political philosophy

Worth Pondering

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In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet–the scientific poet–of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard an inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection…the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.

–Aldous Huxley

Previous Worth Pondering post.

No, They Don’t Really Believe in ‘Equality’

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Kamala Harris has talked a lot about ‘equality,’ and she doesn’t mean equality before the law, nor equality of opportunity but equality of outcomes, ie, equity in the current terminology of the Left.  (video)  Many other “progressive” politicians have adopted similar positions, though rarely expressed in quite so explicit and extreme a manner.  But I would argue that very few among those politicians and other prominent or influential people who argue for ‘equity’ or ‘equality’ really want any such thing.

Consider, for example: Many people in ‘progressive’ leadership positions are graduates of the Harvard Law School. Do you think these people want to see a society in which the career, status, and income prospects for an HLS grad are no better than those for a graduate of a lesser-known, lower-status (but still very good) law school?  C’mon.

Quite a few ‘progressive’ leaders are members of prominent families. Do you think Teddy Kennedy would have liked to see an environment in which he and certain other members of his family would have had to answer for their actions in the criminal courts in the same way that ordinary individuals would, without benefit from connections, media influence, and expensive lawyers?

The prevalence of  ‘progressivism’ among tenured professors is quite high. How many of these professors would be eager to agree to employment conditions in which their job security and employee benefits were no better than those enjoyed by average Americans? How many of them would take a salary cut in order to provide higher incomes for the poorly-paid adjunct professors at their universities? How many would like to see PhD requirements eliminated so that a wider pool of talented and knowledgeable individuals can participate in university teaching?

There are a lot of  ‘progressives’ among the graduates of Ivy League universities. How many of them would be in favor of legally eliminating alumni preferences and the influence of  contributions and have their children considered for  admission–or not–on the same basis as everyone else’s kids? Yet an alumni preference is an intergenerational asset in the same way that a small businessman’s store or factory is such an asset.

Do you think that Hillary Clinton would be happy living as an ordinary individual, without power, status, national and global recognition, and, yes, the money she and her husband have been able to accumulate  in their lifetime of ‘public service’?  (I remember she once chose to wear a $12K Armani jacket while delivering a speech lamenting Inequality)  Is Kamala herself not seeking a rather extreme form of inequality by seeking the highest office in the land?  Is not regular access to Air Force One a form of inequality at least as potent as a billionaire’s access to the business or personal jet that he owns?

The reality is that ‘progressivism’ is not in any way about equality, it is rather about shifting the distribution of power and wealth in a way that benefits those with certain kinds of educational credentials and certain kinds of connections, and, especially those who are holders of important political offices. And remember, power is always and everywhere transmutable into wealth. Sometimes that wealth is directly in monetary form, as with the millions of dollars that former presidents such as  Clinton and Obama have made from speaking fees, or the money made by a former government official who leverages his contacts into an executive job with a an energy company even though he may have minimal knowledge of either energy or business. And sometimes the wealth takes the form of in-kind benefits, like a governor’s mansion or access to government aircraft.  (Those who lived in the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe can tell you all about in-kind benefits for nominally low-paid officials.)  Plus, power itself provides a kind of ‘psychic income’, which can be as valuable to the beneficiary as is monetary income.

And, almost always, today’s ‘progressivism;  is about the transfer of power from individuals to credentialed ‘experts’ who will coerce or ‘nudge’ people to do what those experts have decided would be best.

To a very substantial extent, the talk about ‘equity’ and ‘equality’  is a smokescreen, conscious or unconscious, behind which  ‘progressives’ pursue their own economic, status, and ego agendas.  It is a about a kind of class warfare, conducted on a horizontal rather than a vertical basis.  If your career is based on academic credentials from an ‘elite’ university, or on political connections, or on being in a politically-favored industry, you would come out ahead under the Harris-Walz view of how things should work. But if your career is based on hard work, measurable accomplishment, and creativity, not so much. Especially if you are not willing to eagerly express agreement with whatever the elements of the  ‘progressive’ worldview might be at any particular time.

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“Whole of Society”

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From a recent article in Tablet Magazine about the phrase Whole of Society:

The term was popularized roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration, which liked that its bland, technocratic appearance could be used as cover to erect a mechanism for the government to control public life that can, at best, be called “Soviet-style.” Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.”

In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them—creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors. What this looks like in practice is a small group of powerful people using public-private partnerships to silence the Constitution, censor ideas they don’t like, deny their opponents access to banking, credit, the internet, and other public accommodations in a process of continuous surveillance, constantly threatened cancellation, and social control.

Read the whole article.

I recently ran across an essay from 1913 on A City Built by Experts, by Frederick Howe, which prefigures the ‘Whole of Society’ thinking discussed in the Tablet article.

City planning is the art of building cities as men build homes, as engineers project railroad systems, as landscape artists lay out garden cities, as manufacturing corporations build factory towns like Gary, Indiana or Pullman, Illinois.  City planning treats the city as a unit in an organic whole.  It lays out the land on which the city is built as an individual plans a private estate. It locates public buildings so as to secure the highest architectural effects and anticipates the future with the farsightedness of an army commander, so as to secure the orderly harmonious and symmetrical development of the community. 

City planning makes provisions for people as well as industry, coordinates play with work, beauty with utility.  It lays out parks, boulevards, and playgrounds, and links up water, rail, and street traffic so as to reduce the waste production to a minimum.

In a big way,  city planning is the first conscious recognition of the unity of society, It involves a socializing of art and beauty and control of the unconstrained license to the individual. It enlarges the power of the state to include the things men own as well as the men themselves and widens the idea of sovereignty so as to protect the community from him who abuses the rights of property, as it now protects the community from him who abuses his personal freedom. 

