Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "The Police Have Turned Their Back On The People -- Former Detective on UK Police" video.
-
At 9.00 mins Peter Bleksley quotes Hertzog "The world declares its self to those who travel on foot". I wrote the following response today for The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters "Britain is a Madhouse" program from 2 days ago. My comment there fits well here too so i repost it below.
(Note the contrast between looting water and taking it due to dying of thirst is implicit below in terms of reflex verses reasons. it goes back to medieval natural law on theft and necessity.)
Post to Lotus Eaters bellow.
if you want to understand the riots in terms of some kinds of collective or associative grand political legitimacy, then it seems to me that at the very at least: any individual involved must be able to reason, that is justify, a relation between their own act and a political aim, whether that is to stop something that is going on, or to produce something new, or indeed as is often the case, both. That said then i would struggle to reason steeling water or setting a building on fire as explained by reason of "protecting our children". You know imagine an abstract situation where you can actually ask the looter "Why are you steeling that water", and they would have to say i guess "To save our children"! I have used the same argument against the far left with resect to the atrocities in Israel of October 7th.
Now someone might respond that the steeling water type act not semantically and justificatory and so legitimately related to the political aim, rather they might say its one small even subliminal micro force contribution among many to a sublime nexus of forces bungled together towards a single cause. This approach, ironically is the general philosophical orientation of the far left as revolutionary materialism. In this it is force or collective organised micro forces that cause change, that the human and the political is moved by force rather than reasons. there is a partial model for this in David Hume: as democracy a machine for bringing together multiple forces and resolving them into a one direction policy. Here though the forces are kind of blind aggregate of self interested acts and reason is the instituional act of there resolving it all into one direction. The problem is the individuals here are painted in by numbers and for each the relation to the final act is not direct but mediated by some schema of resolution in the institutional nexus. There is a disconnect of responsibility here too. The idea of conflict politics as forces in opposition is central to Schelling's dynamic equilibrium of forces model. But now the connection of political act to an individual is not jsut about internal resolution of forces but also in dynamic with an opposing resolution from a political opponents own internal resolution of forces. This can create odd micro relations such as a between two opponent institutional resolutions A and B, person in group A resolution, and a person in group B resolution might find they agree more with their opponent than they do with their group and their group's resolution act. This might be due to the complex collections of aims for any individual and how these are abstracted by the institutional schema to get to one act. you can see how the relation between individual choice micro forces into a single instituional force looses much of the chain of responsibility. indeed democracy thought of as a system for resolving forces, does create gap of responsibility too.
A real risk here is when the very democratic schema of resolution between groups A and B is seen as mere forces or the result of forces. You know in old left parlance "Who's democracy? Who's schema of resolution? That is when the resolution system is not recognised or when a "winner" is not regarded as recognised as legitimate by the looser. there is a sense that in democracy the event of a vote ceases the play of forces into a resolution and policy that all agree to respect, as opposed to it been a mere move in the ongoing play of forces. You know politics as continuous war by other means.
Key to a recognised resolution as opposed to a de facto caused contract under duress is the sublation of the violence and force approach into agreement with the new resolution rules. Now i grant you that the far left have much grater recognition of the degree of freedom in the use of force than the right, and this makes it look asymmetrical or unfair. But this is to compare apples and pairs. The far left have got to this point of recognition because of work started by Derrida Foucault and Deleuze in 1968. Since then a world wide army of intellectual have developed these ideas, spread them though academia and into the media and politics over a period of 50 years. During the concluding footsteps of that "long march" in the 1990's I studied Analytical Philosophy and partied. We never really took Derrida and Foucault seriously enough to bother properly Critiquing them.
So when we see say the police "take the knee" for BLM but not a British march, people think the "difference" is just instituional bias or a reverse racism etc. But the difference is really the 50 years of academic work and entry into the institutions, while cleverly keeping their own internal conflicts of forces resolved by "intersectionality schemas". This amounts to a new version of the constitution, but not due to blind force but massive intellectual power the gradual growing of of substantive base and many a sharing of pitcher's of patience. You cannot mimic street protest of the left now. Its like thinking a few people kicking down the streets is like an army walking on stilts.
