Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "UnHerd"
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Part 1: I found Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" unconvincing. The book you mention i haven't read but my mate did and its seemed to me to be a rewriting of old arguments form the 1970's and 1980's "The Coddling of the American Mind" i think it was. That said i thought I'd have a listen to any reasons that can claim: online porn as the root of all our problems. The argument like his other book is jsut a modern reworking of old Conservative progressive liberal arguments. I've heard it all before.
So in the early 1980's all the inequity of wealth and status between the middle class and the lower classes had met with the periodic economic Crisis that always accompany such inequity, a collapse in consumer spending and collapse in market demand. I'm no Marxist but these two are genuinely internally related a priori, as opposed to merely being in association. This means two things: firstly the poor suffer the most in such collapses, and secondly, the middleclass argument that they are there at their station, acting out of some public duty, for social justice and or GDP increase. That their academic qualifications gained from hard work and an egalitarian ordered society both mean necessary competence and that there is some real relationship between intellectual burocratic competence and morality or ethics. its a kind of myth like the old Webber one that Protestant virtue and thrift, the delay of pleasure, was central in the formation of wealth for capitalists. The myth, no one today believes, is that the reverse is true: if someone is very rich they must have virtuous characters. I mean people used to think the rich being good at making money must be good in an ethical moral sense too.
Now we have the dominance of the same kind myth from the liberal progressive left. Someone who is academically trained claim their progressive training makes them not only competent at viewing the world and acting in the world through legal lenses, that such legal tactical abilities are evidence of their morality and ethics. That they have their station and duties due to competence and character: like the ineffable and taciturn middleclass character the wannabe, and pseudo, middleclass try in vein to divine, from observation and mimicry. No one thinks this after the 2008 middleclass mortgage bailout via the banks or the massive Quantitative Easing increase in national debt and money supply. eg profits in form of housing price inflation for middleclass, and losses from the social poor via banks and the State. its not an anomaly its already got a concept "the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of loss", but this time its the progressive liberal middleclass left doing the rip off. So if you are in the middleclass loop and know what to say, and what not to say, then don't mention this old principle of wealth division. But jsut like in the 1970's the problem is we are told by the academic experts there is no choice its an emergency, but then the middleclass claim to: competence expertise; and to be acting out of duty for social justice as their deservedness of that wealth in bricks, collapses. No one believes that now either.
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Part 2: So just like in the 1980's there is a rise in various crimes and a withdrawal from traditional social roles as a part of a big social confidence trick of the middleclass. Then its was the closing of traditional industry now its the ongoing debt Crisis. I mean there are some people with their minds so engineered by shame and guilt that they carry on the empty ritual of legitimacy. They have the Kantian duty app in their brains: to develop all their natural talents to the full and do their Righteous duty without reward in this life but in the hope of an equation of virtue and happiness in the afterlife. But others may not buy this reworking of theology for the age of reason app. its like low alcohol beer or morphine free opium for the masses.
Now in the 1980's I remember well they started to blame all this on "video nasties". Same kinds of arguments by the same kinds of experts on TV as here. All parties jumped on this as the great distraction and shame and blame of the poor. My mate at Uni worked in one of the new video hire shops and did a thesis on the history of this sort of move going back centuries. So what's the parallel with the internet porn emergency? Well just as in the 1980's traditional and ancestral communities collapsed as the works and factories closed. People were on unemployment benefits with mass unemployment. So idle i guess from a middleclass point of view, and idle means the devil will get yer hands. they just have graphs to make this appear true as opposed to some line from the bible. Now the mass unemployment is due to the massive anti male, men as patriarchy, men as potentially violent and dangerous to women. Only the middleclass women can save the girls, with their clever machinations psychological tricks and uses of the law under their own political principles. there has been always a strong attraction of the middleclass to focus on crimes of physical violence and to make what they consider bad taste into a crime and an emergency situation. They link it too by association to addiction to alcohol and drugs, just like the 1980's. Thing is everybody knows its a middleclass trick now. An attempt to shame the most downtrodden group in society young poor men who've been ripped off, and know it.
There's something deeply obscene about middleclass people who have ripped everybody off on a global industrial scale, and then made men, the a priori villains and dangers for women and girls. Women now relate to men in terms of fear and though the technologies of what law affords. A date used to be like a job interview and psychological testing now its like a police interview and court trial. The porn is like unemployment benefit in an age of poverty and structural liberal demonization of men and creation of fear in and legality for women. Anyway someone once said "Love is a drug" did they not.
I think the idea of the middleclass was immigration would supply labour and market demand, and a supply of men for women that want them with their obvious cultural advantage over those men due to the men being in an unfamiliar culture and dependent on them. Like Shirly Valentine in reverse maybe, but i haven't seen it.
