letztlich auch uns (Beinart + Grass)

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 11, 2012

Peter Beinart (whose book is on my list) gets at another aspect of the fear or premonition that, as I was just suggesting, must be heard in Grass’s poem:

Zionism has not always been a consensus position in American Jewish life. Before Israel’s creation, and even to some degree before 1967, substantial elements within American Jewry questioned the notion of Jewish sovereignty.

I fear that unless something changes, those earlier divisions will reemerge in the years to come. The more permanent Israel’s occupation of the West Bank becomes, the more American Jews will be forced to choose between a Jewish state that is not fully democratic and a binational state that loses its Jewish character. And faced with that choice, a great chasm will divide American Jewry: with most older American Jews on one side, and many non-Orthodox, younger American Jews on the other.

Saving Israel as a democratic Jewish state and preserving the Zionist consensus in American Jewish life are two sides of the same struggle.

Keeping in mind that “not fully democratic” is too anodyne for what that future and the measures to stabilize and protect it already entail, the question being put to us is whether Israel is or will remain the promise as it was envisioned by those – in effect all of us, by international-legal proxy – who bought in at its founding.  If the creation and recognition of the Jewish state was not a foundational act within a new and more just global democratic dispensation, then it is a guarantee of worsening oppression and a standing threat of new wars up to and including world war, and there is no middle ground between the two alternatives:  The latter one is the middle ground up until the day that this manifestation of the Jewish state follows prior ones on the geopolitical path of least resistance to extinction.

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Posted in Books, History, International Relations | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

what must be heard

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 10, 2012

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of a world that is always putting a pistol to men’s heads.

–Theodor Adorno, “On Commitment,” 1961

“was gesagt werden muss“/”what must be said,” Guenter Grass’s superficially not very poetic poetic response to current events involving Germans, Israelis, Iranians and all of the rest of the world, is dominated, and justified, by a nearly impossible to comprehend recognition emerging from that murderously coercive course of the world that Adorno juxtaposed to art:  The wheel of historical fortune has turned in such a way that the national heirs of Nazism (of the genocidal) are supplying delivery vehicles for weapons of mass destruction (weapons of genocide) to the heirs of Zionism (and of genocide).

A full discussion of Grass’s poem, perhaps beginning with the particulars of several dubious translations and of the misreadings they have amplified, perhaps examining its peculiar failure as poetry and as politics and its directly connected success as poetry and as politics, possibly investigating its apparent violation of Adorno’s idea of art after Auschwitz under a simultaneous fulfillment of that same idea, will have to wait – will have to be allowed to unfold or be actively unfolded in poetic time, the time for “form alone,” not in political time, the time under the gun.

For now what must be considered (or what I think ought to be considered but strongly suspect will not and perhaps cannot be considered) is this:  A poem is not an op-ed, even a poem that appears among op-eds and that adopts the banal and abstract language and subject matters of op-eds and other disposable political discussion.  Continue reading →

Posted in Art, International Relations, Politics, War | Tagged , , , | 37 Comments

Derbyshire’s Children

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 8, 2012

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns, and Money “beats the dead horse” in regard to John Derbyshire’s rule 10, subparagraph h – “Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway”:

It’s difficult to express how awful this sentiment is, in a way that goes beyond the Murray-esque racism of the rest of the piece. Apart from the explicitly anti-Christian element (the duty to help the distressed may extend even to those situations in which it might be statistically dangerous to do so), the notion that Derb is counseling his children (and readers) to ignore the distress of individual African-Americans as a matter of policy shocks the conscience.

Farley is right that Derb’s advice “shocks the conscience,” but any mature adult can anticipate the rejoinder, or perhaps the asterisk, relating to the numerous configurations of circumstance under which, regardless of the skin-color of the person or people in distress, and whether or not we share it, we would refrain from “acting the Good Samaritan.”

Within a few hundred yards, the Average Liberal Samaritan may well already be explaining to a guilty conscience that it was not just the wrong skin color, but something else about the situation, some perception of vulnerability and risk, that kept the guilty foot on the gas.  We should also recognize that some number of people who share Derbyshire’s admitted racism, even in less supposedly “tolerant” inclinations, might “act” better than the Average Liberal, especially if in possession of greater physical self-confidence.  We can imagine someone who actively despises “blacks,” but has no difficulty stopping to help particular “blacks in distress.”

