From the very font of Neo-Liberalism, The Financial Times, presents the dutifully alarmist report on the ongoing state of its collapse in New York City, that features a report on the quarrel between de Blasio and the bellicose New Democrat Cuomo. The governor scolds the mayor for not maintaining civic order. At what cost will civic order and peace be purchased? Does the mayor express the anguish of a ‘Liberal’ that has too long surrendered to the political imperatives demanded by this and other New Democrats?
Earlier, an emotional Mr de Blasio called the situation “a horrible, perfect storm we’re living through” and announced that the 11 PM to 5AM curfew announced on Monday would be extended another five days, and brought forward to 8PM in an effort to quell the violence.
The ‘as if’ here is that the NYPD, with its long history of racism, examples: Stop an Frisk, the removal of Judge Scheindlin from the court case, by the political machinations of the maladroit Mayor Bloomberg, and the murder of Eric Garner, enjoys widespread support?
The Pandemic and 100,000 deaths, the collapse of The Economy, Unemployment at rates not seen since the Great Depression or frighteningly near. Joshua Chaffin describes the ‘mood’ the city:
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In New York City, the mood has been particularly tense. The city has been among the worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 21,000 fatalities — a disproportionate number born by predominantly black and Hispanic communities. It was due to begin reopening on Monday after nearly three months of shutdown to contain the virus that have frayed nerves and devastated the economy.
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The Neo-Liberal State is collapsing with frightening speed, and its advocates/apologists are in a panic. We are reading The Financial Times, so the last two sentences are unsurprising. Can ‘Law and Order’ be achieved ‘by any means necessary’ a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre via Malcolm X ! The anonymous source the life-blood of a certain kind of Journalism.
A retired law enforcement official complained the police had been given an impossible task, and warned they risked losing control of the situation.
“It’s a very challenging situation, and the mayor makes it worse,” the official said. “He sends mixed messages every day.”
While the home of the American Empire is consumed in flames, Mr. Ganesh entertains his readers with ‘God Talk’. In that spirit let me offer these thoughts:
Janan Ganesh celebrates Francis Collins by way of Christopher Hitchens ‘the heathen’s heathen’ praise for Collins. There can be no real rapprochement between Science and Religion: Belief and Empiricism are antithetical concepts, even ways of thinking and imagining. But propagandists, who happen to be acolytes of Christianity, like Francis Collins, feel it incumbent upon themselves to attempt to bridge this chasm.
As a child who came of age in the 1950’s in America, you could have thought that Billy Graham, or the more high-brow Reinhold Niebuhr, could render that chasm bridgeable. Even though you found the enervating, not to speak of jejune chatter of Christianity’s proselytizers unpalatable…
(The TV preachers who replaced this duo were/are just Grifters running the con!) The once celebrated Harvey Cox is where? I spent too much time, in my childhood, attending Sunday School, Youth Night and Vacation Bible school, having to pay attention to adults’ drone on about, first Sin, then about Jesus! First shaming ,then redemption!
Now the self-obsessed Kierkegaard tried, by of his advocacy of his own Augustinian Temperament, in sum self-loathing for being human, has become the sine qua non of the true belief and practice. To establish irrationality as singularity. This irrationalism appealed to Heidegger, later in his philosophical maturation, if that is the correct descriptor?
See Karl Barth’s commentary on ‘The Epistles to the Romans’ for the demonstration of the hermetic character of ‘Faith’, equal to intellectual/ethical suffocation! Barth repeats this theme, in endless iterations, with abundant Biblical garnish.