Demonised and competing with people from the third world and former communist countries for jobs white men. After all this they, the middleclass legions of voices, want us to work as much as people in the old Soviet Labour camps. and have relationships mediated by men as a priori risk and the women protected by imminent force of feminist law.
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Hegel in the "Philosophy of Right" situates his position as the synthesis of two extreme and unreal abstract notions. We could say on the one side an abstract empiricism (eg utilitarianisms) of immediacy of content (pleasure, pain) to consciousness before reflection, on the one side and the idea of absolute unlimited freedom and right as the realm of Spirt (c.f. Montesquieu on law and Kant on Mind (including action), and the abstract self "I" present to itself in immediacy before reflection. The synthesis is that neither unmediated empirical content can ground the freedom of the will (Kant's heteronomy of sensible affection) or a pure "I" can ground freedom as a non place willing needing to act from a place. The synthesis according to the will then converts (sublates) the myth (Sellars) of pure empirical content for willed content in a context, and the idea of a pure "I" is de transcendentalised for a will that acts in and though rationalising instructions. With the latter we have the idea of a will as traditionally of negative freedom from, now as also a dependent will and so the need for positive freedom to. This though is not a proper synthesis of opposites and the position Hegel want to advance as a process is tendentious and teleological toward the absolute idea of the freedom of the will, absolute freedom. It would seems that Hegel has abandoned the articular Universal distinction here, but really the universal is now under stood not as an abstraction but as the the logic of progress of freedom from nature, and towards increasing freedom of the will, in which the universal is the measure and end of progress as freedom and reason. The old opposition then between empiricism and free authored and responsible action, is now seen as a dynamic process of becoming more rational toward the universal as the measure of greater freedom. Thus he talks of the notion as opposed to the abstract content and concept. Freedom and right and the process towards emancipation and authentic free underdetermined will, does not so much want to leave nature behind (John McDowell/Robert Pippin debate on Kant and Hegel) as transform nature, that is the natural environment and human sensible nature has to go though a process of being continually sublated, that is transformed, to greater homogeneity flattening the rough ground and connecting though and under the universal as a rule and to come. hand in hand with this the will has to becomes more universally orientated and the scope of its action increased to totality. The whole thing at once equates negative law with science as law, and progress with increasing freedom and widening scope of action though empirical knowledge gradually synthesized and universalised with greater scope.
In this Hegel sees his position as the political "middle ground" mediating and transforming the old tension and conflict between a free subject and free sovereign, the dialectic of say social contract theory. There is insight here, for no one could think that there is really an abstract empirical given measured in a time and place and context that can be easily compared though a relation to another piece of empirical data from somewhere else and another context. Hegel at once recognises (he thinks is against the empiricists and Kant) the difficulty of inter differential comparisons when there is no shared context to act as a flat surface to lay rails between (Critique of Kant on Space and relations), and at once recognises the difficulty of imagining a sovereign that is undetermined by its ground the cost and dependency of its will i.e. its lack of pure determination independent of nature and in accord with the universal.
However this is not really a synthesis of a middle ground, rather it is a "project" to "become" absolute reason the universal absolute freedom and equality. The Universal of the logic of rationalism is not a logical given rule but a destiny and aim and end of progress as absolute freedom. This project obviously as it approaches freedom reason and the universal, will simultaneously involve a flattening of the place between particulars into a space and homogenisation and heteronomy.
So for Hegel, think, the logic of process, of project, of aim, and ends, that at once is a logic destined towards universal law, and progress though science. Two basic measures and moving criteria of the project a Taylorism of increasing efficiency and equality.
Hegel saw problems of resistance to its implementation but various features of the body politic like guilds, and civil society being brought from local common sense, and common law and custom to greater scope institutions with increasingly determining rules, as the "mediation" from communal places towards absolute political space.(there is a very early essay of Marx which is really his notes on this, in which he claims this will not be a synthesis of conflict,, rather the two pre synthesis positions of posited absolute negative freedom and void de contextualised persons, and the idea of an absolute free sovereign will both turn on the civic society in the middle. the old conflict between the individual and the sovereign is now doubled as two conflicts from either side on custom the civil society and institutions. The post Hegelian liberal capitalist and the socialist recognise this but tend to view the problem practically, as needing more carrot, more money, more work, more force. Ironic for a project of freedom, but this engineered sensible inclination, and multiple transnational and intra-national identities been integrated together as they leave their their differences and common places behind for greater GDP to WDP local inequality difference for universal inequality difference. its at once a legal and science and technology project and public and private project with primarily medical science and education as the tools leading the way. indeed science and law as the method becomes the measure and aim of the project. Science and law are to become the absolute sovereignty, which of course is not one and has no one there responsible as author, its anonymous lost traces of responsibility dispersed into a million scientific and legal and economy papers and reports. No one to consent to no contract no substantive legitimacy other than the progress of law and science. The image is of a free person from nowhere moving around the world without friction for greater equality and utility, "governed" by formal international institutions and sub institutions with no one their.