So, here’s a bad question:  Who is a better Samaritan, the liberal who for whatever reasons does not stop and give aid, but claims to support “good policy,” or the racist who does stop and give aid, but supports “bad policy”?  I believe there is no general right answer to this question, because I also tend to believe that the liberal is probably a racist, and that the racist is probably a liberal.  This understanding could be the basis for an extensive discussion, but to summarize the position, we can acknowledge that, according to the best thinking on the subject of race, we as inheritors of a racist culture will all end up with indelibly racist tendencies, and that goes for the victims of racism as well as for the direct and indirect beneficiaries of discrimination.  At the same time, even the most obnoxiously anti-social racist, if  he participates in society at all, must also to some extent embrace tolerance, must live and let live, and will in countless ways, whether or not he likes it, or thinks he does, support liberal society.

The reason that the bad question is worth asking is that it reveals the more fundamental contradiction at the root of Derbyshire’s particular ideas and ugly sentiments.

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Posted in Internet, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Writing | Tagged | 6 Comments

Yes, they’re Social Darwinists, but so are you

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 5, 2012

Chait pushes back against the pushback on the President’s application of the term “social Darwinism” to Romney-Ryan Republicanism.

Now, I suspect that right-wingers object to the term “social Darwinist” because it can be understood to imply a more literal application of Darwinism — that the poor should be killed off so they cannot reproduce.  Almost none of them would take the theory quite so far. But the more symbolic application of Darwinism to the market, as a morally optimal tool for allocating rewards, seems appropriate. Republicans may prefer a more positive-sounding label, but in politics you don’t always get to pick your label.

Chait in passing claims that Richard Hofstadter “created the label,” implying that Hofstadter coined the term, when it had actually been in use since the mid-late 19th Century.  You could say that Hofstadter helped turn it into a label – except that it never ended up being used as a “label” except in a moderately expanded version of the same circle where it referenced an already old discussion.

Not that Chait’s argument is bad:  As he says, and starts to demonstrate, there is a rather easily arguable social Darwinist aspect to self-regulating free market ideology as propounded by today’s Romney-Ryan Republicans, who have further managed to fuse it with Christianism and American Exceptionalism – resulting in the apparent belief, asserted in close to these terms, that God chose America as the place to experiment with the Holy Free Market.  The notion merges naturally with Dual Covenant Christian Zionism, and for that matter with the Mormon prophetic re-conceptualization of America and with applied Mormon economics.

There are two main problems with attacking this ideology.  Continue reading →

Posted in Politics, Religion | Tagged , , , , , | 18 Comments

Because mainstream opinion is still catching up with the radicalization of the remnant right

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 3, 2012

Looking at the extreme, exaggerated, consistent, pervasive, and distasteful contempt for the President that characterizes so much contemporary rightwing discourse, Andrew Sullivan asks (again):

Is this rank racism, pure partisanship, class resentment, or some toxic combination of them all?

That and much more, but also quite simply the fact that the current Republican political and opinion leadership is exploiting credibility that it has inherited rather than earned.  It was built up over decades, and popular and mainstream comprehension of the current party’s narrowness has not yet caught up to the reality.  So we have the mere appearance of a still closely and sharply divided country against an actual ideological relative consensus, though the gap or lag also equates with prudent patience, since it remains conceivable that the Republicans will revert to historical form – as an element within the American social democratic state rather than as the principle of its total negation – at any political time.  It’s not just or even so much that the Republican opinion elite has moved right, as that the mainstream opinion consensus has expanded to envelop much of what was once thought “conservative,” an argument that the President and allies, and more than a few disgruntled further-leftists, have not yet tired of making.  For now, in the aftermath of the Bush catastrophe and ahead of the oncoming demographic deluge, the remaining Republican centrists either have adopted adversarial stances toward the movement (Frum, Bartlett) or are represented by politician-opportunists and hacks (Romney, Huntsman, Boehner, McConnell) whose path of least resistance is to operate within the radicalized party as they find it.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , | 13 Comments

Holy American Major League of Nations (Notes on Baseball and the Re-De-Nationalization of Americanism)

by CK MacLeod Posted on April 1, 2012

God Bless a Metonym

Scott observes a process of the trans-nationalization of baseball alongside the seemingly contradictory patriotic and militaristic displays at Angels pre-season games.  He refers specifically to members of the military being asked to stand for rounds of applause, and he wonders why women who have not had cosmetic surgery are not instead asked to stand. (Hear, hear!)  As further discussion confirmed, and as consideration of the ritualistic singing of the national anthem at modern American Major League baseball games ought to confirm, the relationship of baseball to American (American-style) nationalism is a complex and possibly contradictory, possibly dialectical one.

Scott:  And the cool thing is that the term “American” itself contains these potentialities. Have you written about that?