City planning involves a new version of the city.  It means a city built by experts in architecture, in landscape gardening, in engineering and housing; by students of health, sanitation, transportation, water, gas and electricity supply; by a new type of municipal official who visualizes the complex life of 1 million people as the builders of an earlier age visualized an individual home.

(Emphasis added. The essay is excerpted in Visions of Technology, edited by Richard Rhodes.)

Interesting that Howe claims for his approach the term ‘organic’,  while totally eschewing the whole idea of the organic development of cities and institutions.  Interesting also that Woodrow Wilson was elected for the first time in that same year of 1913, and that he also employed the phraseology of an organic whole in rejecting the idea of the separation of powers.

The “whole of society” concept is something that easily goes beyond authoritarianism and slides into totalitarianism:  remember Mussolini’s dictum: ““Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state”…and also that German word Gleichschaltung.

Faustian Ambition (updated)

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A post on  ambition  at another blog (in 2010)  , which included a range of quotations on the subject, inspired me to think that I might be able to write an interesting essay on the topic  of ambition in Goethe’s  Faust. This post is a stab at such an essay.

The word “Faustian” is frequently used in books, articles, blog posts, etc on all sorts of topics. I think the image that most people have of Faust is of a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for dangerous knowledge: sort of a mad-scientist type. This may be true of earlier versions of the Faust legend, but I think it’s a misreading (or more likely a non-reading) of Goethe’s definitive version.

Faust, at the time when the devil first appears to him, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of knowledgein many different scholarly disciplinesand is totally frustrated and in despair about the whole thing. It is precisely the desire to do something other than to pursue abstract knowledge that leads him to engage in his fateful bargain with Mephistopheles.

If it’s not the pursuit of abstract knowledge, then what ambition drives Faust to sell his soul? C S Lewis suggests that his motivations are entirely practical: he wants “gold and guns and girls.” This is partly true, but is by no means the whole story.

Certainly, Faust does like girls. Very early in the play, he encounters a young woman who strikes his fancy:

FAUST: My fair young lady, may I make free
To offer you my arm and company?
GRETCHEN: I’m neither fair nor lady, pray
Can unescorted find my way
FAUST: God, what a lovely child! I swear
I’ve never seen the like of her
She is so dutiful and pure
Yet not without a pert allure
Her rosy lip, her cheek aglow
I never shall forget, I know
Her glance’s timid downward dart
Is graven deeply in my heart!
But how she was so short with me
That was consummate ecstasy!

Immediately following this meeting, Faust demands Mephisto’s magical assistance in the seduction of Gretchen. It’s noteworthy that he insists on this help despite the facts that (a)he brags to the devil that he is perfectly capable of seducing a girl like Gretchen on his own, without any diabolical assistance, and (b)a big part of Gretchen’s appeal is clearly that she seems so difficult to wina difficulty that will be short-circuited by Mephisto’s help.

Mephisto, of course, complies with Faust’s demand…this devil honors his contracts…and Faust’s seduction of Gretchen leads directly to the deaths of her mother, her child by Faust, her brother, and to Gretchen’s own execution.

Diabolical magic also allows Faust to meet Helen of Troy (time and space are quite fluid in this play) whom he marries and impregnates, resulting in the birth of their child Euphorion.

So, per Lewis, yes, Faust is definitely motivated by the pursuit of women. But this is only a small part of the complex structure of ambition that Goethe has given his protagonist.

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“Cricket Morality”

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Conservatives, libertarians, and well-meaning and rational people in general often remark on the unfairness of many practices of the “progressive” media and other institutions of today’s Left. Selective prosecutions, for example.   The fact that those same publications that mocked Dan Quayle for his verbal clumsiness are totally dismissive about any concerns regarding the verbal weirdness of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  Many, many other examples.

It is true. The unfairness is obvious and palpable.  But, listening to these entirely-justified complaints, I am reminded of a passage in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 book Darkness at Noon.

The protagonist of this novel is Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who has been arrested by the Stalinist regime and is facing trial and probable execution.  Among his musings are the following thoughts:

It is said that No. 1 (Stalin) has Machiavelli’s Prince lying permanently by his bedside. So he should: since then, nothing really important has been said about the rules of political ethics. We were the first to replace the nineteenth century’s liberal ethics of fair play by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century. In that also we were right: a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity. Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one that the end justifies the means.

We introduced neo-Machiavellism into this country; the others, the counter-revolutionary dictatorships, have clumsily imitated it. We were neo-Machiavellians in the name of universal reason, that was our greatness; the others in the name of a national romanticism, that is their anachronism. That is why we will in the end be absolved by history; but not they. . . .

Yet for the moment we are thinking and acting on credit. As we have thrown overboard all conventions and rules of cricket-morality, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic. We are under the terrible compulsion to follow our thought down to its final consequence and to act in accordance to it. We are sailing without ballast; therefore each touch on the helm is a matter of life or death.

And this is indeed the logic of so many of our present-day “progressives.”   They have convinced themselves that we are not in one of those “breathing spaces of history” in which fairness is to be expected–rather, everything must be about ultimate things, must be “existential”, to use one of their favorite terms.

But to what extent do they want to throw out the rule of fairness because they believe we’re at a critical turning point at which no other option is possible…versus to what extent is it the other way around, i.e. they are motivated to believe we are at such a turning point because they want to throw out the rule of fairness?

And how many of them have ever considered the possibility that perhaps it is precisely those critical periods in which the rule of fairness is particularly important?