Author: kurto

24. Blainey, Short History of the 20th Century (23 Dec 2020)

by kurto

            During the 20th century political and economic power passed from the United Kingdom and Western Europe to Russia and ultimately America. Prior to 1950, the most important political decisions regarded war; following the advent of nuclear weaponry, the most important choices involved avoiding war. In the developed countries, sociological changes often preceded politics.

            At the start of the century, railways had unified the corners of Europe, North America, and much of Russia and Africa. (South America is little treated by Blainey.) Germany was the expansionist power: once it acquired colonies, the navy that’s often seen as a leading cause of World War I inevitably followed. The conflict manifest the effects of specialized labor: whereas in the Napoleonic era the military commanded approximately of the combatants’ GDP, by 1915 it subsumed nearly half. Germany and France lost some 15 percent of their men, others higher, whereas the UK only six percent – yet the British famously lamented the squandering of the generation and so too long embraced pacificism in the face of dictators. Wilson made eloquent but irresponsible promises. National ‘self determination’ created tariff barriers. More significant, by the slump of 1930, half of the world’s population were economically dependent on international trade.

             In speaking of Mussolini, the author observes that ‘one-party government goes hand in hand with an official set of ideas.’ Lenin made Russia communist, Stalin made it a world power (with some help from the US, as directed by Hoover!). Russian farming’s conversion to collectivism was hugely productive, enabling the country’s industrial base to reach third place globally by 1939. Hitler’s rise was less due to his personality than skillful manipulation of appeasement. The Japanese decision not to attack the USSR was key to Russia’s remaining in the early phase of the war. In the Pacific, air power gained its first triumph over maritime forces in the fall of British Singapore. Stalin outwitted Churchill and Roosevelt.

            In the first postwar decade, the stage shifted to Asia: the fall of China, the Korean War, and the economic recovery of Japan. Decolonization commenced. Ghandi’s rise was shaped by Thoreau, Ruskin and Tolstoy. African leaders didn’t think past independence. The UK’s surrendering the strategic cornerstones of Suez (1956), Singapore (58), and Persian Gulf bases outweighed African concessions. Israeli settlement of Palestine eclipsed European postwar migrations (and the Asian subcontinent?). The rise of rocket science led to the boldest adventures in four centuries, and also to the Cuban Missile Crisis, on which topic the author makes the (rare) error of overlooking Kennedy’s handing back Turkish bases. By the time the Suez Canal recovered from the damage of the 1967 war, it was too small for modern tankers. Containers revolutionized shipping too in raising productivity, reducing theft, and so creating higher pay. The rise of radio (and later TV) had undermined the schoolroom, which in the 19th century had been expected to extend civilization influences, and later fueled the demagogues. (The British commentator David Frost observing that TV is entertainment by people you wouldn’t let into your home.) Women’s work (cooking, cleaning) was radically improved by advances in the 1960s, a decade that ‘enthroned’ the cult of the teenager, feminism and the pill, black rights, and the green movement. The direct result was declining European birth rates.

            Vietnam was the last major Communist victory, soon overwhelmed by the Soviet-Afghan war as well as the contradictions and ossification of Communist societies. The author notes that when the Berlin wall fell, the Russians had more divisions on its Chinese border than in Eastern Europe. China’s rise dependent on capital from emigrants, not Western banks, most of whom came from Guangzhou (Guangdong) and Fujian provinces.

The end of World War I had fostered disagreement and disillusion, the end of the Cold War optimism. By century’s end, Europe was more united, under the aegis of the European Union, than at any time since the Holy Roman Empire. So was the world linked by the rise of global languages (especially English), culture (e.g., sport), technology, ‘megacities’ (Asian cities led by Tokyo). The most divisive trend was radical Islamism: after World War I, Turkey’s conversion to secular rule was less remarked; at century’s end, Russia had returned to a statist economy while Turkey was moving back toward Islam. Secular pluralism and social theory each petered out. It would be unwise to assume Western democracy has triumphed because it requires prudence and experience of elected officials. Blainey is typically orthodox liberal, endowing his views with common sense and disapproving of leftist ideology.