I believe that Scott was referring to the notion that our Washingtonian empire of Unitedstatesia has managed to seize the grand metonym “America” for itself along with the economically most promising expanse of the North American continent, arguably (materially-demonstrably: historically) the most geo-politically and geo-economically exploitable terrain on the planet under our loosely speaking modern conditions of commerce and technology – secure, resource-rich, underpopulated, arable, temperate, benefiting from relatively unobstructed internal and external connections:  To employ the baseball cliche, the United States is the country that was born on third base geographically.

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Posted in Future History, Sports, US History, Yoga | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Supremely Original

by CK MacLeod Posted on March 30, 2012

(Notion:  Constitutional Originalism as the socialized sublimation of the individual’s compulsion to re-experience the emptiness that lies between the end of erotic or eroticized violence and the beginning of order, and that remains internal to order as the potential for violence.)

The challenge to and arising from American Constitutional Originalism is not an abstraction, does not rest on historicity alone, on the impossibility of transferring understandings from an 18th Century interpretive context to the present day.  Nor does it rest on the related limitations of language itself, on the inalienable fact that an original intent can be expressed only in terms that depend on other terms for definition.  The problem that matters is that an attempted return to the originary moment is a search for a primordial “constituting power” that does not arise in Eden or the Promised Land, but somewhere in the wastes, somewhere outside, before, or after, in flight, catastrophe, violence, and despair, in facticities not yet mythologized, and in sacrifices not yet known. There could be no authentic return to a founder’s idea that did not also return to, confront – re-stage and re-initiate – what concretely compelled the declaration, foundation, and constitution of new order, and the dangers to it, and the tasks before it, and the corpses to be buried beneath it.

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Posted in History, Philosophy | 1 Comment

Baseball Been Berry-Berry Good

by Scott Miller Posted on March 30, 2012

Sorry about the stupid title.  Because this post is about unity, I just thought I’d create a connection between it and Fuster’s last one.  Of course, CK will automatically connect it with separation.  That’s fine.  Dialectical thinking itself is about separation–which means that even when it’s acknowledging a dualistic relationship between two things, it’s always relating to reality prejudicially.  Again, that’s fine.  It goes both ways.  Although bob would disagree, non-dualism does the same thing in reverse.  Non-dualism connects more with unity than separation, while dualism connects more with separation than unity.  Unless, of course, the dualism is connected to unity the way yoga is.

So what does that have to do with baseball?  Actually–everything.  Baseball speaks to a non-dualistic dualism.   It can teach us things that words can’t.  It’s philosophical dynamism at work.  It’s also social dynamism at work, and while it may be true that every human action is somehow reflective of the way humans are right now, baseball is strange enough to be truly reflective of everything human.  And it’s stranger now than ever.  It’s “agrarian” energy gives it a throw-back kind of feel, but there’s also something futuristic about the way all the action now happens mostly at night, under huge banks of flood-lights and giant high-tech scoreboards.  It’s slow pace is clearly dated, but people can text away on their i-phones and still follow the game.  So baseball is not just an antidote. It’s just that people like me love seeing kids at the ballpark relating to life in a real-life spacial way.

But baseball is also just right up to speed.  It can’t help but always be up to speed because baseball is all about timing.  A batter either times things well or gets out.  A runner either gets to the base before the ball or not.  So the timing is all in relationship to real events in space.  It’s time, space, and humans.  And we adjust to each other.  In the stands, people like me adjust to having to sit next to huger and huger people.  On the field, players adjust to other players post steroid, or maybe not so post steroid changing sizes and strengths and do so in much subtler ways than in other sports.  If pitchers throw harder, batters have to get stronger, or “use more of the field.”  If pitchers get trickier, batters have to get be more patient, or use more of the field in a different way, and sometimes, as fielders, they literally have to adjust on the fly.  Like nothing else in reality, one baseball adjustment follows another because no matter how good a player is, he can’t just be forceful.  He has to yield in relation to reality.  Even Nolan Ryan had to yield.  He had to learn how to throw strikes.  He had to learn how to save something for later.  Nothing can be forced with baseball because of it’s bizarre time-space orientation, and since our lives are reflective of bizarre time-space orientations, baseball is us. Continue reading →

Posted in Philosophy, Sports | 15 Comments

Helps keep the sperms away

by fuster Posted on March 30, 2012
no, no, no I said BIG eyes

\

 

whyever do you have such big eyes

 

If colossal and giant squid‘s basketball-size eyes—two to three times bigger than any other animal’s—don’t see particularly well, what’s their evolutionary point?

According to a new study, big squid eyes do have a “superpower” Captain Ahab might have killed for: sperm whale vision.

 

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