Damno ergo sum

June 6, 2009 at 10:46 pm (Catholicism, Europe, Greens, Homophobia, Philosophy, Poland)

Descartes

While we’re waiting for the Euro-election results – and scuttlebutt is looking extraordinarily bad for the DUP – I’d like to ponder on something that Green MEP Caroline Lucas was saying on Newsnight the other night. This was apropos of Rankin’ Dave Cameron’s plan to take Tory MEPs out of the European Peoples Party and form a new Strasbourg bloc of rightwing Eurosceptic parties, mostly of the Eastern European persuasion. This is something that Ian Traynor has been banging on about in the Grauniad for weeks, largely recycling talking points from New Labour and the Party of European Socialists. To be scrupulously fair to Cameron, he isn’t proposing an alliance with the real rightwing exotica in the European Parliament, such as the League of Polish Families, the Greater Romania Party or Alessandra Mussolini’s Azione Sociale. It’s just that, by the hysterical tenor of Traynor’s articles, you’d assume he was.

Now, I like Caroline Lucas a lot more than I like Ian Traynor, and I wish she was one of my MEPs rather than the shower we have over here, but she was talking very much along the same lines. What was interesting to me was her line of argument against Cameron’s proposed partners. Given Václav Klaus’ eccentric views on climate change, it’s unsurprising that the Czech Civic Democrats are ideologically treif for a Green. The thing that startled me a little was Caroline lighting into the Polish Law and Justice Party, the vehicle of the Kaczyński brothers, which has a stringent moral conservatism as a key part of its platform. “Some of these people,” thundered Caroline, “actually believe that homosexuality is a sin!”

If I was being unkind, I might linger a little on the fact that Caroline is running for parliament in the gay ghetto of Brighton. I don’t in fact think she’s being opportunistic, I just think she’s being slightly disingenuous. She can’t really be surprised that rightwing Polish Catholics aren’t as gay-friendly as leftwing British Greens, nor do I think she seriously is. What she was saying was that these people’s opinions were so outrageously beyond the pale that no decent person should consider even forming a tactical alliance with them.

There is possibly an aspect here of being a little inured to this kind of thing – he who listens to phone-ins on Radio Ulster will be exposed to a very different spectrum of views than she who listens to phone-ins on Five Live. After all, we get to hear the weird and wonderful thoughts of Iris Robinson and Sammy Wilson on a regular basis – lots of us even vote for them. On the other hand, I’m sympathetic to what Madam Miaow was saying on the dog ‘n’ bone this morning, that it’s when we lose the capacity to be shocked that we should be worried. Mind you, it’s something that has struck me for some considerable period of time, that a lot of well-meaning people, when faced with outright reaction, simply go haywire. It’s where you find this assumption that views falling outwith modern metropolitan cultural mores are not opinions you can disagree with, but psychopathologies to be anathematised. Britain isn’t quite as advanced as Canada, where those holding unfashionable opinions can be hauled in front of human rights tribunals and told to stop expressing those opinions in public, but it’s getting there.

So anyway, in my whimsical fashion, I was watching this segment on Newsnight and started thinking that this was the sort of thing that would be tailor-made for those jokey pieces they sometimes like to do in Philosophy Now, wondering what great thinkers of the past would make of contemporary problems. Actually, you could have a Newsnight Review-style round table, perhaps featuring Nietzsche, Locke, Descartes and the late Saint Augustine.

Nietzsche would, I think, have found the whole argument rather funny. He understood as well as anyone that religion is an integral system, and once you start removing planks then the whole edifice is under threat. You will notice, for instance, that Reform Judaism tends to suffer quite a high attrition rate, while the Haredi sects experience it hardly at all; in irreligious Britain, the Catholics and Pentecostalists are thriving, while the dear old C of E is virtually dying on its arse. That’s because there’s an incredibly strong imperative in religion to hold onto traditional values. The systematic aspect of this is quite important. For example, the Catholic stance on homosexuality is not some arbitrary and irrational piece of prejudice – if anything, it’s too rational, as Catholic teaching on sexual morality, deriving from an Aristotelian concept of natural law, is a one-size-fits-all doctrine that simply doesn’t make room for the gays. That’s why Pope Benny might, if you ask him the right question, talk about a compassionate approach to all of God’s creatures, but he’s not going to rewrite the rule book in accordance with the demands of OutRage! and Channel 4 News.

