Zakaria and Political Reality

I missed a post yesterday, so two posts today. First, a brief comment on Zakarias' article "How Conservatism Has Lost Touch with Reality. A friend has a rather scathing response to Zakarias over at his blog, arguing that Zakarias is practicing a kind of revisionist history, devoid of spirituality, and is hiding behind as ideological fantasy. I don't agree.

First, I think Zakarias' history shows something I've pointed to a number of times on this blog. Tax rates on the wealthy have never been lower than they are today. The current economic crisis is in large part connected to globalization of labor such that trickle-down profits, taxed less than any other point in industrial American history, are no longer fed into strictly an American system; as Casey notes--this makes labor a global rather than local issue, and makes any attempt to address inequality even harder. But that does not mean we should just throw are hands up and do nothing. Yes, the global median income is $9000, and the average American earns significantly more than that. Throwing contextualization issues aside (factors such as cost of living etc), this tells us that, even as we argue for increased taxation on the domestic scene, we keep remain open to global factors. We live in the meantime. One of my favorite aspects of sophistic rhetoric is that it is the art of the mean(ness) of time (and existence), addressing how we dwell with each other everyday, haunted by Idealism's search for absolute foundations, plagued by the problems that call us to be.

Second, spirituality is a complex matter. I think there is a rising "leftist" spirituality--the ecological turn I'll call it. It is a fundamental recognition that every entity on the planet comes into existence through infinite relations with other entities, nothing is born whole, autonomous, or ex nihilio. Of course, this dove tails with my work with Levinas. Such as metaphysical understanding of our Being does, I believe, generate ethical principles, even if the academic left has been slow to articulate them. But I don't think many of us are "postmodern" in the "classic" sense anymore. There's new problems and agendas. One of which, following Latour, is to move beyond critical thinking and critique (debunking, etc) and toward collecting problems (as Dr. Rivers puts it). As Gregory Ulmer puts it: "problems B us"; by articulating the problem, we kairotically emerge inhabiting the problem that infects/affects us. Any attempt to articulate a problem is always an act of self-fashioning. We are the people our problems make us. This, I believe is a thoroughly spiritual orientation, even if it suspends the issue of transcendence. One can be spiritual without a beyond. In fact, I would argue that assuring the presence of a beyond (whether it is God, Truth, Love, etc) reduces the infinity of the beyond to a known object. But that's a Levinasian argument, and a whole post itself.

Third, I think Zakarias is trying to collect such a problem, and the actants that form it. As I indicated in #1 above, I think Zakarias "collects a reality," Zakaria is referring to the increasingly cumulating statistics documenting 1) the rise of unemployment alongside increasing trickle-down economic and 2) the increasingly economic divide between classes. I don't think there is a "Utopian" vision underlying this problem--there is no suggestion that the solution to this problem lies in any kind of communist re-organization of capital. In fact, I think Zakarias' article implicitly calls for a moderate response to the problem he articulates: a better balancing of centralist infrastructure and free market investment and innovation similar to that operating during America's economic boom in the 1950's and 1960's.

A Troll Who Cares--Jonathon Paige & the Ethics of Blogging

Day two of my effort to put something here everyday.

Today I point to a very interesting post sent to me by mxrk, one that relates to our blogging class/project/article. An internet troll details how he created Jonathon Paige's twitter persona and corresponding SummerHoopScoop blog as an ethical experiment. Mxrk and I have our students do something similar in our blogging class, without the overtly critical and potentially unethical angle.

Near the end, the troll draws several morals to his story, and I think two of them lie at the core of my teaching and research:

1. Only trust PROVEN sources that have a track record and accountability.
2. Keep your ears open to bad news as well as good news. When you hear negative news about your school's chances with a recruit from a trusted source or all the facts don't add up in your favor, don't go in to denial about it. Just accept what you are seeing and hearing. A Scout.com analyst is not wrong just because he brings bad news. A random recruiting twitter account is not right just because it tells you what you want to hear. Be smart about what information you hear and where it comes from.

