@svateboje.bsky.social
My take: Using Berger & Luckmann we can helpfully synthesize poli sci results on affect polarization + partisan media/internet/social-media.
(also, i tend to talk too much re folks like Voegelin & Ricoeur)
there is a great bit in Cooper's Voegelin Recollected where Henningsen describes Munich in 68, trying to get V to see how that situation could be significantly different than Vienna in the 30s.
to make sense of Vs seemingly reactionary polemical habits, you just need to recall his interwar European context where politically motivated murder was around every corner and violence was a routine tool for political activism. sort of like racist state & private violence was under Jim Crow.
what he misses in V is what almost everybody does: what is Vs alternative to "gnosticism"? the short answer is something like hope - *not* "belief" - and *not* quietism. you do not have to "believe" in "transformation" just bc you understand how right MLK was that peace is the presence of justice.
another thing, great title: No Spiritual Investment in the World. Styfhals does a great job laying out how this one phrase captures the variety of senses of the G word he surveys among all these writers.
will not do a cross-ref, but i made a few comments the other day on the Voegelin ch in Styfhals bk on "gnosticism" in 20th c German phil. good stuff and unusually strong on V, w some serious reservations ofc.
also tho: open text!
signale.cornell.edu/books/no-spi...
likely worth stressing, this is hardly a specifically "left" problem. it is much deeper than our time-bound "ideological" taxonomies.
altho, one does not need right-wing goof-balls to discern a leftist genealogy of progressive norms of expression and comportment.
another example, so as not to appear "ideologically" unbalanced: "viva la muerte"
excellent pt. for Marx, revolutionary activity purifies humanity in a complete sense by purifying a revolutionary class coming to rule. so, not quite the personal "care of the soul" in your helpful counter-point. Nechayev is a stark example of purity simply from destruction.
like Marx taught, the activity itself purifies, and so brings in Zion. or, contra Weber, intention is its own consequence. besides, righteousness feels great. anyway, i guess this is all why Voegelin called it the *magic* of the extreme.
considering the Schutzian roots of “construction” and their emphasis on institution, right at a major source is my answer
(i mean, deleted for peace of mind more than practical benefit. my re-post highly unlikely to have registered and just some internet rando blip even if it did.)
ps, i'm not counting the "spring" stuff in here, but one might try to. if so, things like near total wipe out of Brotherhood by el-Sisi & co would go in the negative col.
i mean, democracy is great and all, let's just remember it is not quite the same as scientific deliberation
bsky.app/profile/smot...
This is an important NYT piece, and I’m not just saying that because it quotes me and @johnsides.bsky.social. What people choose to remember about Trump’s presidency has very little to do with his chaotic last year in office. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
The One Thing Voters Remember About Trump
We asked voters for the one thing they remembered most about the Trump era. Few of them cited major events like the pandemic and Jan. 6.
www.nytimes.comon tactical level, yes, amazing success in drawing overreach by US in response. and, yes, Taliban allies did great in the end. but have to counter w/ the tactical wipe-out of the organization. so, mixed big tactically and nearly complete failure strategically. or so it seems to me.
yest i did a post disagreeing w an account i follow & admire. i deleted it bc posting pointed disagreements just seems unwise in general. but, i still want to get my pt out here. by stated strategic goals, 9/11 was a failure. US still all over peninsula, still tight w Israel, big Shia v Sunni gains.
Fallows does good stuff
1/4
As very frequent NYT critic, thought I should offer short thread on four 'Opinion' essays today I agreed with.
#1: T Friedman on predictable over-reaction to Biden (finally) applying conditions, re Rafah.
www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/o...
1/4
i can't imagine how terrifying that was. how horrible. i'm glad to hear your child is safe.
seems more complicated than the deep tactical blow to great satan thru over reach. the public strategic goal involved wider regional postures, esp US, Israel & Saudi. no great wins there -- and just bad on Sunni-Shia fronts. Hamas may do better in the end, but then times have changed considerably.
When it comes to terrorist atrocities designed to bait enemies into disastrous overreaction, it takes a tremendous effort of will not to see 9/11 as amongst the most successful terrorist acts ever. Strategically, it worked out *spectacularly* well for Bin Laden.
anyway, transvaluation of value is hard and maintaining a healthy pluralism is hard too and liberal polities are an unusual florescence and something like an Aristotelian virtue of civility will indeed have been a crucial power for managing all this, if we are so lucky.