Nietzsche grasped this brilliantly, as an essential part of his “Death of God” thesis. His view was that, once you killed off the basis of religion, then you also destroyed the basis of traditional morality, and therefore the Umwertung aller Werte – the revaluation of all values – came into play as, if you had the courage of your convictions, you had to consciously rewrite values from the bottom up. He had particular fun attacking the freethinkers who, having disposed of Christian belief, wanted to hang onto those bits of Christian morality they found congenial, while ditching the bits they didn’t like. Even if you don’t like to use the word “sin”, you certainly believe in right and wrong. But without a firm ethical basis, the danger is that your morality is simply based on what is popular at any particular point in time.

So let us now turn to Augustine. His political theology is of interest in terms of the debate around separating church and state, especially regarding the distinction he drew between sin and crime, and why it wasn’t the business of the state to outlaw sin. In Augustine’s view, the state could legislate to prevent citizens from harming each other, but it couldn’t legislate to make citizens virtuous – that was the job of religion. The distinction is important when we come to the question of tolerance. You see, if one approves of something, or is indifferent to it, then tolerance doesn’t come into the equation. I don’t “tolerate” homosexuality because I don’t have a moral problem with it. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to believe that homosexual acts should be legal, and that gays shouldn’t be persecuted by the state, while simultaneously holding that homosexuality is sinful. I would suggest that this is in fact the majority viewpoint in the north of Ireland. You may similarly get people to agree that abortion should be legalised here as a social necessity, but it would be a much tougher ask to get people to stop disapproving of abortion – even the Alliance for Choice fight shy of that one.

While we’re on the subject of toleration, let’s turn to Locke, who still informs a lot of left-liberal thinking on cultural matters. I remind you that Locke’s call for religious toleration was restricted to the Non-Conformist sects; he explicitly opposed toleration for the Catholic Church, on the grounds that Catholicism was, well, intolerant. If you hear in this an echo of Geert Wilders and his call to protect Dutch tolerance by not tolerating brown people with funny religions, you aren’t far wrong. And you may also detect an affinity with the Decent Left. It has to be understood here, in the context of British constitutional history, that for over 300 years, from Henry VIII until about the 1850s, the central issue in English politics was the Catholic problem. I suggest that the Muslim problem currently exercising the intelligentsia is basically the Catholic problem by other means.

Finally, let’s have a brief pitstop with Descartes. Old René, following on from the Galileo affair, was insistent on the need to start from first principles and, if first principles are in conflict with standing public opinion, then so much the worse for standing public opinion. This works quite well for science, but, notwithstanding the pretensions of scientific socialism, I’ve never really believed that you can have a Cartesian approach to politics.

I believe this because of the difficulty in establishing unarguable first principles in politics. What you usually end up with is conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is almost always wrong. Or one thinks of Francis Wheen’s Mumbo-Jumbo, where rationalism is identified with propositions Francis agrees with (though how his strident scientism is compatible with Private Eye‘s stance on MMR is still a mystery), while propositions he disagrees with are dismissed as mumbo-jumbo. Or one can get into the far left where the various shibbolethim of the various groups – “consistent democracy” for the AWL, “centrism” for Workers Power, “popular frontism” for the Weekly Worker, and whatever you’re having yourself – are elevated into first principles that can form a golden key to explaining the world and pointing a uniquely correct way forward.

