harvey young
The New Culture Forum
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Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Will Young Tories Make the Conservative Party Properly Right Wing? Are Right-Wing Youth Alienated?" video.
My view of the very general left construction for policy is centred around linking Bayesian economic rationality, with far left revolutionary "transcendental empiricism". The later TE was Deleuze's innovation in "Difference and Repetition". Here there is a strategy of gradual process change by differential degree increment. It means that what were "traditional categories in a political body can be seen as just variations in a continuum. So family, friends, community, country, are now just contingent smooth variations in a basic material ground. Later they called it a "body without organs". For the left of course any traditional boundaries and distinctions are contingent, historical, and the product of exploitation and asymmetric power, and to be smoothed over under an international world perspective of people. Much of the attack by the left on naturalisms is because the above categories have a tradition that grounds them in nature. The problem for the right was that thy made the account of "nature" evolution and quasi like laws of nature, which then also sees the categories as accidents and contingent. indeed much of the motivation for me to get moving on this was watching the right go on and on about evolutions and naturalism cos i knew it was a trap they set for you to walk into.
Wanting to distance "nature" from this "bare nature" and from nature as individual right, can end up in a theory of natural law, which goes back though Aquinas to Aristotle and Plato. it modern version is form Virtue Ethics like Anscombe maybe and Philippa Foot and the account of facts as ought's if natural facts understood in the natural law tradition ie no is/ought gap against R M Hare.
Now Deleuze shows how a differential materialism or empiricism allows migration of concepts or perhaps spread across what are now variable regions. Concepts are determined not by definition or form but by micro differences on the ground and so categories can be removed by so many small "subliminal" movements on the ground. How to do this political is left open but it is clear to me since i was at the big Bayes Conference launch in 1990ish, that Bayesian rationality also allows inference to migrate across what most would think are non porous, closed frames of scope. So for example in modal terms what is "possible" and "necessary" now, sets limits of policy as rational eg justification. but once a policy move is made then the "possibility" and "necessity" shift, and so each step forward allows new steps previously impossible to be possible and thing necessary to become contingent. it s complex version of say pushing the Overton window.
So if little Jimmy at home with his folks is doing badly at school, they can say for his education in an international standing eg correct view of rights and equality of opportunity, he should be taken off to a State boarding school for his own good. No one ever says internal rights trumps family rights, they now don't need to they just expand the scope and abstraction of individual rights into all categories as criteria of success and efficiency and so find them all except the State, wanting. The tool of equal opportunity in the global world of human rights, is enough to eradicate the family by degree and so a traditional biased so called "natural formation" the family, dissolves or is sublimated into the State. the only reason given is equal opportunity: eg parents do you want your children to be held back by you from there right to the future prosperity .kind of like boarding school and jobs for the de-parented "parents", they might be classed as "natural care givers" or first givers of primitive animal type care. indeed there are many similarity between Deleuze and the standpoint of Thatcher/Regan neo liberalism, which she had difficulty in holding back the effects of individualism over family community etc.
in terms of objective evidence based policy the data will, show improvement in exam results, and attachment to left wing values etc. the loss of the family and the numbers of measurements for everything will not be measured here as losses.
Trouble is the "Family of man" is not a family but a tyranny of a multitude of ideologues in offices with at best indifference or at worst all the vices of power and an absolute ideology of rights and wrong. Any resistance will be silenced and explained by "change is difficult". Talking or questioning them is met with a wall of deflections and attacks of accusations of arrogance conceit, maleness, aggression and taking up other peoples time, costing too much, "catastrophic thinking" and "oppositional defiance disorder". I've been on both sides for 15 years seen both sides. These people are unfit to care for anybody. anyway all the silenced scandals of the children of the north seem to teach them...nothing. Still they carry on with conceit and self claimed legitimacy. Man do i have stories i can't repeat anywhere. they will, do a big media on bad parents a and interview little jimmy, talk about falling crime rates, but hide their own crimes from the metrics of course.
Look we know already these politicalised institutions and there political and anti men attitude often do not end well for the kids in their care. There is no material metric for trust.
Problem is conservativism cannot copy any of these methods say by substitutions of a few names and references. If you don't get this would be absurd i don't know what to say. I means must i prove it in Bayesian rationally or something.
I'm working on an answer Evens question but from the point of view of bias, its not easy, but crucial here.
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@user-we2qv1cx6x He is a clown, but in the French sense of being a profound and clearly consequential clown. On myself and where I am coming from, that is is whole other story of chance events and course and friends.
Basically, I approach political questions, disagreements and hopefully policy, questions though a dialectical method of finding an orientation, which is my take from Kant. So from there the far left and the far right, and a certain traditionalism that seek a ground in the past, become positions of abstractions, but opposing abstractions. So in disagreements both left and right have taken up opposing absolutist type positions of abstractions from judgement. They both then make a similar but opposing faced errors of reason. It is most evident in our habit of deferring judgement to experts of one kind or another eg different sides prefer different sciences. (this is similar to Wilfred Sellars)
My job is to try and diagnose these errors of judgement in public reasoning, which means i do not really ever declare my onw judgement on a position , but try to show problems with them and to get people to make responsible judgments on their own (this is take from Wittgenstein).
It turns out though that a certain kind of conservative orientation seems the correct orientation for this to me. So I Critique the left and the right the liberal and Statist versions and mixtures of both. But I find myself learning towards an conservative orientation from my work. i would say this is correct, but that's just what someone like me would say, I guess.
