Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. - George Orwell
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://theharshcouch.com/thc/2015-03-10/
The Harsh Couch - 2015.03.10 The Dancing Man
wibbly
#1
Re: the far Left being different from the conservatives as the far Left “have their hearts in the right place” - absolute bullshit.
Dogmatists and political romantics sit all over the political spectrum. They all generally think they are doing the right thing.
The more you lean in the direction of a bunch of them, the more your bias makes it looks like they have their hearts in the right place because their version of the right thing is closer to yours.
I’ll post more thoughts on this later this week if I have time.
Also re: Jesus being a good guy in the New Testament - also bullshit. Jesus comes across as a cunt in the gospels. St Paul just marketed the guy well and mass-marketed popularity took care of the rest.
wibbly
#3
Re: the far left
Well, this does betray my past ideological identification with the historical ‘left’ … perhaps more than it should. When I look at my beliefs, desires and knowledge now, I find the views of that ‘left’ childish and incomplete. They completely misunderstand the source, nature, role and uses of greed, for example.
I think (with the benefit of sleep and hindsight) that we were riffing more on the alternative perspective of rights from the ‘right’ and ‘left’. The modern libertarian (Tea Party?) ‘right’ appears generally more concerned with positive rights around liberty and market freedoms, perhaps best exemplified by the right to be a bigot, or the right to unregulated/unmoderated commerce. The ‘left’ (as it was) appeared (to me) more concerned with community, human rights, the right to assembly, right to political speech, right to protection from exploitation …
Of course, that’s not quite the way it is. And particularly in modern times where ‘right’ and ‘left’ have lost much of their former meaning. We all tend to use the terms anachronistically.
I agree that most people think of their point of view as being THE one true moral or ethical stance … and we’re certainly all free to live in our own delusional world. Perhaps that’s our only real freedom in the end …
Re: Jesus
I admit to laziness in the characterisation of Jesus. The peace stuff is a real stretch (for example):
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword” – Mathew 10:34
I guess I have particularly fallen into the trap laid by my forebears, who interpreted Jesus according to their own Methodist do-gooder whims. My grandparents’ Jesus was a very different one to the one I see when I read the writings of his cultists:
”If any [man] come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” – Luke 14:26
“But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay [them] before me.” – Luke 19:27
Quite the messianic turd …
And yet, I always think of the ‘good works’ … but perhaps Christianity and I diverge right at the beginning on the question of ‘good’.
In other news, Jesus does make a lot of use of parables … although that seems mostly to be a strategy to make people take responsibility for their own decisions, or to justify his special status. Life at the head of a cult is hard.
I need to read more of the book. It’s been a very long time … and I promised myself I would get to the Torah before I came round to the New Testament again …
A lot of the parables are thought to be coded messages for anti-Romans (eg the Zealots and other factions), because speaking openly against the Romans (or writing openly against them some 70 - 100 years later when the known Gospels got written) was dangerous.
Jesus often says “Let he who hath ears, hear it”, which many suggest was his way of saying “Hey guys, that was in code for those on the know, geddit?”
Others (eg the Gnostics) agreed he was speaking in code, but said that the coded message was their Scientology-like versions of gnostic Christianity.
I need to read more of the book. It’s been a very long time … and I
promised myself I would get to the Torah before I came round to the New
Testament again …
When you get to the New Testament, start with Luke. That’s supposed to be the most loving, compassionate Christ.
Still a cunt in Luke, though.
In the last few years, I’ve been thinking one of the critical dividing lines for humanity is romanticists vs realists.
And most of the big killers are on the romanticist side of the line.
It takes a romanticist to deny the inconvenience of reality and force a utopian vision on society, cutting away what doesn’t fit into their pre-conceived ideological answers.
You see this in the bloodbaths after revolutions. In the immediate aftermath, there is score settling. I’m not talking about that. It’s after the score settling, when the romanticist ideologues are trying to make things work in line with their ideology and are happy to exploit and kill to keep the ideology in place.
In some of these scenarios (eg Soviet Russia), a thug like Stalin will rise to the top. Whether or not Stalin was a romanticist ideologue (debatable), he had thousands of romanticist ideologues willing to support him, at least until the 30’s in Russian when fear replace romanticism as the key driver of his support.
Yet you still had ideologues in the West who were happy to close their eyes to the inconvenient reality so that they could continue cheerleading the dream.
I don’t think this sort of romanticism is exclusive to the Left. The Tea Party is a good example of the rabid right clinging to ideologies and ignoring the inconvenient injustices those ideologies cause in the real world. Hitler was a romanticist (and an artist as well - artists are usually the worst types of romanticists).
The Left’s grand tradition of fellow travellers, its communitarian bent that often turns into a “stay united, don’t criticise our compatriots because, despite their sins, their hearts are in the right place”, are likely galling to me because I identify more with the Left because of my political leanings in the past.
I find the views of that ‘left’ childish and incomplete. They completely
misunderstand the source, nature, role and uses of greed, for example
Strongly agree with this. To try to shove your point into the shape of my view on romanticists, I see this as part of the romanticist denial of inconvenient reality. Ideologues would rather inhabit a Platonic world of perfect forms, rather than the mire, corruption and evolution-based thinking of real humans.