I read a slim volume of John Polkinghorne , the title of which escapes my memory, and found it disappointing, in that it was a repetition of the Christian Fundamentalist Party Line. What I really enjoyed reading, that was illuminating, by its focus on Kant, was Christopher J. Insole’s ‘The Intolerable God: Kant’s Theological Journey’
Three paragraphs devoted to Joe Biden’s comments, ‘the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’ subject to his own attempt at self-rehabilitation, about the irredeemable character of the black habitual offender: the Predator of the white nightmare:
The Crime Bill, the toxic remains of which, places his attempt at rehabilitation in the category of null set! Or should the reader compare this change of heart/mind to Obama’s ‘evolution’ on Gay Marriage? Here is the comment of a Mayor not included in this Financial Times essay:
Headline: Chicago mayor drops ‘coded’ f-bomb blasting Trump’s controversial tweet on George Floyd protests
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) on Friday torched President Trump’s controversial tweet about protests after the death of George Floyd, sharing a “coded” message: “It starts with ‘f’ and ends with ‘you.'”
Lightfoot made the comment at a press briefing Friday, during which she condemned the death of Floyd and the actions by police as seen in a video of his arrest.
“It’s impossible for me as a black woman who has been the target of blatant racism over the course of my life not to take the killing of George Floyd personally. Watching that poor man beg for his life and for the ability to breathe and then watching the life leave him there in the streets I felt angry, I feel sickened and a range of other emotions all at once,” Lightfoot said at a moving press briefing Friday.
“Being black in America shouldn’t be a death sentence,” she said.
Mr. Biden’s comments are just a stale repeat of what I listened to during the 1965 ‘Watts Riots’ and in 1968. The only question of any real interest is how will the New Democrats get rid of Joe, in the most seemly way possible : ‘Due to ill health I must, sadly, withdraw from the presidential race of 2020. I pledge my delegates to …’
This is about the only paragraph of Mr. Wolf’s essay that is not awash in Late Capitalist Utopianism:
‘Yet that does not make this desirable. When we look at the awful mistakes of the past, we must be struck by how understandable and human they were, and by how inescapable the drift to conflict and economic collapse seemed to those responsible. We must also see that purblind nationalism and fantasies of grandeur did not produce an elegant balance of power, but rather a cataclysm. It was from this disaster that the world of institutionalised co-operation emerged. This sort of world has not become any less necessary. It has just become far more fragile.’
How might the reader define the notion of Late Capitalist Utopianism? Mr. Wolf refers to it as ‘Globalism’ in its ‘first’ and ‘second’ iterations. This Globalization is like ‘The Post-War Liberal Order’ : Europe as an American Protectorate, via NATO and its propaganda arm The Atlantic Council. While not forgetting Jean Monnet’s Coal and Steel Cartel named the Common Market, as precursor to the European Union. And the very idea/practice of ‘Liberalism’ as the way stations toward the sine qua non of ‘Globalism’: this Master Idea even embraces the Mises/Hayek/Friedman Trinity.
(As background read Liberalism: A Counter History by Domenico Losurdo and Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alexander Zevin)
Not to forget Mr. Wolf’s penchant to engage in the rhetoric of the telling graph. (See The Rhetoric of Economics by Deirdre N. McCloskey)
The toxic rivalry between China and the US is compared to the rivalry between Germany and Great Britain, as prelude to The Great War. Mr. Wolf only reads fellow Technocrats!
… A fascinating paper by Markus Brunnermeier and Harold James of Princeton University and Rush Doshi of Brookings argues that “the rivalry between China and the US in the twenty-first century holds an uncanny resemblance to the one between Germany and Great Britain in the nineteenth”. Both rivalries took place in an era of economic globalisation and rapid technological innovation. Both featured a rising autocracy with a state-protected economy challenging an established democracy with a free-market system. Moreover, both rivalries featured “countries enmeshed in profound interdependence wielding tariff threats, standard-setting, technology theft, financial power, and infrastructure investment for advantage”.
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What can the reader think of the inclusion of this paragraph:
As Larry Summers has argued, Covid-19 looks to be a hinge moment in history. This is not so much because it is changing trends, but rather because it is accelerating them. It is reasonable to bet that the world which emerges on the other side of the pandemic will be far less co-operative and open than the one that entered it. That is where current trends are taking us.