My background was physics and maths degree in 1980s, history and philosophy of science ands then philosophy courses mostly Analytical Philosophy in the 1990's, followed by 10 years as a post graduate in a Continental Philosophy department. It was here that i began work on Deleuze in 2001 mostly "Difference and Repetition" and "The Logic of Sense". Others there were focused on Deleuze, and in conversations we explored it for many years, but for me, being heavily into Kant by then, i wanted to bring him down. In some ways a prototype of Deleuze was kicking around at Kant's time Spinoza. But the debate after Kant was on Kant V Jacobson Jacobi something like that that in very early 1800's. Its good that Deleuze wrote and lectured exclusively on Kant and Hume so we have his explicit viewed on this issue already.
I guess i don't need to tell you Deleuze is a neo Marxist materialist the metaphysical ground or his other two legs to the stool, Foucault and Derrida.
Thanks for the question i hope this was an interesting if very thin in detail a reply.
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@user-we2qv1cx6x I've added a bit to this for Novara Media and so i post it here if your are interested.
I posted some stuff on a New Culture Forum program recently, and someone replied, where are you coming from, meaning was I of the Right or the Left? After my usual foray into some philosophy, I said something like I am closest to a conservative position because i thought it was correct and it also allows us to to see Left and Right as both abstractions from this but facing in opposite directions. I should have stressed that i certainly didn't begin as a conservative say from some other reason or out of habit or self interest, and then go on the hunt for some philosophy to justify this political orientation. My positioning as conservative here is due to work done many years ago on Wittgenstein's later philosophy before I knew its political implications. It began, i think, with the so called "private language argument" and the critiques of private sense data and individual rule following in the Philosophical Investigations, reading this in late 1980's and early 1990's, mostly then using the late 1970's and early 1980's Open University Course books on Wittgenstein. It is a reading of this work that led me with reading Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, John McDowell, to what are classed as Communitarian political thinkers. As was common at the time i had linked Wittgenstein's "method" to transcendental arguments and so to reading of Kant's refutation of idealism.
So when i wanted to discuss contemporary politics i wanted to use this sort of approach to Critique political positions philosophically. That then already made me coming from a roughly conservative position, not on specific policy but a kind of philosophical conservative orientation. I was as surprised as anyone to realise I was really in a philosophical conservative orientation. I mean I had been, and still was, voting labour in the 1990's and 2000's.
I have made no secret of this, everybody who has suffered reading my comments ought to know this. Its too easy to jsut say "He's a Conservative so attack him", but that is to get the cart before the horse, the philosophical conservative position was arrived at, i feel by reasoning and orientation alone. The label "Conservative" is a private matter a voting event, to an extent, i think and certainly must be within agreement of various public policies, to the extent they are understood. Just how conservative a Conservative party is a judgement not just on policy but its basis and ground of reasons, it world view, its philosophical stance on the human and so on. Conservatives are philosophically closer to me than Liberal Right or just x-Right and left or Left. Indeed it is not impossible for the Left and Right to be reoriented to a small c conservativism, but this would require a radical shift in the grounds of justification and legitimacy of policy not just a change in policy. The first political book proper I read was "Red Tory" by Phillip Blond, which had some coherence to my conservativism, but much agreement with the Critiques of liberalism and socialism there. I must also say i was influenced by Adam Curtis's documentaries, but was already something of a Critique of disenchantment, which could also be seen as conservative back then, but now its pretty universal in policy orientation but w.r.t the environment first not people. That is situated as a problem about nature more than specifically human nature.
I am going to try and state my position here from Wittgenstein, but in this the notion of policy turns out to not be something derived after the philosophical position is expressed, rather the expression of the position comes from with the policy and policy possibility and necessity. There thus is not any clear cut distinction between theory or philosophy and practice or application of policy. This is the orientation that does not make an ideology/theory and application/practice distinction in this way. rather we being within the context that we are in finding human limits in relation to policy systems in the most extensive sense. That is to race to the conclusion: that political legitimacy and political judgement as needing consent, can by linked to justification as ground of consent. In this day and age the legitimacy/justification ground is science or various competing sciences, and policy as practice even pragmatically determined. This is called evidence based rational policy, and the sciences appealed to as mediation and ground between legitimacy and justification. That is as if we can all agree at all levels and categories of institutions and life, in the science. Problem is science is causal in practice, which actually means the subjects are treated as objects to be moved by scientific instruments and apparatus causally. This though is a kind of transcendental undermining of its own conditions of possibility. that is the grounds of policy in science and a scientific image of man (Wilfred Sellers), is contradictory or in an apparent opposition to the very ideas of justification and legitimacy. Consent involves some notion like freedom, or at the very least some limit on the use of science in politics.
So the "private language argument" is not evaluated and interpreted by me and then applied to ideology theory and policy, rather "private" must already be in a political categorical sense like Kant's amphiboly of the concepts of reflection in the CPR takes certain concepts as fundamental and irreducible to all else. My view is in contrast to this science as it is recognises no limits or boundaries everything is at the same level really with only regional and contingent differences of quality and degree that can be smoothed out by the Right or the Left politically i.e. the human can be smoothed out to consent, but not that is consent to be smoothed out, that is a performative policy contradiction at level of ground and justification not merely at an epistemic detail. From science to left via metaphysical closure and openness. Now I ought to be more clear with arguments and so on from many years ago.
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