Reading notes

On pursuing the low but solid

by kurto

Larry Arnn on Churchill’s conclusions of the Anglo-Sudanese River War, and foreseeable consequences beyond:

In reaction to this gruesome spectacle, Churchill understood something that he remembered and developed the rest of his life. War, he saw, was becoming a “matter of machinery.” Soon he speculated on the disaster of two such armies meeting. Soon he predicted the cataclysms of any general war in Europe of this new and mechanized type. Soon he expanded this thesis to explain the movements of domestic politics that marked the twentieth century and now the twenty-first. Tyranny has given way to totalitarianism, more comprehensive, cruel, and sustained. Politics has given way to the administrative state. War has given way to total war. As men make things bigger, they become themselves smaller, dominated by the science they have discovered and the machines they have made.

Take Me to the River

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.

Virtu vs experience

by kurto

Do civic elites seek to frame judgement on those matters which the populace cannot properly evaluate, so to insulate themselves from criticism?

Writing of Guicciardini’s

    Dialogo

, JGA Pocock observes:

…Guicciardini had himself expressed in earlier writings that the many are good judges of their superiors, able to recognize qualities which they themselves lack, and so fit to be trusted with the selection of the few to hold office. Once the distinguishing quality of the leader ceases to be virtu and becomes esperienzia, this belief becomes less plausible, since esperienczia is an acquired characteristic which can be evaluated only by those who have acquired some of it themselves, and since a republic is not a customary but a policy-making community, there is little opportunity for the many to acquire experience of what only governors do – a form of experience whose expression is not custom but prudence.

JGA Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 2016, p234.

On universalism vs the polity

by kurto

Elite insistence on Kantian universal polities (e.g., European Union, United Nations) is undermining the actual practice of republican government.

What was once understood to be the precondition of democracy or of a representative republic—the act of forming a distinct community capable of drawing from itself its own reasons for action—has become the main obstacle to what is now for us the only defensible objective of collective action: the formation of a universal society of the human species, where we will all be the “same” and separated by no borders.

We live under the authority of an idea of justice that can be summed up as follows: it is unjust to form and defend a common good that is our own.

Pierre Manet states a (unspecified) case for the French Third Republic:

The Third Republic had its faults and even its vices, but for my part I admire the way it knew how at once to impose its regime and to embed it in the continuity of France’s history, and in particular its was of conceiving the teaching of the French language and French history, so that every little French boy or girl would feel part of a long series of centuries and would be inspired to admire works produced by a world very different from his or her own and people very different from those who were familiar.

We prefer to flatten the child’s soul and to crush his or her nose into the wall of the present by making past centuries appear before our ephemeral certainties to be judged. But we will not accomplish the necessary political “reform” by invoking the glories of France against the miseries of the present. If we do not know how to link the elements of our threatened heritage with a common action to be undertaken today, then we will remain in the domain of nostalgia that may be sincere but is certainly sterile. If the two parts of our people—the ruling class and the “populist,” or simply demoralized people—manage to leave behind the mutual disdain into which they have settled, they will doubtless discover that they are both suffering, if not in the same way, from the weakening of the representative Republic and the emptying out of the nation’s interior life.

The Emptying of Political Life: An interview with Pierre Manent on the French election and the future of the nation

Philosophy of history versus free will

by kurto

Philosophy of history – belief in an engine directing events – acts against the free will of men in society:

The intellectual elite claim to understand the direction of history, as well as the scientific workings of the world, and thus feel authorized to impose their rationality on all aspects of society—including areas that had traditionally been regarded as private. This new scientific morality made it possible to present the bureaucracy’s policy preferences as moral justifications for progressivism and administrative rule. There was no limit to the power that could be used to make sure that everyone gets on “the right side of history,” as then-president Obama used to say. But that new morality and those policies could never be made compatible with limited constitutionalism and the rule of law. That is the root of the political crisis we face today.

It has become almost impossible to reconcile administrative rule with self-government. The morality mandated intellectually by our elites has destabilized traditional social institutions and produced a chaotic civil society, undermining any public deliberation and authentic public opinion capable of reconciling morality with the consent of the governed. The technical rule of experts downplayed the role of popular deliberation and public opinion, and also made it harder for any public debate to occur in an intelligent and effective way. Although self-government depends on public opinion to determine what can be done politically, that opinion cannot legitimately be mandated or controlled from the center. It must arise deliberatively from the people in the country at large, and should originate in civil society.

And:

It remains to be seen if the American people understand or will come to understand themselves as political citizens of the nation-state, or as administrative subjects of a scientific global order.

Glenn Ellmers, ‘What Trump and Covid Revealed’

Visions of the Kantian world-state

by kurto

European nation-states survived 19th- and 20th-century ideologies (e.g., Marxism, racism) competing with Hobbesian sovereignty for the loyalty of citizens. World War I marked the high watermark of their cohesion. Visions of the Kantian world-state predominate.

Today, even more than in Hobbes’s time, sovereignty is commonly rejected as an expression of selfish particular interests, and today’s aspirations for political salvation have been invested in the power of international organizations.

Hobbes juxtaposed the demands of freedom against the passion for justice, and he lost. The most powerful enthusiasm of all has turned out to be the supposedly critical belief that our loyalties must not be constrained by the merely accidental fact of being born into some specific society. We must make our own judgments of rationality, and we may appeal beyond the state, to rights, international values, and external bodies. Modern democracy tends to play down the importance of sovereignty. Remarkably, however, it is in these European states, with their Hobbesian echo of pure statehood, that legality and decency survive, and to which the refugees move, in flight from a world that often seems to echo the state of nature Hobbes so much dreaded.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2013/3/swimming-with-leviathan