Again, you could make the same comment about, say, the Tea Party.
There’s a good amount of evolution-based approaches to psychology (eg Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior). However, I haven’t seen evolution-based approaches to psychology cross over into political theory that much. Or philosophy. Which is a pity, as we’re nothing but mammals
EDIT: Not that realists are an all-good group of people. Also, they are usually shit at art.
(read all this in good humoured debate)
From memory (possibly incorrect), the last show included a comment along the lines of “it’s about education” ie better education would result in people having better political, social etc views.
I agree with the proposition that better education generally (not always) leads to better views, but I don’t agree with the implication (not necessarily implied in the comment) that better views = views that we agree with.
First, I doubt any of us would argue there are universal truths (other than a few arbitrary, non-partisan laws of science eg gravity sucks). So the argument that better education leads to better political views in this sense implies that there is one truth and, through a more complete understanding of things, you have a better view of that one truth. That’s a bunk assumption, most likely lurking in our Western educated minds because a lot of what we have learned is based on 2000-odd years of monotheistic belief (notwithstanding that belief was heavily influenced by pre-Christian Greek thought). As try as hard as we might to be godless atheists, a lot of the the grammar and language we use to form and express our thoughts is built on monotheism and the idea of one universal truth (God), likely sitting on a throne propped up by the Greek contribution of Pythagorean right angled triangles in a Platonic world of ideals.
For a loose analogy on how your thoughts can be constrained by your language, see Orwell’s essay on NewSpeak in 1984. We can only think so far out of the box.
Second, arguing that better education leads to superior views is potentially conceding yourself to dangerous grounds.
There are plenty of very intelligent, very educated, actively interested people who don’t share the same political views.
Do you yield your views to theirs because they have better education? Unlikely.
More likely you’d explain the difference as being based on differences in the axioms you and they believe in, experiences etc. And quite rightly, as my view is that there’s no real axioms we can take for granted as commonly accepted when it comes to informing political views.
Third, what is worrying about the “more education” line is that it’s rarely an argument for more education per se, much more often an argument for the “right” sort of education ie carefully selected materials (a form of propaganda) that make it highly likely that people come to the same conclusions as the beliefs of the creators and supporters.
For example, over a decade ago when I was still in Sydney, I was a volunteer in a breakfast program where we made breakfast for disadvantaged kids at their school so they’d have more energy for the day etc. (I only mention that so you’ll think I’m a good person) While I was there, I took a look at the education materials on recycling, the environment etc.
As much as I’m pro-both those causes, I can’t deny that those materials were simplistic propaganda, not unlikely the religious propaganda I saw when I was at school. We’d all likely be cool with that because we support the outcome, even if it means our school age children give us a lot of crap if we don’t sort our rubbish (children policing their parents’ behaviour at home? shades of Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany or Maoist China?).
And we’d likely complain about similar propaganda that taught kids things we didn’t support politically (eg books that argued about the value of unborn fetuses and why abortion was a bad thing).
But let’s be honest with ourselves and admit that education itself is a large propaganda practice and is largely not without bias in terms of the content itself or the content which the authorities put on the syllabus (ahh… how much '90s campus post-modernism have I unwittingly absorbed?).
When someone argues “more education is the answer”, what they really mean (deliberately or not) is “more selective education/propaganda so that there is high probability they come to conclusions I agree with”.
An interesting movement on teaching the “right” things was fathered by Antonio Gramsci. One of his main legacies was the idea of Marxists taking over the education system, then educating people to be more Leftist. This idea has been around for a while (eg the Jesuit’s “give me the boy and I’ll give you the man”).
In my poorly informed historical view, the Gramsciist Long March through the Institutions* started in the post-WW2 world and was fueled heavily in the 1960s, at least in some part of the world. Gen X could be seen as the generation it gave birth to. When I look back at my days in the UNSW Law School, I recall a lot of Left thinking. And I liked it! Except the wafts of post-modernism from the Arts building, but even that has seeped into my thinking.
[* EDIT: I should read links more thoroughly rather than posting the first thing that comes up when I google a term; that article discusses the Gramsciist long march from a pretty narky right perspective]
The THC episode also mentioned propaganda and how it’s not a dirty word in Vietnam (nor China). Historically, it didn’t originally have dirty connotations in the West and it’s only in more recent times we’ve come to think of it as biased and brainwashing material, largely because the fact that propaganda is propagating a biased perspective has become more apparent to us in these post-modern times and, aware of the bias, we don’t like it. We prefer our propaganda more subtle (except for Fox News watchers)
For more traditional use of “propaganda”, see what used to be Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, more recently renamed the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples
Despite the arguments above, I do find that there are more intelligent people who lean left. Maybe that’s just the crowd I’m attracted to.
The ones I like most are those who are reformed left leaners eg Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens.
Some good arguments on the topic I came across today:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/11/mainstream-left-silencing-sympathetic-voices
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-03-11/news/why-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal/full/