1. Freeman, Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political Radicalism (10 Jan 2021)

by kurto

            Attempts a comprehensive critique of Burke’s view of radical theory and revolution, considering the parliamentarian’s work from the philosophic perspectives of metaphysics, epistemology, sociopolitical theory, and so on. The effort is enlightening but ultimately fails: Burke sought practical results not theoretic coherence. He saw that although public evil might stem from rulers or their agents, you cannot cure it by abolishing power, and that revolution always leads from anarchy to tyranny (i.e., restored order).
            Burke held the political universe is orderly because it is a component of nature, so to revolt is to oppose nature. Reason is sovereign, but divorced from experience it’s dangerous. Therefore Burke’s metaphysics belongs to classical (rationalist) natural law but his epistemology is empiricist, Freeman says, adding that for Burke experience tended to prevail over prescription and further his metaphysics ‘collapsed’ as the French Revolution persisted. But: strictly scientific experience leads to bad politics, since social knowledge does not operate and proceed as scientific knowledge.

            Diving deeper into sociology, Burke differed from Locke, who thought society’s purpose is to protect natural rights, in thinking that it is to improve social knowledge, wealth, and morality. His means of enforcement were Hobbesian and gravitated to aristocratic (i.e., meritocratic) order, accepting the possibility of pathologies because the alternative (revolution dispensing with circumstances of social advantages) was worse. Such sociology is said to contend with metaphysics, the latter seeing ideas and society forming over time, the former shaped by circumstance. The more important point is incrementalism versus sudden change: skepticism undermines order, fanaticism (to principle) kills it. The intellectual, Burke said, tends to land on solutions too big for the problem because there are no practical consequences, on principles in a vacuum.

            The real rights of man are to live in freedom under the law, and a give law should be reformed iff it is working against its ends, not solely because outcomes are unequal. Again, ideology corrodes historical, socially understood, imperfect rights. In a cost-benefit analysis, present conditions outweighs speculation on future effects precisely because they already exists, just as natural morality surpasses dry reason.

Burke distinguishes between reform and revolution as well as change and progress. He foresees the ongoing need for adjustments. Radicalism aims at ideals which can never accommodate all circumstances; rebellion attacks constitutions outright, creating anarchy then tyranny. However, revolution is justified by tyranny and necessity (due to burdens imposed by tyranny), a point at which the people’s rights supersede the state’s interest in order. Revolution may be caused by weak, overly strong, or unwise government, and an interventionist state is more susceptible to revolt because it has put itself in a position to be held responsible for social problems. Conspiracy along is insufficient for a successful revolt. In the French Revolution one sees other necessary conditions: fashionable theory absorbed into the royal court; irresponsible, attenuated ruling classes; and long-term social changes such as economic growth, Enlightenment ideas, and new social classes. (An aside: Freeman several times accuses Burke of fearing social mobility; Burke thought talent should be seasoned.) The monarchy, having depredated the aristocracy, left itself to face the revolutionary will to power, masquerading as good-willed social reform, on its own. That is, when ruling principles are weak, people turn to counter-elites.

            Burke’s theory is sometimes incoherent but superior to modern views, Freeman concludes, in going beyond cause to forecast course and consequences. The central contradiction is between tenets of aristocratic state (i.e., order) and bourgeois civil society (the engine of social change). Yet Freeman overlooks Burke distinction between progress and change. Real problems are solved by limited redress.