Hegel's historical context was the need for "Germany" to become a unitary State which it did in 1871 to great growth and prosperity by the being of the 20th century. President Grant visited Germany many times in this period. Went on holiday with Wagner. Everyone claims to be anti Hegelian but this is a kind of common philosophical framework now for all battles and the dream of the universal to come kind of ground. It has obviously drawn much criticisms from those who can actually understand it for what it really is.
Thank you for the discussion so far. I have more comments to follow this i hope very soon. his was not a cut and paste but written from memory mostly, so caution in using it, its not a Politics Paper its YouTube comment. Check out my view here before use.
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Part B1. Beginning with a response to gordo6908. When you say a "platonic noble lie" it puts me in mind of the post World War Two American Political Philosopher Leo Strauss's who, influenced by Nietzsche and Schmitt, argued for a return to myth making in politics, against the post war direction of travail to make politics rational scientific and evidence based especially with respect to policy as projects going forward and their justification in terms of them giving objective empirical content to policy by setting measurable future targets.
I think Strauss's view was that the myths ought to be attractive, and involve noble pursuits, so the construction of a kind of platonic attractor some colour and flavour added to the bare "fact(s)" and "forcast(s)". It seemed to me from listening to Struass's lectures and seminars that he felt that Western Liberal Democracy need more that facts and forecasts to present an alternative to the attractions of Communism especially among the young. One view then is Strauss's myths are Platonic constructions or presentations of a unifying image that must at once attract each individual and the whole community. It has been described as supporting the creation(s) of " fiction(s)" by an intellectual elite to feed the herd, while only the elite know its a myth. This might be unfair a criticism, because the knowledge the elite have is primarily scientific, and technical, esoteric but not a distinction between an inner sanctum known reality and public lies. It's a distinction that is not a radical disjunctive but just between what the elate experts know and understand of policy, mostly in terms of science and law and what would be a kind of sales marketing advertising twist on the policy. These are not necessarily disjunctive but locate two ways of projecting a world, making a world, one formally and empirical, the other aesthetic, that are at a moment in time at least conjunctive. I have explored this in terms of the Ancient view of political speech as rhetoric, and its pre modern revival by the late medieval Humanist’s reintroduction of Cicero on Rhetoric. The enlightenment project gradually becomes one of separating science as fact and reason from aesthetics. The image of Hitler’s rise to power being largely due to his rhetorical abilities and his apparent opposition to Stalin’s statistical data based speeches. The communists had the mythical aesthetic vision of constructing a utopia, combined with scientific methods and metrics to measure progress. The far left now just add the focus on the projection of particular predicates like race and gender, and a legal version of economic progress as justice and equality.
It was probably Wilfred Sellars, coming from a Critique of C. I. Lewis, who first proposed that science itself was mythical, in that there was no such thing as a bare “given” empirical fact or a single rule or principle that once “presented” in time and place can “determine” its future and elsewhere, use scope application and interpretation. Sellar’s does then move the discussion into how the nature of logic and language always already shape apparent “given” facts and rules. For Sellars this means an Hegelian science of system in the widest sense is more appropriate than various positivisms. This can be viewed already then as showing that science laws and facts, are not “detachable’s” from language and reason, but rather they forma system. This means to follow Hegel beyond Sellars that it is a myth to imagine we can disentangle science from language and culture and aesthetics in the first place. Rather we must begin “in the middle of things” recognising and making the mythical elements in science “explicit”. It means science and technologies cannot be really abstracted from culture, in origin, inner private, then outer public justification, expression (eg as if a non-aesthetic presentation was possible), construction of a world, and public legitimacy.