The imperative for the Nation State, post Pandemic, is to rebuild its manufacturing base to produce strategic goods, as the bulwark against the failed ‘supply chains’ of the failed ‘Globalist Agenda’! And to rebuild in the name of Welfare of all its citizens: this designation to include the sans-papiers, the undocumented , the refugee!
Mr. Summers and his political/economic enthusiasm for the ill-fated Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, as the precursor to the catastrophic collapse of 2008, does nothing to enhance my opinion of Mr. Wolf judgement!
Benjamin Disraeli wrote in praise of “Tory men and Whig measures”. Almost a century and a half since he was Britain’s premier, that mix remains the surest way to electoral glory, and not just there. It is, come to think of it, a serviceable definition of populism.
Its disappointing that this is the last the reader encounters Disraeli, in Mr. Ganesh essay, except for this wan last sentence:
Disraeli would not have balked at the price tag.
With a handsome photograph, of this famous politician, acting as an introduction to the Ganesh political commentary on the November American election. It appears to be a bit of self-serving misrepresentation.
To fill that void let me recommend Michael Flavin’s ‘Benjamin Disraeli: The Novel as Political Discourse’
As Flavin argues it, Disraeli used his novels as part of a complicated process of testing out political ideas and policies, in sum his political laboratory. The vexing question arises: What contemporary politician would possess such talent and vision even to write a novel or to use it as a means of thinking through political ideas and actions? I attempted to read Vivian Grey , but gave up when Disraeli shifted the narrative from English political life, to European context and my interest plummeted.
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All of this I wrote yesterday, and now the unforeseeable: Riots in Minneapolis, over the police murder of George Floyd, caught on video, as he was murdered! An echo of the Eric Garner murder? But this time the exposure was almost instantaneous via twitter .
All Mr. Ganesh’s labored political advice, speculation and chatter comes to naught? in light of an act of violence committed by Officers of the Court, sworn to protect and serve, against a black America citizen. One can only marvel at the fact that Ganesh’s essay has been overtaken by an unpredictable event, the descriptor unprecedented has no place here!
What Ganesh omits in his speculations, and would be political strategizing, is the fact that time and history, in there duel march forward, presents conundrums that a would-be technocrats cannot predict.
Trump’s racism was established by his vicious campaign against ‘The Central Park Five’, the absence of Omarosa Manigault ,and his defense of the Charlottesville white thugs puts the president in an utterly negative position. Toxic bellicosity defines his politics
On the question of Senile Old Joe : releasing video from his basement is not a political campaign! Joe penchant for self serving lies, and his draconian Crime Bill: the videos of his speeches are all available on YouTube. The burning question, just how will the New Democrats engineer Senile Old Joe’s departure?
Both The Americans and The British love to wallow in the bathos of ‘high toned’ entertainments: The Pallisers, Upstairs Downstairs, a bit of an anomaly, but still within the nostalgia parameters? And Downton Abbey. Wistful nostalgia for another age, refracted, or is that white-washed? to meet the needs of moderns, awash in the current fashionable cynicism, and longing for the soothing balm of movie/television kitsch.
Its a pity that Mr. Ganesh hasn’t read Edward Copeland’s ‘The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform’
In the early nineteenth century there was a sudden vogue for novels centring on the glamour of aristocratic social and political life. Such novels, attractive as they were to middle-class readers, were condemned by contemporary critics as dangerously seductive, crassly commercial, designed for the ‘masses’ and utterly unworthy of regard. Until recently, silver-fork novels have eluded serious consideration and been overshadowed by authors such as Jane Austen. They were influenced by Austen at their very deepest levels, but were paradoxically drummed out of history by the very canon-makers who were using Austen’s name to establish their own legitimacy. This first modern full-length study of the silver-fork novel argues that these novels were in fact tools of persuasion, novels deliberately aimed at bringing the British middle classes into an alliance with an aristocratic program of political reform.