4. Wood, 1620 (28 Feb 2021)

by kurto

            An earnest but unsatisfying rebuttal of the New York Times’ tendentious ‘1619 Project’. The newspaper’s polemic, which contends American society and politics are premised on white supremacy dating to a 17th-century slave-trade ship, is founded on disputatious scholarship and pointed at partisan ends (i.e., ‘reparations’) rather than pursuit of knowledge – separating the publication from Walter Duranty’s equally duplicitous reporting on the Communist revolution. The main tenets – a) the Civil War was fought to protect slaveowners against Abolition, b) Lincoln was a white separatist, c) blacks fought slavery alone, d) the slave plantation was the foundation of capitalism, and e) US history is characterized by white supremacy – are readily dismissed; but 1619 is a symptom and 1620 (named for the Mayflower compact, a true founding) leaves treating the cause of others.

5. Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (20 Mar 2021)

by kurto

Humanistic disciplines teach man to control his will, for as Burke observed, the less control within, the more without. Forsaking the fostering of individual character and sociopolitical standards risks civilization. Not reason but imagination holds the balance of power between lower and higher nature of man. Criticism must aim for centered judgments, an abiding unity, above the shifting impressions of individuality.

In the long run, democracy will be judged by the caliber of its leaders, effectively a judgment on their vision and imagination. Rome and early 20th-century America alike display ‘psychological imperialism’ – the will to power. Should the aristocratic principle of merit give way to egalitarian denial of principled leadership, parliamentary government will likely fail.

Western decay primarily traces to Bacon (utilitarianism), Rousseau (naturalism), Machiavelli and Nietzsche (imperialism; individual license transformed into will to power), with an assist to Descartes’ substituting demonstrable science (mechanism) for higher will (transcendence) as the definition of reason, and Freud’s corrupting ethics by asserting to refrain is automatically bad. The way back is Socrates (definition), Aristotle (habit), and religion (humility).

Rousseau, Babbitt’s bete noire, flattered mankind by asserting man is naturally good and corrupted only by his institutions. He taught that to pity is to exercise morality and so virtue, and glorified the instinct, the irrational. He denied personal liberty in the Social Contract’s civil religion. Rousseau inspired to violent revolt versus civilization: anarchy today, social despotism tomorrow. By result, since the 18th century Western leaders have increasingly pursued the ‘idyllic imagination’.

The English utilitarians, following Bacon, sacrificed ethics to progress. They identified progress as simple movement toward undefined, far-off events, a projection of idyllic imagining. Ridding politics of theology, as Machiavelli did, entails dispensing with ethics: men cannot be ruthless statesmen and moral exemplars. Nietzsche extended the license of Machiavelli’s prince to all.

The net result is imperialistic leadership, the will to power toward the idyllic. Yet the modern sensibility wishes to be anti-institutional but also enjoy the benefits of religion and humanism. ‘The implication of unity in diversity is the scandal of reason’ – the point of politics is to abstract unity from diversity: e pluribus unum.

The first reply to human torments is not perfect theory but developed character. The problem is to be self-reliant, to develop personal standards, the freedom to act on them, and humility (i.e., will, intellect, imagination in right relation). Greek philosophy failed to adequately address the problems of right conduct guided by higher will. Subordinating the ordinary to the higher is common to all religion. Humility, which came into the West via Christianity, made control of will more important than primacy of the intellect, but the church was less concerned with mediating metaphysics than following Aristotle’s golden mean. In dispensing with pride of intellect, the Christian tended to dispense with reason altogether, whereas the Orient showed little antagonism between the two. Karma (spiritual strenuousness) is to work on one’s highest calling. The Asiatic emphasis on humility as preceding emotion or intellect was a superior approach.

The Socratic thesis is knowledge is virtue, the Baconian that it is power. Confucius was the master of those who will act on will. Burke saw humility as the first of virtues, that tradition is a mechanism for individuals to achieve superior social standards. But he underestimated utilitarianism.

True liberty lies neither in society or nature, but inside: self-control makes one free. Expansive emotion cannot substitute for higher will. To act according to ethical will is to limit. Standards are a matter of observation and common sense; the absolute is a metaphysical conceit. Kant’s freedom to do does not address freedom to refrain.

