Sommers asks the following in her critique of a feminist textbook::
“All books have mistakes, so why pick on the feminists? My complaint with feminist research is not so much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism.”
I think she picks on the feminists because she is something of a feminist.
The national editor of the Atlantic takes a look at Kevin Starr’s latest volume on California.
“California, as he’s argued in earlier volumes, promised “the highest possible life for the middle classes.” It wasn’t a paradise for world-beaters; rather, it offered “a better place for ordinary people.”
Yet, it’s certainly not what it was…:
“Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background. That’s a deeply undemocratic betrayal of California’s dream—and of the promise of American life.”
California certainly has its problems, but I’m not so sure about the analysis here. Too much fatalism. Even if true, I don’t think it’s a problem that couldn’t be solved by reasonable people working hard in a democracy. Perhaps California’s “golden age” and its current decline is merely the first and most idealized westward push…manifest destiny?
It’s almost without history in many ways…or still on the leading edge of it.
Strauss briefly highlighted (about 40 years ago now in this video) what he saw as two intellectually/academically predominant ways of approaching political philosophy that have rejected it as a pursuit of the good:
1. Positivism-”The only form of genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge…and science knows only facts, or relations of facts.”-Video 1-Minute 4:40
Outside of (S)cience, you are only discussing values, or relations of ideas which are less than factual, and thus perhaps not knowable (or certainly not with the same claim upon (T)ruth). Of course, this doesn’t prevent people from pursuing “The Great Society,” or “The Open Society” or other ideas which likely influence politics in the wake of positivism…but it can prevent the kind of project Strauss wanted to pursue.
Strauss also brings up:
2. Historicism-: “All human thought, including scientific thought, rests ultimately on premises, which cannot be validated by human reason, and which change from historical epoch to historical epoch.”-Video 2-Minute 4:10.
From Aristotle to Locke, thinkers have presented really different and conflicting ideas on what a good society ought to be. Historicism suggests that this is because they lived in different times, with different problems. So, as you look back upon history you must see them as part of their contexts/cultures/times. Yet, in so doing, the lens with which you understand their times assumes that you can have an absolute knowledge of time itself.
Paradoxically, like Hegel, you are then claiming to have absolute knowledge but also claiming that you can’t have absolute knowledge within the bounds of reason (or claiming that there are absolute ideas, however unknowable).
Am I falsely attributing a Nietzschean influence to Allan Bloom, or is there some continuation of Nietzsche’s “modern” project here despite how well Bloom discussed him?…A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would sing and be as other birds,
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
is what to make of a diminished thing.
Full post here. (The link may not last long. For future reference, it is the Richard Bacon show on the BBC, Tue June 29th, 2:13:00).
Is agnosticism a convenient middle path…a cop out…a way to split the difference and not confront the balance of evidence?
The Kantianism is thick here. Here’s a quote from Betrand Russell:
“As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God.
On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.”
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
As Malcolm Gladwell argues in the New Yorker, McArdle wants to focus on the difference between issues of freedom (and I would add the more dangerous Freedom, as Gladwell points out)…and simple economics:
“Hard news stories take a great deal of time to write–more time than most amateurs can afford, which is why blogs tend to do opinion rather than journalism. Moreover, they are at least greatly improved when their authors are not worried about losing their jobs if what they write pisses off a local power broker.”
Gladwell argues that “Free” is a kind of utopian vision, or at least as it appears in Chris Anderson’s new book: “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” What’s being overlooked is the cost of actually gathering news and information, and the infrastructure required to do so:
“This is the kind of error that technological utopians make. They assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors—that if you change the fuel you change the whole system.”
Yet, aside from this utopianism, should we go so far as to have the law step in…protecting news-gathering organizations to some degree?
Gladwell finishes with:
“The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws”
It’s still up in the air.
See Also: Walter Isaacson’s piece in Time a while back: ”How To Save Your Newspaper,” that is, if it isn’t already a shell of it’s former self.