My point here is that politics is, above all else, a dialogue. One may have one’s ethical or moral or ideological compass, although much of the political class appears to have none except the gaining and holding of office. But it’s vital to hang onto the necessity of dialogue. We don’t gain much from stating a tangled bunch of preconceptions as first principles and then acting as if those who hold dissenting positions are somehow mad or bad.

Yet, for all that, Caroline Lucas has some basic principles. So too have the mad Polish Catholics, although they aren’t the same ones. If Lord Snooty has any, I’ve yet to notice.

And that’s quite a ramble from where we started. Now, I think it’s time for a nice cup of tea, a chocolate gravy ring and some Battlestar Galactica.

11 Comments

Badiou on the communist idea

April 13, 2009 at 11:52 am (Philosophy)

For your further edification, here’s Alain Badiou speaking at the Communism conference at Birkbeck the other week. Jeepers, I’m glad he’s still around. And if you haven’t read his book on Sarkozy, I thoroughly recommend it.

2 Comments

What the Sasanaigh don’t get about Badiou

January 14, 2008 at 10:34 am (Philosophy)

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This, one might think, is a good time for reading Capital. Perhaps, but it’s also a good time for brushing up on the old Badiou. Which tends to be something you put off normally. Sure, I read Žižek for entertainment – the man really missed his calling as a film critic – but you could never mistake Badiou for a little ray of sunshine.

But this leads me back to an old favourite, the question of why the Brits don’t get modern French thought. On reflection, the practitioners of Analytical Philosophy who dominate Britain’s philosophy departments are far from being the worst – in general, they just aren’t that interested in continental thought, which is why you can get a PhD in philosophy without having read a paragraph of Heidegger. No, what really annoys my brain is that element of the punditocracy that fancies itself intellectually sophisticated – it might be Johann at the classier end of the market, or it might be Nick and Francis at the Beavis and Butt-head end. Fuelled by a potent mix of philistinism and Francophobia, they operate on the basis that modern French thought is a load of pretentious gibberish, while occasionally plucking out quotes from the more facetious French philosophers, taking them literally, and holding them up as examples of how silly the French are. Exhibit A is Baudrillard on the Gulf War, when in fact the simulacrum was one of the few things Baudrillard got right. And yes, Prof Callinicos, I’m looking at you.

Now this may seem a bit cheeky, given that Irish culture is even more anti-intellectual than its British oppo (we only have one serious philosopher, and that’s Cardinal Des Connell), but bear with me. I like to read Badiou because, and this is a major test for me, he’s capable of being wrong in a really interesting way, so I find him stimulating even when, as I often do, I completely disagree with him. On the other hand, put yourself in the shoes of a British pundit who doesn’t know frig all about modern French thought but who has heard of this bloke Badiou. You go into the library, or perhaps Waterstone’s, and crack open a volume of the great man’s musings. The first thing you read is Badiou singing the praises of the Cultural Revolution in China. Your first reaction, understandably, will be “Who is this maniac and how does he get to be so influential?”

To take the political side first, it’s true that Badiou is an ex-Maoist and not very ex at that. Let’s leave aside for the moment that Mao Zedong Thought is itself very poorly understood these days, because that really isn’t the point. The point is that Badiou is a Nietzschean, and his take on Mao is a Nietzschean one. This then layers misunderstanding on misunderstanding.

In France, where philosophy is taken seriously enough to be taught in secondary schools, this isn’t a big problem, because most people with a basic philosophical training will have some grasp of Nietzschean categories. In Britain, on the other hand, it leads me as a Nietzsche aficionado to one of my long-running bugbears. That is that only about half a dozen universities in Britain teach Nietzsche, and historically they haven’t taught him very well. That can sit alongside other glaring gaps in the curriculum such as Schopenhauer not being taught anywhere, Bergson not having been taught anywhere for the last fifty years, and Kierkegaard being relegated to a weird half-life in theology departments.