The highest virtue of social order is justice. To collectively work toward a just order is a higher sense of work; but it is a gathering of individualized work, not minding one another’s business – contemporary ‘social justice’.

Moral realism is refusing to shift the struggle between good and evil from the individual to society. The chimerical equality of social justice is incompatible with liberty, the inner working according to standards, to higher will. That is, equality clashes with humility. Mere humanitarian ‘service’ can’t ward off the will to power. The failings of social justice are the undermining of individual responsibility, the obscuring of practical sense – as evidenced by the use of government power.

The conflict between the liberty of the unionist and the idyllic equality of the Jeffersonian is core to American history. In response to evil, the Puritan begins with inner reform, the humanitarian regulation.

6. Gregg, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (25 Mar 2021)

by kurto

Liberty, which has been vital to the West, derives from social commitment to search for truth and justice. Limiting reason to scientistic basis cripples that search, leading to pathologies such as promethean Marxism (social engineering), utilitarianism (undefined material progress), and Nietzschean will to power. Whereas the concept of logos, man’s foundational ability to reason deriving from supernatural rationality, connects reason with faith. The Greek concept, along with Jewish liberation of reason from myth and nature worship and Christian doctrines of God’s rational nature, natural law discernible to men, and human freedom to choose goodness and truth (plus universal brotherhood), form the basis of reason’s integration in the West. But from Bacon forward, faith was severed from reason and cast as superstition, while Locke asserted the human mind is shaped only by senses — there are no innate ideas. Scientism, core to radical empiricism, led to 19th-century ‘faiths of destruction’: the aforementioned Marxism, utilitarianism, and will to power (which exhibits skepticism’s flaw, the claim to be strictly empirical, but whose first principle is itself groundless). The consequent ‘dictatorship of relativism’ – the collapse of confidence in reason to determine non-empirical truths – is a persistent threat. Islamic voluntarism – truth solely from revelation – and specifically terrorism cannot be contested by a liberalism enervated by flight from reason. Newman was the first to counter scientism; Benedict XVI is the author’s modern hero; logos is to be recovered.

10. O’Connor, Michael Collins and the Troubles (20 Jun 2021)

by kurto

Narrates Irish politics and warfare from 1910-25, the period prior to Home Rule’s passage through the Civil War’s denouement. During the 1890s, the revived Gaelic language, poetry, and theater catalyzed national (popular) energy. The following decade, revolutionary architect Arthur Griffith drew parallels with Hungary’s Francis Deak, who had won autonomy within the Habsburg Empire, while the Irish Republican Brotherhood elevated such intellectuals as W.B. Yeats. The arming of the Ulster Volunteers set a precedent for nationalists; the Curragh Mutiny indicated the British would contravene its own rule of law. Westminster’s passing Home Rule, hitherto blocked by pre-reform House of Lords, looked to vindicate John Redmon’s strategy; however, his volunteering Irish men for World War I surrendered the leverage for implementation and so a check on events to come, O’Connor concludes. The Easter Rebellion not only fired Irish imagination, as evidenced by poems, but future imperial revolts, he claims. From 1917, the Dail operated parallel government including courts administered by Sinn Fein in 23 of 32 counties, importantly providing an alternative to ‘garrison’ rule. 1918’s conscription then united disparate nationalists and the Catholic Church, whose declaration that resistance was justified was readily extended to the Troubles. Sinn Fein field training focused on guerilla operations. Michael Collins, more of an icon than the book’s proper subject, crucially deprived the British of sociopolitical intelligence, putting out their eyes’ through bold counterintelligence. The British response, the ‘Black and Tans’ and ‘Auxiliaries’, also resorted to irregular operations plus terrorism. Targeting village creameries indicated Irish progress toward a new political economy, which ran through Ascendancy landlords, and helps explain popular willingness to resist atrocities: ‘men of noble spirit and unfaltering courage were dying but their race does not perish’. The author focused on Dublin and the West, the civil war in Ulster and the broader north is largely untreated. De Valera’s great contribution the US campaign for money and recognition – Americans (save Wilson) are portrayed as broadly sympathetic – but his opposition to the treaty and decision to instigate civil war bears further scrutiny.

