personnel have problems with accurately shooting firearms. Untrained people involved in a tense and frightful situation like a firefight will more likely be a danger to anyone near them than to a determined shooter.
As well rely on Elmer Fudd coming to the rescue.
But I don't want to dwell on these arguments. Instead, I write regarding the numbingly stupid, futile, ordinary, predictable nature of the debate which takes place after one of these sadly frequent events. Fox News, which always may be relied on to say something silly, seems to be characterizing this event as part of the "War Against Christianity" it keeps maintaining is taking place. Indeed, what else would it say under the circumstances? Certainly nothing which is not superficial and not good for a headline.
Some pathetic, deranged, perhaps narcissistic loser/loner has firearms and uses them against others and away we go, off on the merry-go-round of rhetoric. Though all those involved in the posturing which takes place are banal in their response, one can at least sympathize with those who seek an answer, who want some king of substantive response to be made. Those who say such things just happen, or sell more guns, however, are despicable in their complacency and presumption.
I'm now a gun owner. I have a shotgun, with which I try to blow flying clay discs out of the air. It's a pastime requiring a certain skill, and which I enjoy. I don't feel that in owning a shotgun I'm exercising some sacred right, however. I find the thought of using my shotgun to defend myself from a tyrannical government laughable. My ownership of a firearm has not imbued me with the desire that all should own one, or the belief that they should not be regulated. Why should it?
Tired rhetoric is no effective response to evil, but it's the only response we seem to have to evil of this kind. What does it say about our country when murder and massacre are grounds only for more of the same posturing?
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