So, is Badiou saying the Cultural Revolution was the greatest thing since sliced bread? Well, yes he is, but he’s saying something more interesting than that. What he’s saying is that the Cultural Revolution functioned, or had the potential to function, as the Nietzschean Umwertung aller Werte, the revaluation of all values. And this is where his critique of Mao comes in: that Mao in reining back the excesses of the Cultural Revolution after the ultraleft period of 1966-69, instead of allowing events to reach their logical conclusion, not only betrayed that process but also reduced his own status back to that of just a politician, dropping down from the übermenschlich to the allzumenschlich.

And this might just make you think that Badiou is even more of a maniac than he appeared at first sight. It’s certainly not a position I would care to argue in political terms. But philosophically it’s an interesting argument, much more so than columnists harrumphing about “Leninism” would have you believe. And, if we want to rise above the drab little world of Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism, why not?

26 Comments

Pourquoi Guy Debord, pourquoi Jacques Attali (un peu)

August 20, 2007 at 2:12 pm (Cruise Missile Left, Philosophy)

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There is something oddly fitting about using the categories of modern French thought to critique the Decent Left. A lot of it has to do with their peculiar mode of thought, which mixes the anti-theoretical philistinism of the Anglophone pundit with the normal thought-process of the far-left sectarian, the latter combining a sort of crazed logical positivism with a strong streak of magical thinking. And, given their hostility to a French intellectual tradition most of them don’t understand, it’s quite amusing as well.

So we brought Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum to bear on Decency. Old Baudrillard got plenty of things wrong, but this is a case where the simulacrum fits perfectly: you could see this even at the birth of Decency some fifteen years ago, when there was a noticeable division between those small-d decent people who wanted to defend Bosnia on geopolitical or humanitarian grounds, and those for whom “Bosnia” was a Platonic ideal and “defending Bosnia” (which seemed to consist mainly of writing columns in the Graun and Staggers) a measure of personal virtue. Similarly, “Iraq” or “Darfur” or “Afghanistan” in Decent discourse are to be taken not as references to places on a map, but to intellectual categories used to bash the Indecent about the head. You find a lot of this with Professor Normblog, who rarely writes about Iraq the place, and who in his more lucid moments sees the war as a disaster, but is still intent on using the simulacrum of “Iraq” to prove that his support for the war makes him more moral than those who said all along it would be a disaster.

Similarly with Nick’s scattergun attack on “The Left”, a simulacrum that bears only a fleeting resemblance to an actually existing left, but a suspiciously close resemblance to Nick himself circa 2002. And don’t get me started on the Cohen-Wheen-Hari trope of “postmodernism”…

Closely related to the Baudrillardian Simulacrum, but distinct from it, is Guy Debord’s Spectacle, which itself was an expansion from the purely economic into the cultural sphere of the Marxian concept of reification. Now, if you’re one of those people who didn’t throw away his old situationist texts, you’ll recall that in the Debordian schema “liberal democracy” played the part of the integrated spectacle, while “terrorism” was not only the mirror image but the necessarily constructed enemy, the obscene other without which democracy could not exist, the big bad that proved the goodness and superiority of the democrat. And doesn’t this provide an excellent framework for reading Berman’s Terror and Liberalism?

Skipping from this to our own Decent Left, we find something rather striking. While those of us who count ourselves as Indecent generally have positive agendas of our own – shit, even Osama has a positive agenda of his own, albeit a repugnant one – the Decents, qua Decents, literally cannot exist without Indecency. They need to have big bad Obscene Others to define themselves against – this isn’t just rhetorical but existential. Without the ideological simulacra of “the Serbo-fascists” or “the Islamofascists” or “the Chomskyans” or “the SWP”, where would they be? I suppose this is what divides off semi-Decent New Labour hacks like Aaro or Norm, who can always retreat back into New Labour hackery, or a dilettante like young Johann, who can always find another big idea, from ideologues of Decency like Messrs Cohen, Kampf, or Hoare minor, whose self-worth seems to depend on running literary campaigns against straw men.