A literary expression wedded to status obsessions, in another Age, that took Austen’s novels as its natural precursor, in an etiolated form.
I find this sentence in Mr. Ganesh’s essay comic, to say the least: the Queen and Royal Family are still active, if symbolic figures, representative of a long dead Feudal/Imperial Triumphalism:
Even the good ones make a modern country — earlier than most to smash feudalism — seem past-obsessed to a creepy extent.
Nikhil Krishnan reviews three books in the May 15 , 2020 issue of the Times Literary Supplement: The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin, In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure
After an introductory paragraph Krishnan begins his essay with reference to Christopher Hitchens’ London Review of Books essay of November 26, 1998 titled ‘Moderation or Death’ , nearly 13,000 words. Krishnan describes it as a ‘a thunderous philippic’. Krishnan describes it further in this paragraph:
The tone of the sceptical response was set early after Berlin’s death when Christopher Hitchens produced a thunderous philippic against the man and the type in his review of *Michael Ignatieff’s authorized 1998 biography. The review itself was a mixed bag, playing down (or misstating) Berlin’s philosophical contributions but assembling evidence that his repute was disproportionate to his scholarly virtues.
Yet Krishnan self-serving in-curiosity leads him astray. Could this Ernest Gellner essay of November 20, 1995 in the Prospect, meet his standard, of a more cogent evaluation of Berlin: the historical commentator on the History of Philosophy, whose transmogrification into a Philosopher, meets an actual critic that trumps Hitchens’ trivialization? for want of a better term.
Title: Sauce for the liberal goose
Sub-title: Liberalism has become the world’s dominant political theory but its philosophical foundations remain uncertain. Ernest Gellner unravels the flaws in the work of Isaiah Berlin, the champion of modern liberalism.
The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing. Isaiah Berlin has preached the virtues of the fox so long, so persistently and so coherently, that he has become the veritable hedgehog of foxiness. He seems possessed by a single dominating idea-that we should not have single dominating ideas. In his view, the system of human values has no all-embracing, unifying apex, which could constitute a kind of final court of appeal for deciding all issues. Thinkers have pursued such a philosopher’s stone, but the quest is in vain. If Tolstoy was a fox trying to be a hedgehog, then Berlin would seem to be a hedgehog striving to be a fox. There is an ultimate key to our condition: it is foxiness, the absence of ultimate keys.
Still, in his own writings, the tendency towards rotund digression camouflages the single-minded preoccupation with the virtues of the fox. Berlin is a relaxed writer, and if a deep tension is inherent in his central theme, a reader might be forgiven for not noticing it. But this is not in the least true of John Gray’s exposition of his views in Isaiah Berlin (Harper Collins, 1995). Gray passionately pursues what is virtually a single theme: can the acceptance of a plurality of rival-or incommensurate-values be consistent with liberalism? Gray enters into Berlin’s system of ideas, identifies with it, and lives out its tensions. He is so involved in the problems which haunt Berlin’s thought, that he pursues them with a determination which is less conspicuous in Berlin’s own leisurely, one might say blas?, style.
Mr. Caute’s reveals that Berlin was a practitioner of the crudest kind of academic politicking, nothing like his ‘hero’ the passionate, cards on the table Herzen!
Note that Mount tells of an encounter with Berlin:
And it is not even true that Berlin’s indignation was reserved for his enemies on the left. I hope readers will forgive my recalling once again a personal encounter with Berlin which presents an eerie parallel to Caute’s ordeal in the All Souls common room. I had just written an enthusiastic article somewhere about the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, and I was queuing at the issue desk in the London Library, when Berlin buttonholed me, almost shaking with urgency and annoyance: ‘You were far too kind to Oakeshott, far too kind, the man’s a complete fraud, he has no doctrine at all, nothing resembling a doctrine, he has nothing to say.’ This outburst was all the more remarkable, since what Berlin and Oakeshott had in common, it seemed to me, was that they passionately rejected the idea that a single doctrine could provide all the answers. What they both taught was that the world is a complicated place. And indeed their unexpected antipathy, which was mutual, showed just how true that is.