I guess the post war socialists and communists realised this too w.r.t. the west. Like Gramskie and Lukas they placed culture and aesthetics high up in the order of priorities for Socialist entry into liberalism. Even the hard line Marxists materialists mechanists don’t think its “just the economy stupid”. This then motivates me to address Johnathan Height’s scientific legal political cultural work here though Nelson Goodman. This because Goodman began working in logic and scientific method especially in the technological sense of science as constructive. He shifts towards the idea that even in science and prediction there has to be a linguistic context a common sense context even of meaning already in scientific inferance. Later he conceives these context laden “constructions” by projected policy, as aesthetic “Ways of World Making”. This inaugurates a shift from thinking of science as “representation” to “projection” of a construction future world. While Sellars did not focus on this it’s clear there are many aspects of Kant that do. That is Kant’s interest in the role of archetypes and in aesthetics. The philosophers of science coming for natural science, mostly ignore this wider cosmological context to Kant, but sociologist and psychologist know that the explanation of action necessarily involves considering agent’s beliefs. Eg to explain the 17th century Witch Trials you need to hold the beliefs of the people then as constitutive of action explanation. But in science taking up common sense language as is often done in politics, they (the scientist and policy projector) can act “between time and place” in cognitively contradictory reasons, the policy projects can both run simultaneously even if cognitively contradictory and w.r.t. to the same person in the same place, at the same time, a priori contradictory due to the projection of more than one time stamped predicate of the person by policy.
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Part 2 Not sure if this addition was taken down or I didn’t post it properly, so I post it again, I think with some removals and addition but not sure
Tom McTague's point at 17:00 mins that Tony Blair is tacitly claiming, or committed to being able to "see into the future" I think is not to be taken as some kind of mystical or pre-cognitive ability, or a hope or a first cause operating by pulling over all of empirical existence. I think this point can be made clear if we turn to a mid to late 20th century Analytical but Hegelian American philosopher Wilfred Sellers.
Sellars problematic is in a nexus of the conflicts he finds himself thrown into, in the/his contemporary philosophy of logic epistemology language science and mind. In "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" he orientates his tradition though Hegel. So raw empirical content "the given" is contrasted with the idea of "a given" rule or law concept that can determine its case alone. The empirical position he takes to be that of logical empiricism, and the rule position he takes as Quine extensional notion of a set operating though the Universal and Existential Quantifiers. So there can be no genuine givens here they are myths. No mind and freedom impacted by laws of nature on the senses can cause assent to judgement, and no rule extension can exist independent of the world and appellation or interpretation in a context. De-mythologizing epistemology though does not mean abandoning altogether but keeping the sense but getting rid of the absolutes. The epistemology framework of mind allows him to combine both the old empirical content and the extension of a rule into the one space or view. The key here is he proposes a different logic that of inference, that can also combine in one shape both these positions, but further it is a dynamic on going process involving necessity and possibility, as well as for Sellers the necessity to bring in laws of nature as the connection in an causal inference between two events. Mind and experience then are dependent on laws of nature within the logic as ground of inferences, but neither Hume Aristotle logic can account for this. rather we move forward though and with a kind of heuristic (my view) closer he thinks to real ordinary first person human reasoning in life than the others. Its claimed by some to be similar to Pierce's "abduction" today this too now has a mechanical analogue I believe with Bayesian Inference which is now the general mechanism of science reason justification and legitimacy. The method for all data. its is of course dependent on political and economic institutions for the data (or Facebook) and computer technology to deal with the data, for predication and action. in this a person is split into predicates that are aggregated and the arrogate then has to refer back to people in some to mediate and be the target of action. There are no empirical givens no universal or single predicate series rules. But now with this the human sense of anticipation and expectation is not operating within a separate and underdetermined nature, rather the order of nature is so constructed necessarily with this as to make the ground rise with the anticipation. So lie George Soros said at inetecon "Paradime Lost: Sympathy for the Devil" you can get to a point in the economy where your capacity is so large you change the very order of economic nature you are acting in. He called it Reflexivity. this is a kind of analogue to Hegel's will dependent and active, as opposed to the pure "I" independent of the world and world of it.
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Part B1: I watched some of the "Future of Britain 2023" talks. They talk about making government more efficient. it has the look perhaps of a foreign policy first, and domestic policy second, that must follow this sphere that determines necessity. The domestic notions that are around necessity, concern first the necessity of domestic legitimacy, as opposed to a legal and economic, notions of international equality and utility maximisation. Domestic legitimacy as opposed to international projects of utility and equality, concerns first notion like promise, duty, trust, contract, consent, as relations between the domestic people and the State. That is domestic consent of the people to the domestic government is de jure priori, but not materially independent of the sphere of international de facto issue of global Internal product and international equality. Existence is not a play of predicates viewed from space, but also it is not a thing its self but in a dependency ration with the foreign. But the conditions of democratic consent are priori to our role under the international constraints.
This can be expressed fairly well though Habermas's notion of a system and Legitimacy Crisis.
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Part B2. Sometimes the anomaly is not the enemy of necessity but it friend. So I watched a piece on Channel 4 News last night about the conservative government record on reducing the number of unassessed asylum claims. The government response to the gap between objective policy target and "anticipation in action" was excused by adding a qualification to the target description "backlog"... that of "legacy"..so target to reduce the legacy backlog".
