Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "David Starkey: Starmer Will Now Impose a New Constitution on Britain" video.
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Part A1: Up to 5:00mins in. I've got to say I'm shocked at the result. I do agree reluctantly I suppose, with the narrative that is forming now, that the conservatives and maybe Reform too, collectively lost as opposed to labour winning when it comes to the inner details of the divisions of votes in each constituency, and by comparison with previous election results. That is: the conservative vote split between conservatives and reform on on the one hand, and that the labour votes by which they won was less often than in elections they have previously lost. Indeed it seems the left have being able to greatly limit the possible electoral effects of split in there vote over Gaza for example.
The "conservatives lost" narrative: on the on hand is not used by Reform, rather they claim it is evidence for a progressive alternative movement, political party and organisation to the Conservative Party with its base, while on the other hand, the Conservative Party have not used this as an excuse, rather they blame themselves in terms of not listening to their base and not delivering i guess crucially, we can say now, on Brexit and its common sense meaning in terms of achieving serious immigration control in general. We have to say that during this time, post Brexit vote, The Conservative party were beset by a series of highly extra ordinary external events such as covid, and the ability of the left to construct an oblique post 2008 financial Crisis narrative from MeToo and BLM. This allowed the left to attack sovereign inequality for example, in more extra sovereign terms such as very closely to with the US left ideologies and the Planet as the base of inequality mediated by an international standpoint on anti racism and Colonialism and its past. In this the left were able to marshal people protests with high level instituional interventionist power choosing the law and its institutions for its primary praxis.
I have to say, I imagined people would see these extra democratic practices, if at least not illegal but though legal methods, for what they are: attempts to derail the aspirations of Brexit with street protests, Union collusions for political purposes, and the disturbing activity of high level civil servants. Indeed it has felt like labour have been in power for a while now if not actually democratically elected, have taken many of the locals councils too in this intervening period. It has come as a shock to me then that reflection of the so called conservative failure in office, has not resulted in an interpretation of the lefts use of manifold extra democratic practices to derail the governments capacity and capability, and so to punish labour for this, but rather to continue to support them regardless. It smells of a tacit justification more muscular notion of political legitimacy, along with an embrace of tacit rejection of general acceptance of the deliverances of democratic decisions as legitimate as well as justified, and establishing a ground of agreement and limits to what is conventionally and traditionally regarded as the space of freedom to Critique and react. In short the democratic tradition involves recognition of the results of an election, even by those who loose, respecting the public’s collective “decision”. In radically shifting these limits the left have practiced broadly a politics that sees democratic elections mere shifts in who are in the primary control and rule making, while a politics of conflict then is continued and treats an election not as an agreement and recognition even but as a mere shit in rules and call to re triangulate the politics of conflict. I thought people would be more attuned to this radical difference in the approach to politics and democracy and reject it, but they have not. It is not considered a higher principle of difference between radicals and conservatives. It was debated in its modern form first from contrasting Hegel and Marx conflict thesis with Kant and Conservatisms in early 19th Century Germany. Maybe though people have also felt that the conservatives as the Conservative Party and Reform have had little to say about inequality in General choosing to Critique MeToo BLM and the particularly the more bizarre positions of LGBTQ+ issues. In this I was reminded of some aspects of American politics to try and fight and turn a whole election on one suitably chosen “moral” issue. Indeed while the neo-liberal conservatives have now been ousted from many seats, neo-liberalism with its neglect of problems of inequality seems alive and well with Reform at the moment at least. They choose to avoid this issue by Critiquing the lefts current given schema of feminisms and anti-racism post colonialisms for Social Justice with the sovereignty.
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Part A2: One thing is certain and important though going forward Conservatism is “origined” in a paradoxical way. Peoples views their language and reason as laden with context and tradition has always been there. A long tradition from Ancient Greece sees this as a self-understanding event though only on encounter at the edges with other groups views languages and traditions. But this is not really the origin of Conservatism for me: rather Conservatives is found in reflection not w.r.t. other groups but w.r.t. the vary board and expanding world view and project constructions of the Enlightenment and its sciences and laws. Conservatism “comes to be there” or “find itself as being there” only after reflection on science and law and institutions and projects. Indeed it is the scientific and legal point of view that then subsequently class wrongly and incongruently such reflective self-awareness from contrast to science and law as mealy so many relativisms and subjectivism that are contained under and with a high scientific and legal vocabulary. But of course this is a myth, the scientific an legal point of view, is not transcendent, its proponents do not have a gods eye view of the world or hold a mirror within which to reflect it, they are just the people who work in institutions that have the mechanics of various logics to play with though which to affect our lives and re construct our world.
Conservatism then is bound up in itself with Reflective not immediate self-understating with contrast to science and law. But these are not disjunctives and so it’s not a case of making an enemy or opponent of science and law, either as a rallying cry for popularist movements forward or environments retreat from politics backwards. Conservatism finds itself in its history in its long conversation with science and law. Politics has to operate though these of course that then foregrounds the practical aspect of this paradox that a conservative party it seems must act though and with public science and law, while holding a certain ironic attitude to its scientific claims of truth. Scientific and legal private Justification and public legitimacy are not the same thing.