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How many more instances of the particular bad faith, wedded to maladroit academic skulduggery, to engage in hyperbole, of Berlin remain undiscovered?
What is interesting, if not revelatory, in the Krishnan essay, is its final paragraph, that places the intellectual vogue for Berlin in the past tense.
Berlin’s champions seem to want for him a status akin to the one Auden once claimed for Freud: “if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, / to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives”. The “sonorous music of his sentences”, as Rowan Williams once aptly put it, had their special power, but those sentences, for all their rhetorical virtues, left behind at most a mood, as certain dinner party hosts are able to evoke — and a mood is much less than a “climate of opinion”. It seems to mark a deep difference between temperaments, how easily one is able to shake off the mood when one is no longer in the presence of the man and his sentences.
One of the most important literary/political publications in America, The New York Review of Books, was the headquarters of the Berlin enthusiasts/publicists!
Political Observer
*Watch the unseemly hero worship, of Michael Ignatieff, on full display:
Sir Isaiah Berlin interviewed about his life by Michael Ignatieff
Does the word quixotic define Mr. Ganesh extended exercise in typing, that comes to rest in this sentence, and two paragraphs, that acts as an indictment of both ‘Right’ and ‘Left’? On their ‘cultural declinism’ presented as ‘stark news‘? Yet the very notion of a concomitant political declinism, better yet named the corruption, of the whole of America’s political class remains outside the Ganesh ken?
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This stark news I address to conservatives but also to the left, as both sides have come to traffick in versions of cultural declinism.
For the first, the problem is several decades of irreligion, permissiveness and the debasement of a national way of life through immigration. For the second, the problem is several decades of unfettered markets and the commodification of people. But both converge on the same bleak picture: an atomised and decadent society, less than the sum of its parts, brittle for all its outward riches. Both are nostalgic for the mid-20th century, when most western nations were more homogenous and more equal.
Theirs is an analysis that makes intuitive sense. In fact, it is strange that it is not true. If liberalism means anything, it is that society has limited claims on the individual. Collective action must therefore be harder to pull off.
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In the hermetic world of the pundit Mr. Ganesh is not a Copernican, but a Ptolemaic! Self-congratulation this writer’s ambit, yet where does the argumentative ‘they’, of the above morph into the writer’s voice, and then back again?
If Mr. Ganesh, had spent less time reading the latest best selling pop fiction, and intoning on the genius of the late Tom Wolfe. Or the latest craze of the reactionary literati for his successor, he might have read Daniel T. Rogers ‘Age of Fracture’ published in 2011, and winner of the Bancroft Prize: from the Epilogue 9/11, page 261
It was in the nature of the crisis to throw up into the air all the culture’s voices and intellectual fragments, old and new. Antagonisms and sentiments forged in the culture wars, preexisting ideas and identities, premade global strategies manufactured after the first Gulf War, newfound commercial ambitions, rage, and crisis-made yearnings for unity and solidarism all swirled together. But after three decades in which the very language for society had grown thinner, in which the “little platoons” of freely choosing selves commanded more and more of the social imagination, in which block identities seemed to have grown more fractured and fluid, in which power and history seemed to have become more pliable and diminished, what was most striking was the suddenly resurgent talk of solidarity, unity, and the public good. Amalgams of ideas have their countermotifs as well as their dominant strains, their points of hesitation and resistance. In the wake of 9/11, a powerful recessive strain assumed new power and urgency. It looked, Appleby mused, like the mindset of the Cold War all over again.