So, as i said earlier, not only can intention in action be met by the reflexive capacity to have the road rise with the anticipation, it can also have the horizon come down to meet the promise by a qualification.
Here's an analogy: Someone Jim, agrees with Jack, to move the logs from the back of the house to the front of the house by tomorrow. Tomorrow comes and only some of the logs are round the front. Jim says he meant only the logs form last year not this years log as well. Of course last years logs were stored on a back to front inclined slope. Yes these are the ones that were just going tot roll to the front anyway. It might seem a disingenuous, until we realise Jack has his own qualification he is busy, during the night, cutting down more trees, bringing logs from the front to the back, and letting the tires down on Jim's wheelbarrow.
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The question of the retrieval of an ancient "lost" tradition, is set against a 19th and 20th century tradition of just making things up about the past for present psychological, cultural or political purposes. Back then there was a lot of it about apparently for example the issue over whether Gerald Gardner just made up of constructed Wicca as a patchwork out of random ideas he had picked for that purpose. i.e. that there is no possible relation between the present Wicca and pre modern Witchcraft except an attempt to appeal to a tradition of injustice to women by manufacturing a connection between the Witch trials of 17 century during the terror at the end of the 30 Years War. That to claim more than biological ancestry and gender Set membership, that of a "famine" marginal unwritten tradition that "masculine" modernism through medical science was seeking to eliminate. In understanding this it makes more sense to think of it as one of many creative and imaginative feminist political strategies and tactic from the 1970's on wards. Wicca as a supposed retrieval of silent and unwritten beliefs and practices, always looks and sounds more like a tactic of modern and post-modern political feminism trying to claim, against its own modernist origins in Public Right and Government house Utility, as being part of an "esoteric private" ancient tradition. It affords a claim of extreme misogyny from the past that is handed down to the present now and so is a historical injustice, like Colonialism and so on.
The philosophical problem here that there is a incongruence of sense between modern feminist Rights and justice claims and the esoteric tradition that would want to reject those modernist grounds, as disenchantment. Most feminist and Wiccan's are not to bothered by this incongruence, coherence and non contradiction being viewed as a modernist vice of disenchantment. There is one feminist philosopher who has taken this issue on though: Luce Irigaray in "The Speculum of the other Woman". She draws in part on Heidegger the N##I philosopher who is the real driver of the many movements you are discussing, unless they keep silent about their more heterodox influences.
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Two things about the "individual warrior" that seems to be in Nietzsche is it is really a re-representation of Roman Stoicism and Stoic virtues, though medieval Chivalry, not really esoteric at all just old, and not a lost tradition it features in the Arch-Enlightenment/Romantic thought of Kant and taken up by Foucault's in his later work as "care of the self", and is now of interest to capitalist liberals, wanting to use it against the far left, in the way they did with Sartre's individualist existentialism. The men are standardised against, and expected to become, like the old warriors, the virtues of protecting feminine virtues. Good for feminists who want both freedom and protection , but without the cost of giving it over the the political state to mediate it. They want it to be, socially and psychologically, immediate, that is to place it in the hearts of their men. Ever likely this is appealing to both left and right feminists. The forgotten exoteric tradition of men going to war for the women. funny how these left and right aristocratic philosophers always see it as someone else's job to go to war. they'd be Nietzsche's herd i guess guided by people who, won't themselves, be turned into food and clothing.
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The image of the political cultural and virtue layer cake, with each having the norms and virtues associated with their "function" and vice versa, so a hierarchical layering of functions, is in part traditionally Platonic: Gold Silver and Bronze types of people, for separate types of role with norms and virtues. This is not a lost esoteric tradition it is dead and well in exams and qualifications; it is also in part the medieval Catholic uptake of Aristotle and virtue and function. its a very bad reading of Aristotle on the function and the unity of the virtues in his Ethics. The opening of the Ethics is "Every man seeks some good, The Good is that which everyone seeks". it is not be read as a definition or axiom or principle, but as a paradoxical non sequitur. To take Sidewick's view its a compositional fallacy like all people on the road are going somewhere , The "Somewhere" is where everybody on the road is going. reading this as straight assertion lead people to think of a hierarchy of functions, all unified under a single unity goal aim purpose. it modern political versions are: right liberal progress to greater GDP utility and pleasure that requires freedom, and left socialist progress to rights equality justice that will be freedom.
This is not the kind of unity Aristotle had in mind, all the virtues must be exercised together by a rational animal. Eudaimonia is not a temporal progress end as the logical unity supposes but the synthesis of the virtues in an action judged and done appropriate to its context and event.