Anyway one consolation is that Ian Duncan Smith is not going into dignified retreat just yet. Back in 2010-2013 I spent most of my efforts opposing the Universal Credit system he introduced within the Coalition government. I ended up actually, a subject of the very same system I had critiqued after 2013, with both good and bad experience of people and institutions there. What struck me about IDS though was unlike most other ministers who spends couple of years in post before moving on, he stayed and saw it though for the whole time. Probably something to do with responsibility. In deed Universal Credit allowed for much simpler and effective system of support during and after Covid than the previous system would have.
Hay back, in 2013 I would have been laughing at the Conservatives loss, but I’m not laughing now.
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Part B3: on Keir Starmer's language i agree with Emma Webb, he is trying to turn the woke ideology into a unchallengeable position. That is to express it in terms referencing closer to a purely mathematical logical material prior schema of content of difference, rather than the post modern identity turn that takes social identities and difference as the basic conceptual if not categorial basic schema. The idea seems to be that we can givnen an account of economic inequality first from pure numerical content and then after make generalisations "decisions" about the best conceptual boundaries that schema these difference for policy directedness. So for example we might just measure a lot of individuals in terms of wealth, and then look at their idenety "predicates" and place and time projections and say fore example generally people with cats are poorer than those with dogs. this goers back a long way to Plato and mathematics and "cutting nature at the joints". This as an ancient ancestor was worked on at Oxford some years ago in the "Power and Ancient Ontology" series, and taken up also in contemporary analytic philosophy as metametaphysics. In a way Baysain approaches to mass data with computer Algorithms could be said to be a technology for this project. A technology for an anti "Form and idea Platonist" but pro pure Mathematical Platonist. i found this later anti Idealist anti "Republic" Platonism in Plato's lesser known writings on the forms.
What doesn't change though is the logical and architectural cosmology of the syllogism of the Sovereignty in the Planet. Where the boundries are is still a decision even if hidden behind technical data and computer algorithms, that make it appear non subjective and impersonal and detached. Maybe though like Dominic Cummings use of this for the Referendum campaign, maybe a data set of those in instituional public power doing policy and those that are not will show a difference at the joints. Those in power are not transcendent, but neither are they like any ordinary idenety difference among empirical identities and differances.
you know the algorithm might determine white men as a worse off group form purer data, but this might be unlikely when you compare them too all the new arrived immigrants wealth, and the masses of poor on the Planet and their racial identity groups.
Whereas Badou talks of the empty set, i talk of no real zeros and no real infinities.
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Additional note added Sunday 07 07 24.
Robert Jenrick on the Laura K show looking back and reflecting on the Conservative defeat said the problem is we need to listen to people and deliver on our promises. But his "diagnosis" of what this means in practice is more of a focus and grounding of conservative Politics in Principles and following principles. So the diagnosis "is" that they failed to deliver in practice what they claimed on principle. So by this: issues of general inequality or low living standards of the less well off and mass immigration, while proposed as policy were not delivered, thus policy proposals for these might be expressed as principle there is the additional, or meta principle: to deliver on your principles. I think he is being a bit too abstract here. the failure to deliver expressed as a outright denial or forgetting of the prior particular principle and as a denial of the principle to hold to principles is much better understood in terms of: external quasi natural factors or at least beyond the simple control of a politics, and internal quasi legitimate forces that is left political action from Covid on wards to destabilise the capacity and capability of the government to deliver on policy eg to stick to its principles and the principle of principles. This for me the problem was not a case of simply ignoring or forgetting the principle as might be expressed as a change from [must] "follow P" to [must Not] "follow P", or [must] "not follow P" or [must] not "follow P" which can become by slight of conceptual hand a principle to do everything against or opposite to P. that results in a meta principle paradox if we try to make not following P or do anything other than P into a meta principle for now there is no meta level either anything goes or we have a meta principle like "do not follow principles" which then invites do not follow principle including this one.
This is weak diagnosis to imagine the conservative party held its self to action under an alternative Principle or negation of its principles. No, events prevented them, rather than an intention to act against their principles. Maybe though Jenrick is already making the first moves to realign conservativism towards the left, in terms of inflating the role of high level and abstract general principles. indeed he does this in tandem with a proposal for getting away from "soap opera politics". In this he means to deflate the already thin notions of responsibility intention agency authorship and wit them the human arm of logical principle the promise the duty the contract and so on. it requires much analysis to show where character and the virtue fit in or not as the case maybe. Indeed is it a long left and socialist tradition to think and act in terns of institutions rules and logic, at the expense or neglect of more think concepts of value and the good wrt to actual people. Imagine though what it could possibly men to act in opposition to virtue or to treat anther as being in opposition to virtue. this shows the incongruences of conflating and mixing up the semantics of principles and the Semitics of character. With this confusion in the tool box the lelt can go after their chosen enemies as if they are in vice, and can exculpate themselves from responsibility in their institutions.
