StephenKMackSD's Blog

David Brooks is reeling from the effects of his colleagues reporting on the Radical Individualist’s in our midst. It seems that something like 28% of Americans live alone and half the births in America in women under thirty are out of wedlock and 50% of Americans adults are single. The continued existence of the comfortable bourgeois hetero world that Mr. Brooks treasures is somewhat in doubt, as the way of the American Tribe. 28% is, rather uncomfortably, almost a third! And women under thirty giving birth without husbands surly points to American Moral Decadence, although that was last week’s subject. But Mr. Brooks ambles around in this statistical data while contrasting it with some hastily constructed nostalgic asides. But Mr. Brooks cannot quell his moral panic about the Radical Individualists among us, and their subversion of his comfortable world view, that doesn’t have anything to do with the lived American actuality. That could be a description of Conservatism itself, as not in touch with the evolution of American lives.

Queer Atheist

Here is Niall Ferguson in the magazine Foreign Policy, the prestigious voice of American Establishment thinking, in an essay entitled We’re All State Capitalists Now. Mr. Ferguson or the editors have a way with this outworn cliché, it speaks of historical moments, well past. But Mr. Ferguson is an Economic Historian with many irons in the fire: full time apologist for the British Empire, a Free Market advocate, a Conservative of some political standing and, now, a full time resident of America, teaching at Harvard. We like our political reactionaries so much, we like to import the best of the lot from the mother country. State Capitalism is the newest description for the form of Capitalism that has evolved in China, I would say Post-Communist but that would be inaccurate. Mr. Ferguson assures us of his fealty to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations while leaving it’s intellectual companion The Theory of Moral Sentiments unacknowledged. The question arises, why might that be of import in a conversation on economics and it’s various iterations, of it’s models. Smith’s plan was to construct a ‘Science of Man’ with Wealth and the Theory as parts of that unrealized whole. Economics was once a branch of ethics (the Dismal Science has a past!),that might be a difficult burden for Mr. Ferguson to carry, even, perhaps too intellectually confining: Modern Conservatism’s economics has more in common with the thought of Spencer, than with the whole of Smith-the truncated version being more politically convenient. But in this essay we have a example of an ‘American’ public intellectual’s fascination with the slave labor camp of China, the ‘successful’ wedding of authoritarianism and capitalism. Even Žižek has commented on this phenomenon. For Mr. Ferguson and his political/economic allies it is a model that speaks to their aspiration of a nearly problem free form of political oppression, in service to profit: modern Conservatism’s obsession with the care and maintenance of the natural Capitalist aristocracy. Perhaps I have overstated the case, but most assuredly not by much. As recent reports have indicated the greatest expenditure in the Chinese economy is ‘internal security’, meaning a vast spying network that has been constructed to maintain the fiction of a nonexistent political harmony, with an eye to wining new customers. But the miracle of authoritarian capitalism is belied by the growing number of reports of worker rebellions,strikes and the wave of suicides: all very deleterious to attracting new business. Mr. Ferguson, true to Conservative form, is sounding the warning of the Yellow Peril, but in this iteration as a threatening challenge to the economic hegemony of the ‘West”.

 

Political Observer

David Brooks

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/opinion/brooks-the-jeremy-lin-problem.html?…

“The odds are that Lin will never figure it out because the two moral universes are not reconcilable. Our best teacher on these matters is Joseph Soloveitchik, the great Jewish theologian. In his essays “The Lonely Man of Faith” and “Majesty and Humility” he argues that people have two natures. First, there is “Adam the First,” the part of us that creates, discovers, competes and is involved in building the world. Then, there is “Adam the Second,” the spiritual individual who is awed and humbled by the universe as a spectator and a worshipper.”

Immanuel Kant

 

“Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from it’s self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the the guidance of another. Self-incurred is this inability if its cause lies not in the lack of understanding but rather in the lack of the resolution and the courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.”