When Sartre supposedly turned Aristotle on his head with "not essence precedes existence, but existence precedes essence" It cannot be right because he has just reversed a very bad understanding of Aristotle from Aquinas generally.
This new revised view of Aristotle is now common but John McDowell makes this very clear in his discussion in "Mind and World" and in his responses to criticisms.
Its clear in Kant where the "faculties" or Powers" of the mind are multiple some functionary but they must work in harmony and hierarchy can be seen as the enemy of this that leads to transcendent aims (the Just, the Good, the right, the freedom) that are impossible and self destructive.
Kant's Third Critique contains everything here but much more suited to and coherently "expressing" the non place of the inexpressible between reason and the sublime experience of nature as beyond understanding.
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The philosopher to read, for heterodox and radical approaches to politics in the 20th century is Heidegger, and his early work on Being which was his attempt at the destruction of Western metaphysics in his N##I period. Then his later work on freedom and essence and truth, then the main book is a collection of notes "Contributions to Philosophy" which is a nightmare, even in comparison to his other writings. he had a massive influence on the post world war two French far left, and from them to the US left liberals now.
In relation to nature it has some affinities with late 18th early 19th century German Idealism and Romanticism ad so strangely the environmentalist movements at least in terms of not seeing nature as resource for human use which is how they characterised modernity and science and technology from Bacon. Its is also the era that the notion of the Volk emerges out of.
The thing is this turn of Romantic and aesthetic German Intellectuals, is at once a turn and massive expansion of the Universities prior to but seen as essential to the organisation of yet to be unified German State (1871) 200 years after the 30 Years War. This was the result of the need to create a massive civil service for the coming unified State to be, and that the German Aristocracy were the first to realise in Europe, that their power in land was on the way out, and they need to train their kids in Universality in Reason so as to carry on their position in a what they realised was a new social order to come out of the industrial revolution. (Eg as in Marx later of new economics means new social order.) thus the moderns here area continuation by other means of Aristocracy but with better ideological disguise, suitable to the new age. no one will believe "All things bright and beautiful" in this age. So the exclusive aesthetic taste abilities that made them exceptional as the wealthy Aristocracy becomes efficiency accuracy expertise and technocratic morality as law to justified their wealth power and freedom. in the new context to come. So there is continuity here that Marx misses I think, between pre modern and modern.
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The point at 56:00-57:00 mins is spot on. That is really the big difference between modernism and traditionalism, modern think parts can be abstracted out of wholes by analysis and then applied without loss into other contexts. Modernist left and liberal right although moving in different direction both argue on this. if man is finite with a culture that is not reducible to freedom of the individual and/or the project of justice, then we cannot make the abstractions of content rule and law and just transfer/transplant them via some shared infinite rails between stations to somewhere else, then it will lead to unforeseen and metrically invisible problem. Its not like the Western Modernist projects don't think its easy, on the contrary they do think it will be complex and difficult, but then the need for a hierarchy of lots of middleclass highly educated lawyers, teams of educationists and perhaps a paid security detachment.
This would be an anti modernist Critique not of a detail but of the whole cosmology of the programs, the paradigm if you like. This then would be the radical explanation of our problematic times. The left of the 60's thought this way about capitalism from Adorno, but then their revolution is mealy more layers more beurocrat's and more subtle or not so subtle force. So these competing systems and politics did share a basic agreement over modernism for two centuries, but differed as to its shape. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of liberalism now running on in abstraction from its old Socialist competitor globally. The traditionalists are one of many who are Critical of Modernism and want a very different cosmology to Global abstract universal capitalism and global abstract universal socialism. They might see both as infinite projects which then implies not so much infinite nature but infinite human nature rather than Kant's finite human nature. What left and right modernisms are doing then is assume infinite human adaption and de contextualisation after Bacon. It is a possible world but with kind of transparency and frictionless movement that would need to radically reshape humans into this and it's image. There is the sci fi link a kind of living death is presented here, a opposed to finite life. its the modern version of being infinite like God, taking rocket to the heavens. but so far the anti modernists solutions are either cons for decorating the stark substantive economic theories of the left and right, worse than the disease, or only vaguely formed.
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Upto 10:00 mins Gosh!. In what topological universe could May Harrington represent a middle way as opposed to a muddled political agenda of her own. That is, I think, she is a radical feminist who just happens to be critical of trans rights. This, I think, because she believes those rights are employed by misogynists men to enter into feminist private spaces by utilising the social justice left's transgender minority rights of non exclusion. This she implies is case for some, from her interpretation of data set extensions through one to one mappings between sets, but these are associations only, and not support a move to "All" since no necessary relations or essences can be expressed though data set correlations. On women only private spaces Harrington defends, I would say while these are depicted as private spaces they are really sources for public action. As such sources of private data themselves, such an extremely biased private pre selected sample set of the universe is ordinance for public action even though its providence is from a private women's only space.