The Irish war of independence, skipping past contemporary Wilsonian self-determination, is frequently portrayed as a model for postwar struggles, for decolonization. (Indeed, the Volunteers are described as the first fascists, which does not bear scrutiny.) The mor interesting threat is how, 75 years after the Famine, the Irish established parallel socioeconomic institutions strong enough to topple the hegemon.

8. Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism (26 Apr 2020)

by kurto

Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois simultaneously rejects Aristotelian virtue and universal (i.e., Lockean) liberalism by asserting that moral vices and sociocultural particularisms determine the best mankind can hope for. Man’s nature is a source of justice in the Hobbesian sense of self-preservation, but only as refracted through custom and circumstance. History not teleology holds the key to political comity.

Like Aristotle, Montesquieu studies political regimes; however, whereas for the former the goal of a republic is the best use of freedom (i.e., virtue), for the latter it’s freedom itself. Anticipating Hegel, in a regime where freedom is less than ne plus ultra, some will oppress others simply to avoid oppression. Montesquieu also denies Aristotle’s exultation of the philosophic gentlemen or the statesman. Through private vice such as building wealth, which leads to superabundance, public virtue emerges and thence to patriotism. Religious (e.g., Christian) virtue unacceptably contests the state’s ends. Pangle shows Montesquieu’s definition creates an egalitarian politics with no definite end, only relative characteristics and lack of oppression.

The political sphere is not the source of society’s way of life. Statecraft is less important than the past, subconsciously carried forward. In emphasizing history as revealing social mores, Montesquieu can be seen as the progenitor of sociology, and more obviously foreshadowing Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Cool climates promote restlessness and more specifically scrutiny of government, revealing man’s passion for security, since liberty is an opinion of security. Also in the future, Burke would emphasize custom and Rousseau set aside the ancient emphasis on excellence in favor of base equality and freedom.

A republic (whether aristocratic or democratic) is more easily achieved in small, agrarian units. Montesquieu makes the case for separation of powers, moderate (limited) criminal law, and commerce as harnessing man’s passions to the general welfare. He favored competition between aristocrats and commoners, mediated by monarchy, to check tyranny and also to promote excellence as against mediocrity. As a formula: balance of power and separation of power promotes efficiency (i.e., minimum of friction) in reaching civic ends. In Montesquieu’s treatment of law, one foresees utilitarianism: restraints are to provide universalization of liberty and security, not the promotion of higher ends. Economic superabundance provides for social goods, such as freedom to philosophize. The English system provides an example. It lacks politesse but evidences morals. The English are not worldly but usefully focused on commerce. Consequently their political liberties are well balanced, exemplary. Yet Montesquieu overlooks the Tory institutional loyalties which are the foundation of social opinion, Pangle writes.

The legislator is to be prudent, not high minded, working through man’s passions. To understand a law, Montesquieu says, we have to view its intent, what’s it’s trying to solve. He is modern in espousing a system of institutional balance and competing interests, and preeminently insists on the applicability of circumstance as manifest through historic custom. His views failed to foresee or provide for defense against the French Revolution, Pangle observes, and paradoxically underestimated the durability of English liberty. The author asks: is formulaic security yet to be overwhelmed by man’s intrinsic nature? But Montesquieu, in bringing the principles of political thought down to the realm of current events, calls us to a contemporary accountability.