NB merely highlighting 'shame' is not going to get anyone very far. eg, a good example of traditional gendered behavior thankfully suppressed as hostile in a work place is so-called "slut shaming" for what was once called "fornication" and is still often technically illegal.
i heard one time about a candidate for a faculty position who almost capsized by not being sufficiently mute re established facts about the sources of atlantic slavery in a much older, internal African slave trade. however clumsy the nyt piece is, i'm not sure why its hardy topic should shock.
there is a steady stream of examples from academia of more controversial affordances for establishing new standards of comportment using public expressions of opprobrium. just ask the folks at Hypatia, the Poetry Foundation, the AHA, or the Harper's letter. stuff happens. c'est la vie.
the attention to fora is important, bc ofc practical bounds on expression are a complicated function of fora. just bc you find something shameworthy doesn't mean you can make a hostile work place out of your moral opprobrium. depends on the target. lots of traditional gendered behavior is fair game.
totes. i would call this a plea for the virtue of civility during a challenging transvaluation which involves various modulations of pluralism across various fora, many of which are in fact experienced by *some* as stifling.
totes. i would call this a plea for the virtue of civility during a challenging transvaluation which involves various modulations of pluralism across various fora, many of which are in fact experienced by *some* as stifling.
tagging @cmfederico.bsky.social as an example of the kind of analysis my reading of Voegelin tends to produce. not a thing like the claremont "book of nature from on high" crowd. not, "cultural relativism" whatever that might mean. not Hayek, not Marx, tho tractors & laws are both important.
had Hegel been right, this thread could have been a routine case of absolute spirit looking back at the growth of objective spirit from subjective spirit, the childhood that modern "rights & interests" had to pass through. but spirit experiences history only by being in the middle, not at the end.
despite my high regard for K Appiah, this distinguishing "western" feature is real. it cannot be attributed to magic words, institutions, traditions, beliefs or anything like that. it can't be disassembled into ideal & material tinker toys. it's not about a gnostic moral progress of "individuals."
(naturally one can amplify that "etc" quite a bit w all manner of coerced labor, master-servant law, Junker agriculture, and whatnot we might find in the glacial "end of the old regime in europe")
same thing with indigenous peoples. no crime was spared in fueling labor but there were practical limits, like small pox. so, instead of chasing matter vs idea shadows, makes more sense to ask why nothing close to a european out-caste slave market was even dreamable, press-gangs etc notwithstanding.
meanwhile the internal African situation was *totally* different! unfortunately idk near as much about this story as the other one, but it takes a good 500 years or so to tell the other one. like, start with Bisson's Crisis of the Twelfth Century
press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...
Irish just bc of the proximity of English colonizing & generations of fluctuating, quite brutal anglo-irish conflict. centuries of "modernity" in the background made it impossible for such thing to even be practically conceivable, all of the violent "racial" hatred in that conflict notwithstanding.
had there been a market for Irish slaves or something like that available for any anglo, or french, or spanish colonial labor scheme, it *would* have been used! just no question. leaving the imho goofy Q of matter vs idea aside, this is clear as day to me.
alos, it never gets enuf attention that part of the calculus of slavery over indenture is the massive early modern background of reduced leverage over europeans. we can be confident that no crime was spared in fueling indenture bc humans. navy press gangs is one scale. colonial labor another.
S Kenny reviews The Anatomy of Blackness: Science & Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment by Andrew Curran (2011)
reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1379
looks like a good book. would be fun to compare to Voegelin's 1933 Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte von Ray bis Carus. (better than the English title)
also,decades of controversy predicated on the dichotomy that either racism or economics must singularly root atlantic slavery is just weird. it can be hard to imagine how fierce that "materialist" grip has been.
abstract has me. i am not so fluent w McCarthy, but have a few decades of stewing in Voegelin. and i did love Blood Meridian. looking fwd to your analysis. thanks!
Simkins, Francis Butler. The Journal of Southern History 1, no. 4 (1935): 530–32. doi.org/10.2307/2191...
The Georgia Historical Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1936): 95–97. www.jstor.org/stable/40576...
Woody, R. H. The North Carolina Historical Review 13, no. 1 (1936): 91–95. www.jstor.org/stable/23514...
for no good reason, links
Logan, Rayford W. The Journal of Negro History 21, no. 1 (1936): 61–63. doi.org/10.2307/2714....
Dodd, William E. Review of RECONSTRUCTION RECONSTRUCTED, by W. E. B. Du Bois. The Virginia Quarterly Review 12, no. 1 (1936): 138–41. www.jstor.org/stable/26434....
using my browser history i can say that thread on reviews of Du Bois' Black Reconstruction was from ~ Feb 7. i tried to scroll that far back and had to give up. but the bk was reviewed widely and often respectfully.
wound up choosing this one
www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520...
Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire
The Roman empire remains unique. Although Rome claimed to rule the world, it did not. Rather, its uniqueness stems from the culture it created and the loyalty it inspired across an area that stretched...
www.ucpress.edulet me qualify what Rockman has to say in the piece linked above. all of the specific historiographic innovations he describes involve topics one could get from, say, Frederick Douglass. yes, new research paradigms on, say, slavery & NY finance are worthy. & new. the basic topics are not at all new.