So any middle ground after the fact, that ignores this pre ontological private bias of public ordinance is actually beginning too late and after the de facto social and psychological engineering of those private spaces of discourse by feminist activists.
In short Harrington is trying to treat her "both sides" as two epistemological standpoints that are equal and we have to wait for 5 years for a court decision if it even gets to court. This attempt at a comparison of two epistemological standpoints though is wrong. Indeed feminist epistemology already considers, primarily though an position of linguistic relativism or standpoint theory, that such a comparison fails to take into account linguistically coded biases and power differences, that feminist theory itself recognises. But we see the linguistic coding bias is already employed by private/public feminist groups as a tactic to bring their data source subject women to "woke collective consciousness" of the ontological priority and separation of Gender difference before the law. That is they employ their own linguistic engineering on their female subjects privately, before they collect the said data and select it for use as public ordinance in a political gender struggle against the Patriarchy. They of course see this as a corrective to ordinary first person epistemic reports that they think are just knee jerk sounds and scribbles of a body that is hopelessly over determined by the super structural ideology of patriarchal capitalism operating though a biased linguistic schema.(see Quine Davidson and McDowell on conceptual schemes in McDowell's "Mind and World" Appendix)
The feminist left being the epistemology with the view of this being already framed or fraught by power differences, which they believe legitimises the prior use of power to redress it. Rather then than thinking you compare two power neutral epistemologies, you are really comparing either: two Hegelian Master/Slave structured epistemologies, the Hegelian view that the whole epistemic thing is firstly about power and conflict between subject and object; or one side has a Hegelian conflict view the other thinks i can have a power neutral openness to the world. Modern feminism has taken on board via Marx and Foucault the Hegelian view of knowledge as first subject to power difference and ontological difference (Heidegger) and conflict. we can take Bertrand Russell's epistemology as the beginning of an attempt at power neutral epistemology. Whereas Hegel talks of the French Revolution, and the metaphysics of freedom and necessary Terror, Russell talks about Othello believes that Desdemona loves Casio. These are really radically different philosophical ontological and metaphysical positionings and can not be compared without much work done first. Certainly feminists understanding the Hegelian power analysis in collecting their private data from their captured subjects, but they try and present it in public as if its a Russell type provenance. problem. Those women groups talk as if they are doing social science but it just power politics and the use of their own subjects for political gain under the guise of care and safety and listening. The subjects must be linguistically corrected by them before they are both accepted as part of the group and allowed to speak their data. I know this both from third hand though public figures who worked in these kind of organisations in the 1970's and 1980's, and from female friends, with no where else to go, who had joined expecting care and got peer group and formal coercion to change their stories into something political useful for the Anti Patriarchy project. I don't even need to talk about the men who's ex's and girlfriends had joined such groups and being "corrected". that is a good thing cos no one will believe their speech coming from a supposedly disgruntled dumped boyfriend with an epistemic standpoint of a position of male power in homelessness.
I thought only the left indulged in "my enemies enemy is my friend".
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Might feminists realise, in their jouissance realisation of the utility of dragging children into their struggle for freedom and equality, that at the same time, the special exceptional status of children, as protected at least from a political world that only recognises force and law as prior, that they risk destroying that special separation. I man they have used utility and equality though a continuum to give the impression, metaphysically, of a smoothing over the distinction of child and adult. It then affords women the same status of vulnerability and so appears to afford an army of institutionally situated women the excuse to apply care exclusively here. Critics of this have gone back to 1960's charges of paternalism of the left, but really its protectors and protected a vulnerability theory of law in Lenin and coming out of Derrida. Linguistically as i recall we had children, and adults. Then we had vulnerable adults, but this was eased by a temporary mediation of "young person" "young adult" "teenager" "age difference" . Legally of age but not morally. One said years ago 19 is still a developing child. With the new materialism of conceptual continuity from Deleuze, all situational affordances tactics of Foucault and the undeconstructionable Justice in Derrida, that we can no longer talk of children as a non political category. Indeed the dark political tetrad of Deleuze Foucault and Derrida arrived at this conclusion in 1977 i think and reflexed "their" signature names to it. Of course they are not agents responsible for this: agency intention responsibility and distinct categories are a mixture of traditional and modernist ideology. This was not an anomaly or jsut a French thing, for its the destiny of the whole political orientation, they jsut had to keep it implicit by not educating people in logic inference and process. see John Searle v Derrida "Signature Event Context" "Ltd Incorporated" and Philip Pettit John McDowell (edit) "Subject Thought and Context" especially John McDowell's "Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space". The left might now never reference these three and only talk about Feminist and anti Racists and Post Colonialists but, you see just like the screaming dead soldiers as the victims of the from the first Women movement, so there must be silent victims of this post modern philosophy too. Who has ever gone into that. The feminists must ask with Foucault Derrida and Deleuze is this a good anti men affordance or do we risk loosing it all by cutting off the branch they are sitting on. There was an extremely anodyne book on N##I Germany and "intellectuals going along with the holocaust" they conveniently escaped causal responsibility you see no agency even for intellectuals. This is because its left intellectuals who wrote the books and they aren't gonna whistle blow on their mates, their class, their power. And so it geos on exculpated middleclass intellectuals. when they have destroyed the distinctions of traditions and legitimacy crisis happens they just move to a city and university in another country. where they do their job of attacking tradition and the poor there. No consequence just move 'em on like problematic Catholic Priests and Health Care Staff.