In short Jenrick has walked right in to the Hegelain trap of thinking contextual and indexical situations can be interpreted without real loss of content and quality in terms of complex nested rules and principles and their subtraction by mediating quality into quantity. Vice and virtue becomes man in the state of nature and man in an office in a state of affairs.
In my advice to Jenrick I would recommend reading a short piece of Hegel's "Science of Logic" (Trans. A.V Miller (1969) "With what must science begin" (69-78) and "General Division of Being" (pg 79-80).
Hay its only like 10 pages, and if you like this sort of thing join the Labour Party and sublate your soul.
This is part of a response to Novara Media but i post it here first. you're welcome. Enjoy the next five years of the Hegelian Experience of Schematizing Without a Concept. Close your eyes and open you audit books.
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Appendix Part 3: “Thus, the valet can always reduce his employer’s high-minded avowals of good will to base intentions operating in the background without contradicting any observable facts. The uncharitable valet need not see his employer as consciously deceptive, but only the subject of deeper causal mechanisms masked by his conscious self-ascriptions of noble intent. I might not consciously decide to take up the rake with adulterous intent, but nevertheless that might be what is motivating me simply as a part of animal existence. The valet sees his employer not as a hero (a bona fide, self-conscious agent) but as a material being “who eats, drinks, and wears clothes,” and therefore there is no reason to privilege the employer’s stated intentions of his actions over the sorts of causal etiologies that can be given of those same doings (PS, ¶665). Once again, contingency has crept in between the act and its normative explanation. That is, there is no necessary connection between my avowal to be out to please my spouse and my actually being so moved. If there are other explanatory etiologies in the vicinity (and our understanding of human nature certainly suggests that there are), then we can plausibly explain my action in terms quite contrary to my own preferred view.” (Madden pg 6)
“In a number of places Robert Brandom interprets Hegel’s valet as a prescient literary type for later 19 th and 20 th century genealogists, such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and their ilk. Brandom’s genealogist claims that “when what we fondly believe to be reasons are unmasked, all that remains is blind causal processes. Those processes have taken the guise of reasons, but in fact yield nothing more than rationalizations. Genealogy in its most radical form seeks to dispel the illusion of reason.” If Brandom is correct that we should identify the valet as a global genealogist i.e., all of the employer’s discourse can be reduced to the workings of a natural etiology, then we should take him as claiming that the employer’s discourse is nothing more than subterfuge. That is, the claim is not only that the employer could be seen acting for less than laudable motives, but that he actually is so acting because these basic material etiologies are well-confirmed and trump whatever else we might have to say about ourselves. The valet would not merely say that “For all we know, Madden is just out to impress the woman next door,” but instead “Madden is just out to impress the woman next door, because that’s how we know human beings really operate.” (Madden pg 7)
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Appendix Part 3: I think perhaps the notion of service in contrast to Duty might mean this kind of hermeneutics of suspicion, as Richour puts it, permeating the agents phenomenological attitude and disposition to their patents. there si a dualism here of the publicly observable, eg by behavioural science (c.f Gilbert Ryle) and law (the public realm) and its underdetermining of meaning on the one hand; and the private subject on the other. Such a subject is deemed in terms of Behavioural risk (where Baysian possibility equivocally becomes Aristotelian intentional potentiality) and the need for law to access the private sphere ( eg the added commandment not to covet in addition to public acts assessable to law).
If indeed the New Left have turned away from postmodernism and the French, then they may well intend to move forward and back to the post Critical Speculative Scientific Legalistic World View. The view of Hegel and modern science and law in Speculative Realism.
If this is the case then all your Critique and writings on post modernism will only be useful as historical Critique. Better sell 'em all on E-Bay to make room for a new section of your library "Speculative Realism Theology and Communism".
As well as it allowing an escape for the left from the advetn of more post modern Critique of Critique, it also is more appropriate to shift to the reverence of the scientific and legal once in power in Western Modern Civilisation". Another reason that will need to be addressed by conservatives as well is many of the groups opposed to Western Liberal Capitalism and Social Justice such as: the Iranian Revolution and the rise of Political Islam, and President Putin some years ago at least, with Ahmad Fardid and Alexandar Dugin, respectvily, both draw their inspiration from the later works of Heidegger. Works in which Heidegger called for a reawakening of tradition against the march of modernism science and law.
So if the left return to science and law and leave the Heideggerian postmodern and Heideggerian neo theological conservatives behind, then they do break with previous alliances theoretically and ideologically. But the re-turn to science and law eg mental illness behavioural psychology risk and law as tools, this is from the frying pan into the fire.
Its correct to describe Dugin and Fardid as conservative, but it just means that Conservativism needs to discover itself, or better, themselves not just in reflection contrast to science and law but in reflection contrast to Heideggerian Politics of "Ereignis" (Event).
I though worked on this stuff some 15-20 years ago, it is the Heideggerian Politics I wanted to avoid as well as disenchantment, that's why i turned to focus on Wittgenstein, Tom Nagel, Bernard Williams, and McDowell.
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