12. Duckworth, Grit (4 Jul 2021)

by kurto

Propounds the nature and virtue of tenacity, ‘grit’, illustrating with American sporting and other contemporary examples. Talent plus effort equals skill; skill plus effort equals achievement. Environment greatly determines one’s tendencies to meet challenges; yet one can learn to be optimistic. Once proficient, an individual’s deliberate practice propels advancement through demanding objectives and laborious work at isolated elements. Thus deliberate work is the opposite of ‘flow’, albeit complementary in that both produce satisfaction. Duckworth treats purpose as the outcome of cultivated interest, however, dismissing ethics (as well as hedonism) as biologically determined, baked into the cake, so to speak. The slight reveals the primary shortcoming of her work and psychology in general. As Collingwood observed in An Essay on Metaphysics, the ‘science of feeling’ lacks an intrinsic measure of right and wrong. It ‘wipe[s] out the old sciences of thought, logic and ethics, with their criteriological methods and their guiding notions of truth and error, good and evil. …The only difference between a logical and a psychological science of thought is that a logic of thought faces the fact that thought is self-critical and consequently attempts to give some account of the criteria used in this self-criticism, while a psychological science does not. …Psychology has always approached the study of thought with a perfectly clear and conscious determination to ignore one whole department of the truth, namely to ignore the self-critical function of thought and the criteria which that function implied’ (pp. 114-116). In fine, grit is valuable for those with well-defined teleology. All of Duckworth’s subjects are such paragons, but tenacity in pursuit of questionable ends is no benefit.

20. Collingwood, Essay on Metaphysics (27 Oct 2019)

by kurto

Metaphysics is the study of absolute presuppositions which underpin contemporary scientific inquiry. Invented by Aristotle, who erroneously conceived it as a science of being (‘ontology’ to Collingwood), the subject’s birth simultaneously gave rise to science: for to think scientifically is to answer a question; questions require presuppositions; and all such questions and presuppositions must somehow be grounded. (Propositions seek to answer ‘is it true’ or similar queries; facts, from Bacon onward, are things that answer questions.) All metaphysical questions are historical questions: what was the contemporary view?

Mistaking the certainties of one’s age for the certainties of all ages is a fundamental error. It is religion’s role to promote the development of absolute presuppositions. Thus Collingwood concludes the Christian church has been the guarantor of Western science. He shows how the doctrine of the trinity corresponds with modern science, which rests of absolute presupposition of nature as once, and therefore science as one in corresponding to law.

‘Antimetaphysics’ is an irrational, unscientific view of life, to which Collingwood ascribes various personas. Deductive metaphysics is a constellation of absolute presuppositions which are without conflict, like coherent mathematics; but metaphysics (i.e., history of ideas) is never without internal tensions. Logical positivism, which seeks to prove presuppositions (and all else) as fact, is the most prominent example of the pair of enemies of metaphysics; in actuality it treats fact in a medieval manner.

By targeting metaphysics, positivism continues the 18th-century attack on classical Greek thought. Separately, psychology, which purports to be the science of how we think, cannot claim dominion over metaphysics because it does not uniquely do so (so too does logic) and since it makes no recourse to truth and falsehood and thus to self-criticism which is the end of thinking (i.e., was my thought successful?). Theoretic thought is logic, practical thought is ethics. Psychology in actuality is not cognitive (as the ancients thought); it is the science of feeling; lacking not only self-criticism but also a science of the body and also an understanding of truth, it is no science at all. Psychology is a pseudo-science which cannot supplant metaphysics and other sciences because it ignores procedure: it is the propaganda of irrationalism, which is not a conspiracy but an epidemic undermining the scientific pursuit of truth.

Elsewhere, Collingwood treats the sequence of physics from Newton (all events have causes) to Einstein (all events are governed by laws, but most have no cause). Physicians escaped the anthropomorphic problems of the 19th century – nature causing things – by concluding there are few causes only behavior according to law. But philosophers and positivists alike extended Kant’s view that every event has a cause. Kant himself considered metaphysics as ‘god, freedom, immortality’. Of his categories of modality – possibility, actuality, necessity – possibility (i.e., something that could be) is a major stumbling block for positivism. The scholastics considered that pagans ended Roman civilization, but it was really the loss of faith in Latin absolute presuppositions.