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Part B2: A couple of provisional examples:
John before 18 years old is a child. After the date “t” of his 18th birthday, he is an adult. Why can we not project the first predicate forward and retroact the second predicate backwards.
After 1990 and the 1970’s music revival, I tested the retro DJ’s by asking for David Essex’s “We’re gonna make you a Star. Non ever did have it in their record and then CD collections with them. But then one day in 2020’s I went up to DJ and asked and he said he could play me anything I could possible think of. That was of course because he was hooked up to the internet and had no CD’s or records. Technology does involve loss as well as gain: both creation and destruction.
David Essex "We're Gonna make you a Star" was a criticism of exploitation probably sexual in the music business in early 1970's. He was introduced on Top of the Pops probably by Jimmy Savel. Before the Jimmy Savel scandal broke the BBC organised "Child Line" where children were encouraged to call the BBC about possible abuse.
Another philosopher who has focused on language and naturalism in science is Steven Pinker during his work at Harvard. We have good idea of the underdetermination of laws and policies from the Pinker's Wikipedia page, as well as the fact that the scientist might not know what their work might mean for someone in the future, or a t worse not be trusted. We know this though the internet.
Its ever likely that the mainstream media and he experts want to protect children from "knowledge" of the amorphous abuse that goes on. So amorphous that the media and elites want to stop access to such knowledge. Might it not be the fall out from these abuse cases and the "stranger danger" that is the reason for so called "mental illness" in children. The apparent association between the rise of mobile phone technology and "depression" might be more to do with the fact that it was the rise of mobile phone type technology that enabled children and parents knowledge of what was going on in these so knowledge gathering and caring institutions as opposed to waiting for those institutions to come into the Platonic light of Truth by their own volitions. People are depressed because they know what the elits are about now...themselves and their own class, this cuts across political divides.
Maybe they think the kids should call BBC Child Line or the organisation and funding source for Pinker's work at Harvard.
This is just the tip of the Ice Berge in to understating the political cultural aesthetic context of Haidt's "science and evidence". And if the argument is made to "protect" children from harming themselves, why would begin a child limit the scope of the policy wrt to its reason. From my habit of watching politics and policy one thing i can project into the future is the policy is much wider in scope and tendentious aims than the immediate facts evidence and policy rule claims. this deceit is called the art of politics. Mobile phone technology has helped us all to see what is really going on in a way that mainstream media or academics would never do. And its not pretty and is rather pretty depressing. The truth can be ugly for us and de legitimising de authorising for the elites. The solution though is not to stop the depression on patronising health grounds, grounds also constructed by more medical elites. it not been pleasant to find the myth of our betters our superiors our elates as all good and all just all caring for those bellow them is false. But surly it is only the elites who would feel better about ways of constructing a world in which the light of science and technology shines only on those bellow them. Mobile phones are a millions million little lights pointing all over the place, distracting, and disrupting, and so on but also they can upwards to illuminate the myth and the myth makers. Delete the BBC report abuse line speed dial for starters. it seems the BBC use these sorts of technologies to get some "ordinary person" to "speak out" some first person narrative of horrors about something as if its evidence for a policy they must have already been working on anyway for what ever clandestine or double effect reason. I talked above about the scientific turn in politics followed then by the aesthetic turn. They talked about the lefts jurisprudential turn in politics, but its now the Media/Jurisprudential turn, as it jsut like a mini unchallenged courts evidence for policy. Mobil phones are the matter of common sense against scientific legal media cherry pinking Bayesian inference.
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