Author: kurto

Faulty postmodern pillars

by kurto

Two of postmodernism’s original contributions, the unreliability of Cartesian science and the instability of language, are premised on sophomoric understandings. So writes John Ellis in ‘What Does Postmodernism Really Amount To?’.

Postmodernism’s components include skepticism, cultural relativism, the shortcomings of rationality, and neo-Marxism, all of which are unoriginal. Its attack on science and language are new.

…General skepticism about scientific knowledge [is postulated], for example, by the postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard, who advocated incredulity toward all such ‘meta narratives’. [In the 1860s Charles Sanders] Peirce put paid to that attitude in a devastating riposte. He argued that generalized doubt was impossible, because when we doubt something our doubt is grounded in specific knowledge. If you doubt a theory, it will be because you know something that causes your doubt. If you are skeptical of Darwinism and people ask you why, they’ll expect a specific reason for your doubt, and they won’t be satisfied with a theoretical rejection of all scientific narratives. Indiscriminate doubt is nothing but empty posturing.

Regarding the instability of meaning in language, French critic Jacques Derrida misread of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure said the assignment of words to meaning was ‘arbitrary’ but that the meaning made sense in its context (e.g., 20C or 70F are both accurate measurements).

Because he misunderstood what Saussure meant by this second sense of ‘arbitrary’ Derrida jumped to the conclusion that meaning becomes unreliable and indefinite. This mistake was amplified by Derrida’s stylistic habit of dramatic verbal exaggeration. And so, for him, the absence of a reference that exists independent of language (what he called the ‘transcendental signified’) extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely. Meaning becomes indefinite, limitless, indeterminate. The play of signifiers is endless. But of course Saussure’s point was exactly the opposite — that the meaning of a term is created by its place within a system of terms and is specified within that system.

Appraising Isaiah Berlin

by kurto

Berlin deserves a place among the second rank of philosophic greats for his defense of liberalism against the tyranny of communism as well as his definition of ‘negative liberty’.

We should surely forgive him his posture in the face of the Left establishment: what appears now as pusillanimity was probably, at the time, the only effective anti-Communist tactic, even if it did serve to entrench the left-liberal attitudes which have since dominated British intellectual life. His defense of negative liberty (liberty as personal sovereignty) is of enduring value, as is his critique of the ‘positive’ alternative — the idea of liberty as ’empowerment’ — which comes to the fore whenever egalitarians seek to ‘liberate’ us from our traditional freedoms.

Many praise Berlin, too, for his defense of ‘pluralism’, attributing to him the view that human beings have different and incommensurable values, for which no ultimate or shared foundation can be provided. This idea does indeed play a large part in Berlin’s later and more long-winded writings…

Roger Scruton, ‘Back to Berlin‘,

    New Criterion

, September 2009

Crisis sharpening statesmanship

by kurto

‘Perhaps statesmanship of the noblest and truest kind has always been associated with crises of one sort or another’, Daniel Mahoney writes in ‘Ballast on the Ship of State: Statesmanship as Human Excellence‘.

In this framework, DeGaulle finds his place among Cicero, Burke, Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill. Bonaparte, to the contrary, exemplifies ‘greatness without moderation’.

Also:

One cannot promote justice on the ‘willful’ premises of Machiavellian (and Nietzschean) modernity. If one begins with nihilistic premises, if one reduces every argument to a pretense for domination and exploitation, one necessarily ends with the self-enslavement of man. A barely concealed nihilism cannot provide a foundation for common humanity, the civic common good, or mutual respect and accountability. In the end, it can only negate our civilized inheritance despite the perfectionist or utopian veneer that invariably accompanies it.

On Stalin’s evil genius

by kurto

Sean McMeekin’s

    Stalin’s War

asserts the Soviet leader manipulated interwar Europe in his interests, in ways that have been obscured by the West’s focus on Hitler’s Germany. ‘At its core is the claim that Stalin saw an advantage in the renewal of global hostilities, so he helped facilitate them’, writes Yale’s Ian Johnson.

Stalin had his war — and won it…. A looming question throughout the book is the counterfactual. Was there an alternative to partnering with Stalin against Hitler? That question has rarely been raised in serious scholarship but merits the consideration McMeekin gives it. The historical evidence in Stalin’s War shows how badly senior statesmen, particularly in the U.S., misunderstood Stalin, the Soviet system, and the price of their alliance with the USSR.