I'm thinking especially of the second bullet in connection with Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment. I've been using Rickert's final chapter (an expansion of his "Hand's Up, Your Free!" article) to point out a contradiction in Martha Nussbaum's Not For Profit, namely that critical thinking can foster empathy (I'm arguing that the Socratic critical disposition actually requires the suspension of empathy). But Rickert and Nussbaum share one assumption: that human beings are not fundamentally "fixable" creatures, that psychoanalysis begins with the assumption that we come with problems (Ulmer: "Problems B Us"), and that the "good" life (or the good pedagogy) begins by dwelling within this fallen condition (rather than seeking to remedy it once and for all, as if any such final solution was possible). Levinas also frames the individual as fundamentally flawed (in terms of his/her debt to alterity, a debt too great to ever be completely repaid)--and I think that overlap resonates with me.

I have a special place for trolls in my heart, since they occupied an important part of my dissertation; there I used Internet trolls to demonstrate that there isn't necessarily an essential "goodness" to digital connectivity. At the same time, I argued that digital trolls were the inheritors of the cultural studies/Socratic/counter-culture/American Transcendentalist/critical tradition. While I appreciate their intentions, I remain torn on the issue of their methods. But I like this piece for the way that it demonstrates the fluid nature of ethos in the digital age. What I take away: every individual needs to be savvy, attentive, and open.

Jameson's New Book

Blogora's sporting a link to Jameson's preview of his upcoming book today. I've never considered myself a Marxist nor a fan of Jameson, but I nod my head to this paragraph from the preview:

Now we can step back and assess the meaning and import of Capital as a whole. This is a book about unemployment: its conceptual climax is reached with this proposition that industrial capitalism generates an overwhelming mass of potentially uninvestible capital on one hand, and an ever-increasing mass of unemployed people on the other: a situation we see fully corroborated today in the current crisis of third-stage or finance capital.

I think Jameson's got his finger on the problem, but not necessarily the solution.

I'm working on an article skeptical of critique today. And while I am enthusiastic about investing energy in empathic pedagogies, I'm missing the ole ideological fantasy of liberation.

No Life Is Good

In The Philosopher's Magazine, David Benetar argues that "No Life is Good." A cynical (and, I hope, playful) argument against the mechanical life. His conclusion isn't to kill yourself, just to stop having babies (and thus bringing more people destined to suffer into the world). But doesn't misery love company?

From the comments:

If I take this article at its meaning, it’s not merely that human lives are simply devoid of the quantities of mere pleasure that would make them more worth living; I also take it that most human lives are devoid of real meaning, period. Consider how so few people really contribute anything in the way of a lasting legacy, a benefit to others that keeps on giving decades, centuries after they’ve passed on. On the contrary, most people accomplish nothing, and by the reckoning of others who perhaps have not known or befriended them, may as well have never lived at all, for they have made such waste of their lives! Note how most of us–too many of us–grind through a cyclic process of self-sustenance, eating, sleeping, waking, going to work, contributing nothing at work that will affect people’s lives in any meaningful way for any duration of time. The cycle continues unabated, through generations.

We're reading Nussbaum's Not For Profit in my summer class; the previous chapter dealt with learning to accept human frailty and oppose myths of perfection and grandeur. I think this short piece compliments Nussbaum nicely.

Insane Job Add

Blogora has a link to The Philosophy Smoker's discussion of a crazy philosophy job add. Two things:

1. I can't wait until we all bow down before work with corporate sponsors.
2. Are visiting associate positions even real?

Burke, Sophistry, and Ecological Rhetoric

I wrote this in response to a graduate students' project on Kenneth Burke. I didn't want to lose it, so I'll stick it here:

Burke shares quite a bit with the Sophists because they both believe that rhetoric is metaphysical, rather than representational. That is to say, language doesn’t simply report on an already existing reality; rather, language participates in bringing reality into being. This does not mean that all reality--for Burke or the Sophists-- is merely language (a critique often thrust upon poststructuralists); there is a material world out there. But we do not have direct access to that material world, we always engage it through our consciousness, through our culture, through words, ideas, preconceptions, expectations, moods, ideologies, identities, technologies, locales, dispositions, injuries, etc.

Its Crap

Today I learned that a friend from grad school--a dedicated high school teacher--lost his job yesterday, along with about 80 other teachers, when his town voted against a tax increase.

To echo David Harvey's conclusion to his RSAnimate talk, "its crap."

We cannot sit by and accept an economy and government that increasingly stratifies wealth. As I have written before, no one earns a billion dollars (or even a million dollars) in isolation. Please endorse the sharing of wealth as a fundamental human value. Every human being on this planet should deserve a chance at food, healthcare, and education more than particular individuals deserve the right to earn billions of dollars.