People temporarily resolved into a riot is not a solidarity of revolution. The verbs and adverbs of the acts and forces are incongruent.
1
-
1
-
At 33.00 mins The police are criticised for not knowing the communities they police, and following the academics on legislation and procedure or policy, and the academics don't know the realities of policing or the communities either. But many academics don't know the wide intellectual context of their work either. One reason for this is the pragmatic turn in philosophy and methodology of subjects. Its turned research away from the wider context of its origin, and towards a project approach. ie You do research just by giving some particular aim or outcome of a project in the already accepted paradigm frame, and then taking an existing method and applying it to the task. There is little reflection and Critique and context only whether its works and how well. This of course has the effect of insulating each subject area from others, and so pear review becomes wholly internal matter, and they create their own Journal and publish this stuff. Around 20 years ago the issue of siloed subjects it seemed was taken on by the left in academia, an they talked a lot about "interdisciplinary" work but this was not reflective and Critique from other subjects but rather the application of other approaches applied to new subjects. You know Marxist methodology applied to theology will not be about Marxists reflecting on their material view of human nature, rather it will be about finding things in theology to Critique with Marx and then a project to change the theology.
The Right used to say the left intellectual were devoid of real world knowledge and practice they did only theory in their ivory towers. This has not been the case since the 1970's. All they have been doing for decades is how to stuff, community theory and praxis and so on.
Academics have always had a thing for levels of theory and hierarchies of principles that can be used to structure and organise many disciplines. The ethical organisation of the Victorian era failed, then the idea of pure empirical content, then the idea of hierarchy of nature was replaced by hierarchy of semantics and logic eg confirmation and justification methodology and now to Rights and empirical content we have a moral legal attempt at unifying and organising the disciplines into hierarchies. For academia the woke regulations are best understood as yet another way to organise the different disciplines into a deductive rational empirical order. in a way its the left's answer to Quine a wholeism not as a corporate body but principled unity and totality. What works has replaced truth. But this is framed with moral legal principles called woke regulations. It could also be viewed as providing a rational public frame for organising and Critiquing all the pragmatic project that flow out into the real world. A way to decide on who gets the money the funding. Years ago at the start of this they saw themselves as opposed to a market model of the university where student numbers decided what subjects survived as students began to have to pay their own fees back. the solution was to increase foreign student numbers and reorientate the university around internal rights and empiricism. Now the high level principle of pragmatics pursuit of positive rights utility difference and empiricism of the details, do you see the theoretical pragmatic architecture of justification of academia as a unified whole is Positive Rights law, this is at once universal in pragmatic scope for the whole world and so a theory of legitimacy in progress.
In the old terms of philosophy of science: pragmatic outcomes in terms of Rights and empirical content; the practical has precedent over theory or truth now.
I first came across something like this in the work of Nicholas Maxwell and aim orientated empiricism. His question of academic method being organised around seeking the good in life: a metaphyseal moral principle from Kant and Einstein's unified field theory. But rather than the good alone its The Legal Right and the Good that is the external legal ordering. That can be put as saying: 100 years ago logic and language were regarded as the hope for unification of all disciplines, making them the highest most general subject, now that role is for external negative law. Legitimacy has surpassed justification. A legal journal is the new meta academic journal.
Sellers ought to have called his book: Rationalism and the Philosophy of Law, not Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. That was kind of my working title for my failed PhD project from around 2003.
The irony is though all these disciplines regulated under purpose of positive rights, are in terms of method a complete mess of contingent relations a nexus less even than a corporation theoretically. But ontologically its regarded as creative imaginative and open. No wander everyone is confused there is no notion of nature hear at all only some idea of justice in law and economics.
1
-
1
-
1