As a reader of Mr. Rogers book , he squanders all that he has argued in the preceding chapters, in a search for bourgeois academic respectability, but the above paragraph marks something worthy of quotation. That presents a very different argument than Mr. Ganesh. Dose the last paragraph of this essay, in praise of ‘liberalism’, in small caps, seeks to obscure the fact that this ‘liberalism’ is in fact Neo-Liberalism? In a Keynesian inflected panic, in the face of Covid-19 Pandemic? Austerity has reentered the political conversation, even as we are in the earlier stages of the Pandemic.
It turns out that liberalism does not by definition breed egoism and irresolution. A lot of the easy calumnies against it (“We could never fight a war now”) appear less certain. And if the “horizontal” bond among citizens is a bit stronger than assumed, so is their “vertical” cord with government. Anti-elitism — the spirit of the age, we thought — is broad but it can also be shallow, or at least selective. The speed with which people deferred to the medical and bureaucratic establishment was telling. The crisis has found nothing more wanting than our cynicism.
The defenders of Bret Stephens, in the American Political Gossip sheet Politico, are not just one of the authors of ‘Coddling’, but his fellow travelers, who inveigh against homegrown enemies ,of an enlightened political present, and the political cowardice of the New York Times :
Pamela Paresky writes for Psychology Today and is a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago. She served as primary researcher and in-house editor for The Coddling of the American Mind. Her current project is Habits of a Free Mind: Psychology for Democracy.
Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Coddling of the American Mind (with Greg Lukianoff).
Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and is the immediate past-president of the ACLU. She is the author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of Enlightenment Now.
The same defenders and allies of that new manifesto of an ersatz centrism in ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ , read the short version of this newest hysterical homage to its precursor ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ by another political hysteric Allen Bloom.
Note the fashion for publishing these condensations, that give birth to even more bloated Bestsellers: ‘Closing‘, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ , ‘The End of History’ .
Not to forget that the co-author of ‘Coddling’ Jonathan Haidt is a New Democratic political operative, whose propaganda objective is to paint ‘dissidents’ as the enemy, in a lame pastiche of Carl Schmitt. Note the alliance between the Neo-Conservatives and the New Democrats as part of a toxic realignment in American politics.
Like the English and their ‘Civilizing Mission’ that rationalized their Imperialism, Mr. Stephens believes, even worships at the shrine of his ethnic exceptionalism: “The Secrets of Jewish Genius. This particular expression of exceptionalism allows Zionist Settlers to steal land ,destroy the houses, and crops, kidnap the children and murder at will the indigenous Palestinians. That is prima facie evidence of racism!
It takes four people to author a defense of Mr. Stephens? Better yet call it a Manifesto in defence of the indefensible. Carefully rationalized by ‘the real roots of Jewish achievement are culturally and historically engendered habits of mind.’
Stephens took up the question of why Ashkenazi Jews are statistically overrepresented in intellectual and creative fields. This disparity has been documented for many years, such as in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene by the eminent sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab. In his Times column, Stephens cited statistics from a more recent peer-reviewed academic paper, coauthored by an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. Though the authors of that paper advanced a genetic hypothesis for the overrepresentation, arguing that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group because of inherited traits, Stephens did not take up that argument. In fact, his essay quickly set it aside and argued that the real roots of Jewish achievement are culturally and historically engendered habits of mind.
In sum, the exceptionalism of Mr. Stephens is rationalized by ‘the real roots of Jewish achievement are culturally and historically engendered habits of mind.’ Science is trumped by Belief ?
The closing paragraph is an exercise in self-congratulation. The reader can only wonder at a reply to those who defend Stephens: the rights of Palestinians to live and prosper within the framework of Stephens pronunciation of ‘culturally and historically engendered habits of mind. The question might arise, how can the reader think about the Gentile culturally and historically engendered habits of mind? ‘Superiority, no matter how it is inflected, is always toxic.
We strongly oppose racism, anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry. And we believe that the best means of combating them is the open exchange of ideas. The Times’s retroactive censoring of passages of a published article appears to endorse a different view. And in doing so, it hands ammunition to the cynics and obfuscators who claim that every news source is merely an organ for its political coalition.
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