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Jul 04, 2026

Cockeyed Platonist and “The New Humanism”

Posted on March 8, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08brooks.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB

Cockeyed Platonist (CP) posits ‘The New Humanism’, whatever that might be. How does he define his re-imagination of this concept? Is it both theory and practice? The answers will astound! As CP seeks to redefine ‘Humanism’ in a newspaper column! His reductivism, not to speak of his intellectual aspiration, is astounding. Thousands of years and the greatest thinkers of the Ages have attempted this act of definition: remaining at the point of failed, although noble, attempts. But have no fear a newspaper deadline has, here, a metaphysical weight that drives our thinker into new breathtaking insights, not available to past, nay, even present thinkers, writers and cogitators on the existential condition of Homo sapiens. Here are the players in CP’s sketch, a Dramaturge’s notes toward an Intellectual Melodrama:

Human Capital

The French Enlightenment

The English Enlightenment

David Hume, Adam Smith (although neither is mentioned, their ideas are present and central)

Attunement

Equipoise

Metis

Sympathy

Limerance

Sigmund Freud

I would assert that the answer to his own question bears all his intellectual and moral weight, but questions remain in the reader’s mind: has he answered any question, even his own? I will let you be the judge. I hesitate to prejudice my readers as to right or wrong, success or failure in our thinker’s attempts to do what no other mortal has ever done, in a stunningly brief 802 words. Bravo!

Cockeyed Platonist and The Clash of Civilizations, Redux

Posted on March 5, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/opinion/04brooks.html

If one really makes an effort to discover first rate critiques of the neo-imperialism of Mr. Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’, the wise reader might opt for such thinkers as Edward Said and his devastating ‘Clash of Definitions’ in his essay collection ‘Reflections on Exile and Other Essays’. Or one might read Amaryta Sen whose ‘ Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny’ is ­­­­­­­­­­­­ the most through going dissection of Mr. Huntington’s arguments, yet to date. Even if one favors a more ‘mainstream approach,’ the useful volume ‘The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate ( A Foreign Affairs Reader) would be a much preferred starting point. It might be argued that Cockeyed Platonist (CP) is not the best thinker to evaluate Mr. Huntington’s neo-imperialism, masquerading as highbrow comparative cultural criticism: although both Huntington and CP love the great overarching abstraction, as a key element in their forms of argument. While CP genuflects to the work and memory of the ‘great’ Huntington, his criticism lacks the depth, strength and political honesty displayed by both Said and Sen. The question might be asked as: How can a document that led the way for misguided policies and policy makers, be quoted as a document containing anything resembling wisdom and or as a guide to any reasonable political action, predicated on reliable data? This question and many others remain unanswered.

Cockeyed Platonist and Paul Ryan: A Transient Political Crush or The Real Thing?

Posted on April 9, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/08/opinion/08brooks.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Can it last? That is the salient question that begs to asked of the latest political crush of Cockeyed Platonist (CP)? Does it have the staying power of true,lasting political fidelity,or will someone come between them? Donald Trump or Michelle Bachmann or even the sedate and respectable Mitch Daniels? The dictates of political pragmatism being his singular guide.The answer awaits the passage of time in The American Political Melodrama. But let us carefully consider a more pressing issue, the seriousness of the Mr. Ryan’s budget proposal and the ‘courage’ and ‘initiative’ that accompanied its birth, as argued by our thinker. But a more burning question obtrudes itself into this essential debate: CP cannot resist making this about morality rather that politics i.e.’This is an immoral imposition on future generations.’ This in a passage on the lifetime contributions of an average working couple: Medicare contributions of $140,000 contrasted with $430,000 of benefits. But a question arises in my mind, as to the interest paid on these lifetime contributions and the totality of all contributions in the aggregate, and the potential for accrual interest,or is this a question of the economic naif? And then in any discussion of Medicare and cost control come the question of ‘The Death Panels’ no matter how seemingly high minded the rhetorical frame: this a perennial Right Wing shibboleth. For a critique of Mr. Ryan’s budget, as to its seriousness and viability, one need turn to Mr. Paul Krugman, in the New York Times, for a cogent,unsparing evaluation. Paul Ryan is CP’s political man of the moment, of course, subject to the vagaries of his political sensibility.

As for Mr. Ryan moving us off ‘Unreality Island’: like most of his fellow Conservative Thinkers and some Liberal Thinkers, CP has yet to even acknowledge the utter failure of the myth of ‘The Self-regulating Free Market’,in practice, as the cause of the Economic Collapse of 2008. The repeal of Depression Era economic reform legislation was the reason for our current economic crisis and the propagation of the Myth of Austerity as the inescapable answer to that crisis. It is not the political romanticism masquerading as ‘Economic Theory’ of Friedman or Hayek, that will dominate this political moment in American life, but the actuality of the effectiveness of Keynesian thought and practice, even in modified form.

Cockeyed Platonist on the Fallen State of Man

Posted on January 20, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

I missed this column by Cockeyed Platonist (CP) when it was first published. ‘The Tree Of Failure’ is a title redolent with possibilities and CP exercises his good judgment and ethical restraint to telling effect.This is not simply a column but a sermon preached by a ‘Social Conservative’ on the ‘Fallen State of Man’, to use the vocabulary suitable to this piece. This is supposed be a commentary on the speech given by President Obama in Tucson after the shootings. But CP cannot resist the opportunity to engage in his favorite rhetorical exercise, of reducing historically located actualities into large, but manageable abstractions; the better to instruct his readers, to use the opportunity for pious sounding political moralizing: for the ethical posturing, that the thinkers on the Right cannot resist.The vocabulary is a compendium of the mainstays of sermonizing: Sabbath ( the seventh day of the week),redemption, renewal, with the additions of a sociological/political nature; social organism, communal improvement, social enterprise and civility,to add sociological relevance to his narrative, but clearly understood as intellectual garnish by his readers. Joe DI Maggagio then appears, as exemplary of a non-narcissist athlete, of the old school, and almost completes this collection. Reinhold Niebuhr has that signal honor of being the final example of American Uprightness, and is quoted, at length, on forgiveness. Mr. Niebuhr, a man who eventually founded,by time and cogitation, the school of political/moral thought of ‘Christian Realism’, an apologetically rationalized American Exceptionalism: the narrative richness and diversity of The American Political Melodrama is thereby secured, made empirically concrete.

Cockeyed Platonist:The State of the Union,Political Nostalgia and Masculine Privilege

Posted on January 26, 2011 by stephenkmacksd

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/opinion/25brooks.html?ref=davidbrooks

Cockeyed Platonist (CP) like the Establishment Republican, Paul Ryan and the Tea Party’s Michele Bachmann has decided to give his own version of national political sermonizing called the State of the Union Address. Now there is nothing to compare to the love, even the addiction, of CP for long winded abstract theorizing, it’s his intellectual bread and butter: the opportunity to woo an audience with pretentious high flown phraseology, in service to the master idea of American Exceptionalism, is an occasion for pulling out all the stops. Boosterism and the pep talk are American perennials. He unenthusiastically makes the president’s choice of styles of address between standard and visionary approaches. After that CP proceeds to deliver his own address full of the afore-mentioned rhetorical devices properly inflated for the occasion. CP writes two columns a week and this has the feel of something written over his morning coffee with a deadline staring him in the face. Even the title, ‘The Talent Magnet’ has a shopworn quality and the assertion of ‘what the country hungers for’ leads one to the unpalatable notion of a decisive paternalism, as the indispensable key to success, in the proscribed realm of national occasion: an evocation of a necessary political nostalgia wedded to masculine privilege, as sine qua non.