In the contemporary era, there are three implications. First, the extent to which ‘reductio ab Hitlerum’ has ruled scholarship and indeed social understanding. Nazi Germany was not sui generis but a form of tyranny matched by Soviet Russia. Second, FDR’s foreign policy was equally as inept as economic policy (e.g., 1937’s double-dip recession). Third, progressives seem little better judges of telos than of merit. It is little wonder the academy is sinking.

4. Kramnick (ed.), Edmund Burke (17 Mar 2016)

by kurto

Presents leading segments of Burke’s most notable works in conjunction with contemporary critiques, and reprints three essays seeking to characterize the whole of his thinking. Kramnick succeeds in simultaneously portraying the genius of Burke’s rhetoric (if not the volume of his erudition) and its more heated qualities, which sometimes took him beyond the pale. The triumvirate of essays – 1 right, 1 Marxist, and 1 centrist — demonstrate Burke’s empirical skepticism toward rationalism.

5. Stanlis, Edmund Burke (10 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Burke’s understanding of natural law — the spirit of equity — as reflected in English common law is the cornerstone of his largely uncodified body of thought: so Stanlis has contended since his groundbreaking Edmund Burke and the Natural Law. In this monograph, he reiterates and elaborates the basis of those views, while demonstrating he was not a utilitarian. Subsequently he shows Burke’s opposition to the rationalist views of the Enlightenment, particularly the French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose conception of ‘sensibility’, or abstract moral empathy, which paves the wave for theoretical innovation; Burke preferred an empirical approach to limited reform, in order to preserve the best elements of society. This contrast between revolution and reform is demonstrated in Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a revolution ‘not made but prevented’.

6. Knightley, Australia (20 Apr 2016)

by kurto

A long cultural essay of 20th-century Australian society, helpful for understanding changing attitudes but lacking the dispassion of the historian. The author recurs to descriptions of the government and the working class, changing views of Aboriginals, and the cultural relationship with England. Knightley seems a reliable weather vale for left-liberal politics: he doesn’t acknowledge predecessors thought they were doing the right thing.

7. Kelly and Bramston, The Dismissal (24 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam violated multiple standards of propriety, including Kerr’s obligation to inform Whitlam of the seriousness of the budget crisis (i.e., blockage of supply), Kerr’s keeping counsel with High Court judges, his discussions with the opposition, and the use of ‘reserve powers’. The authors generally located the shortcomings in the personalities of the vainglorious yet timid Kerr and to a lesser degree the ambitious Malcom Fraser and the bombastic Whitlam. Constructed as a journalist’s tick-tock account with the newest information presented first, the book seems unlikely to be the last word because of its focus on personalities to the near-exclusion of contemporary society, economy, and politics; it reads like a polemic, defending contemporaneous conclusions, although this could be a byproduct of Aussie vernacular.

8. Morgan, Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (27 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Surveys the Revolutionary War era, demonstrating America’s founding is a product of shared search for principles of civic equality and justice. As with Burkean or Whig historians, Morgan argues for a revolution not made but preserved; this effort covers the details of articulating protest, organizing around the colonies’ common political views, and ultimately framing the American Constitution. The work’s eloquence lies in persuasively tying emergent principles to facts on the ground. A 21st-century analysis would hit harder at the moral failure to dispose of slavery — but then most latter-day treatments pettifog in ways which Morgan surmounts. Interestingly, the author contends the Articles of Confederation were not quite as dire as commonly held, and ties the Bill of Rights to the Constitution’s adoption by the states as a quid pro quo.

9. Paulsen and Paulsen, The Constitution (18 May 2016)

by kurto

Illustrates vital political concepts and shortcomings in the American constitution, before going on to narrate five distinct periods of jurisprudence: to 1860, postbellum, to World War II, to 1960, and the current activist era. The Constitution does not establish judicial supremacy but the document’s supremacy: it is intended to surmount the clash of opinions. The authors view the document as broadly successful, save for the stunning failure of allowing slavery, because it has tended to move toward justice rather political fashion. But the justices themselves have often stood in the way of progress for long periods of time, and continue to legislate from the bench. The heroes in fact are Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, and others who have fought for the Constitution’s preservation and the revision of its application.