StephenKMackSD's Blog

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!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/06/AR2011030602928.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

‘Why Egypt has to be the U.S. Priority in the Middle East’ is both the title of an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Robert Kagan and Michele Dunne,dated March 7,2011, and an imperative to political action for the United States. They present a set of policy prescriptions that seem mild, even progressive in consideration of the Egyptian Revolution and the resultant ‘Arab Spring’. But might a closer look prove illuminating? Could we take a more critical look at the source of data or at the least the opinions of Senators McCain and Lieberman, as representative of a certain mind set or even a set of preconceptions regarding America’s place in the arena of global politics, with a focus on the  ‘Middle East’? I would say that McCain and Lieberman represent an unapologetic hawkishness!  Mr. Kagan’s  own dubious record precedes him: The Project for a New American Century does not represent anything but a kind of Neo-imperialism in its most virulent form, while not determinative of the ideas presented, it sets the stage of argument, in the  intellectual place of an unapologetic American Paternalism, even aggressive militarism.

Also,is the notion of the implementation of ‘Free Market economic philosophy’ compatible with the reality of readily available and cheap bread, a staple in the Egyptian diet? Or will the ‘Free Market Ideology’ prove to be an unwelcome practice, representative of a Western secular moral bankruptcy? Is the new atmosphere of the post-revolution simply setting the stage for an Egyptian, even a Cosmopolitan Islamic answer to the demonstratively hollow and self-seeking nature of Western Political Modernism? The political position of the ‘Working Group on Egypt’ is centered on American interests not on the interests of the Egyptian People, and their drive for a self-defined pluralism based on the universal aspiration of freedom: exercised in the actuality of a specific,indigenous context.