An Answer to the Question:What is Enlightenment

Immanuel Kant

Translated by James Schmidt

What is Enlightenment

Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions

Edited by James Schmidt

University of California Press

 

 

 

Jeremy Lin is an NBA player who, at present, is having phenomenal success and is a person of deep religious faith. In his desperation to manufacture his latest column, Mr. Brooks takes Mr. Lin as his subject of a very unflattering and desperate attempt to nullify Mr. Lin's aspiration to serve god and to be a NBA player. It makes Mr. Brooks seem as small a person as he is. Please read Mr. Brooks condescending and pompous meditation on the world of major league sport, heavily garnished by the 'Great Jewish Theologian' Joseph Soloveitchik identified as 'our best teacher' in the matter of the incommensurable worlds of faith and worldly success, as determinative. Can the critical reader of Mr. Brooks take this as indeed serious? How quickly can we forget the long list of manufactured apologetics for The Free Market and it's natural supremacy in the moral and political world? But let me quote in full from the devastating reply by Matthew Carnicelli of Brooklyn, New York, whose understanding of Mr. Lin's actual world in the NBA and its imperatives is hard to rebut :

"David, perhaps you're not a basketball fan, inasmuch as you missed the most obvious connection between Lin's religious faith and his success with the Knicks.

Lin is a point guard. By definition, a point guard's role on the court is to selflessly yet skillfully distribute the ball, in the process improving his teammates' opportunity for success. Because Lin embraces the traditional selfless role of the point guard, and seeks to empower his teammates rather than merely himself (take that, Ayn Rand!), his teammates play harder – and their collective performance can literally transcend the sum of their individual talents. This is what has been happening with the Knicks over the last two weeks.

When the player manning the point guard, however, aims primarily at individual glory and attention, rather than selfless distributive transcendence, his can amass gaudy personal statistics and wealth – while his team inevitably sinks to the bottom of the NBA standings, as did the Knicks under a talented but less-than-enlightened Stephon Marbury.

Indeed, David, I would further argue that the greatest NBA talents, the true "franchise talents" all lift their teammates games in roughly similar fashion – and intuitively understand that individual glory is ultimately hollow, and often fleeting, unless collective glory ultimately accompanies it."

Political Observer
         

Here is proof that women in America no longer have to postpone their wish for children until marriage. Here, also, is proof that David Brooks’ obsession with out of wedlock births as a sign of American decadence is not about moral decay, but rather about the waning power of patriarchal values i.e. the Abrahamic Tradition of Judaism,Christianity and Islam in the United States, as arbiters of morality, ethics and the image of women and their place in a thoroughly entrenched secularized republican setting. Although that secular state, and its institutional safeguards, are under concerted attack from the most reactionary members of these patriarchal traditions, as unelected legislators and guardians of public morality . The waning of male heterosexual power to dominate the discourse that seeks to define the acceptable expressions of gender roles and morally permissible sexual conduct, female/male, gay/straight/ and intersex/transsexual are the uncomfortable realities that goad Mr. Brooks and his political/religious allies, Conservatives, who continually sound the alarm about the moral decay inherent in the free choice of existential/political actors, in a dangerous, out of control secular environment. This is the argument of first and last resort, always play this handy trump card, that sounds the well worn notes of a carefully cultivated political hysteria. The other is my enemy,even if it is my sister, brother, father,mother, friend or just a person I have not, nor will ever meet.

Queer Atheist

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/06/usa.politics1
Here is what Isaiah Berlin celebrated as a man being clubable, in it's institutionalized form: our special relationship. You recall the paragraph in The Color of Truth by Kai Bird where Sir Isaiah celebrates the Bundy brothers as one of us, the enlightened elite of  the Anglophone world, of Imperialism reborn as active, but not too successful,Cold Warriors? Well, here, New Labor and New Democrats and various hangers on, with the help of Pew money, celebrate the virtues of themselves, as part and parcel of the active forgetting of their more radical political pasts, as opponents of Robber Capital rather than its apologists,sycophants or even it's active agents.
Political Observer       

http://todaysdocument.tumblr.com/post/17881526195/issued-by-president-frankli…

 

For the past week I’ve been reading Pauline Kleingeld’s new book Kant and Cosmopolitanism:The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship published by Cambridge University Press. I measure a book by it’s first one hundred pages, so I have spent the last week concentrating on engaging with Professor Kleingeld’s impressive and enlightening scholarship. She is a first rate thinker and writer, who takes as her subject matter other thinkers, whose ideas are worthy of extended examination. Reading a great book has a remarkable intellectually revitalizing power.

I have missed Mr. Brooks essays in the Times of last week and am catching up on my reading, today.  In his essay of February 13, 2012 titled The Materialist Fallacy exploits his perennial theme of American Decadence, and the first indicator of that pernicious decadence is out of wedlock births. Mr. Brooks is morally conventional to the nth degree,though his is not an unconscious moral conformity,  but rather a conformity in service to the politically defensible Conservatism that he continually champions. In the first part of his essay he carefully defines the historical territory of American society and politics, of recent memory, and shows his unrivaled ability to a engage in a self-serving reductionism carefully engineered to fit his conclusions. He is an adept propagandist. But the defense of contemporary sociological scholarship and it’s conclusions about the importance of stability to the well being of children, and their potential for success in learning, growing and leading both productive lives as citizens, and as persons is not the actual question here, but the question of Mr. Brooks defending the dubious scholar Mr. Charles Murray and his latest publication Coming Apart. The question of what policies should be constructed using sociological scholarship, as a tool to engage in successful state interventions in the lives of citizens, not withstanding Mr. Brooks’ assurances to the contrary, is not the project of Conservatism 2012. “Starve the Beast” in the words of the Social Darwinist and political ideologue Grover Norquist, allied to a concerted effort of Republican Governors and state legislators, in twenty one states, to suppress the votes of people unable to obtain state issued photo identity cards is the real face of Conservatism, not the carefully modulated and intellectually respectable moralizing of Mr. Brooks.

Political Observer        

 

 

Glad to say that I have just received Professor Kleingeld’s new book and am reading it with rapt attention.

Happy Scholar

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/opinion/sunday/douthat-can-the-working-clas…

 

While contemplating a reply to Mr. Douthat’s essay of February 11,2012, titled Can The Working Class Be Saved?, a thought kept recurring to me that would give me no rest: in 21 states Republican legislators and governors have passed voting bills that restrict voting to those who must present picture identification in order to register to vote and to cast a legal ballot. These laws will restrict the voting rights of the working poor, poor blacks, people on fixed incomes, Social Security recipients, and students. One might argue that these groups represent a vital part of voters who regularly cast votes for Democrats. The rhetorical notion that Conservatives, the Republican Party, care about the ‘working woman or man’ and the ‘underclass’ and their welfare, wedded to a concern for protecting the process of voting from the nonexistent threat of ‘voter fraud’, make Mr. Douthat’s propaganda exercise moot. Although he paints himself as the mean between two extremes, Mr. Charles Murray’s Libertarianism and the New Deal Romantics, is any of this convincing, except as mere rhetoric in the face of the utterly undemocratic actions of America’s Conservative Party, the Republicans?

Since the election of Reagan in 1980 the whole of electoral politics, in America, has been focused on the middle class and it flourishing. The New Democrats were a product of the triumph at the polls of Reagan: they willfully forgot the legacy of the New Deal and made their peace with Wall Street which led to Bill Clinton, of both Welfare Reform and Financial Reform i.e. the elimination of regulations that have proved disastrous: the collapse of the world economy in 2008 and the fact that in 2012 near 147 million Americans live at or uncomfortably near the poverty line. This being the political background to Mr. Douthat’s exercise in faux concern for the ‘working class’ as the backbone of the nation. One can also observe that the Occupy Wall Street movement has changed the nature of the debate in America about income distribution, with the plangent idea of the 1% and the 99%.

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