Back in May ’68, the Situationists reckoned that going beyond our allotted roles as passive consumers involved exploding the Spectacle. Today, the simulacrum-politics of the virtual warriors is as worthy of debunking as anything.

76 Comments

Decency and the English language, with a little help from Baudrillard

August 9, 2007 at 5:57 pm (Balkans, Cruise Missile Left, Intellectual Frauds, Journalism, Linguistics, Orwell, Philosophy)

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I’ve been tempted to comment on the spat between Nick and Johann, but that’s been quite adequately covered elsewhere. But I do want to make a few comments on Decency, and I’ll come back to these points in greater detail later. In particular, I’ve been meaning to write about the uses and abuses of Orwell for quite a while. But for the time being, let’s take three basic points: on the apple not falling far from the tree, on the incidence of multiple Orwells, and on the linguistics of Decency.

Firstly, as has been observed on multiple occasions, the Decent Left, and especially its more ideological wing, contains a huge proportion of former leftist sectarians. This shouldn’t be surprising. People rarely outgrow completely their early selves, much as they might like to believe otherwise. A good example is the late Monty Johnstone. It is well known that, prior to becoming the CPGB’s expert on Trotskyism, Monty had himself been a Trotskyist, during the Second World War, when it was neither fashionable nor profitable. This was not only important for his hatchet work – many a Trot made himself look an idiot by debating Monty, only to find Monty knew much more Trotsky than they – but arguably played a big role in his long-term dissidence within the CPGB.

Hitchens Bros are another good example. Pete, of course, likes to paint himself as a conservative nowadays, and affects the air of an old-time Home Service announcer, but he retains an SWP streak a mile wide. As for the Dude, on reading his recent biography of Orwell I was struck by its resemblance to Cliff’s Lenin. Not stylistically – Chris is still a much better writer than Cliff – but structurally. It is in fact a book about the kind of man Orwell could have been had he been lucky enough to have the Dude around to advise him. So it isn’t, or shouldn’t be, surprising that British Decency embraces lots of superannuated sectarians, many of whom retain their sectarian habits.

Secondly, Orwell. Many of the journalistic Decents, and I’m thinking especially of Cohen and Wheen, hail poor old Orwell as their precursor. Well, there were at least five different Orwells, depending on the period, so it depends very much on the Orwell you mean. Nick claims as his role model the Orwell of 1936, picking up his rifle to go and fight fascism in Spain, but this is more than a little disingenuous. Firstly, Orwell’s actual politics of his Catalan period – his semi-Trotskyist period in other words – would instantly repel Nick. They would seem to him Chomskyan, or even reminiscent of the Nick of yesteryear. Actually, the Orwell that seems to inspire Nick and Francis (Aaro I discount as owing more to Ehrenburg) is Orwell’s wartime writing, and not even the good stuff – most of that writing was pretty lively – but the large percentage of his wartime writing that consisted in heaping abuse on those intellectuals who continued to hold positions that Orwell himself had held only a little while earlier.

Finally, the role of linguistic criticism in analysing Decency. Wheen and Cohen (who nicks his writing on this wholesale from Wheen) may not recognise the linguistic turn in philosophy, but the linguistic turn recognises them. Let’s start with the application of cant phrases. To take an easy example, when the Engageniks say “racism”, they don’t mean racism. They mean anti-Semitism, and they are so promiscuous in that allegation that it has no meaning from that source, except to mean “people we don’t like”. Similarly, if you read a Guardian article on Serbia by Ian Traynor, it’s a fair possibility that Traynor will be writing about “democrats” versus “extreme nationalists”. Leave aside Traynor’s prejudice and incomprehension – you need to understand that, when Traynor refers to “democrats”, he usually means Sonja Biserko, Nataša Kandić and the little coterie of neo-Jacobin farmhands in Belgrade who actively want the Yanks to occupy their country; meanwhile, “extreme nationalists” refers to, er, most of the population, including principled anti-nationalists who, for whatever reason, baulk at the full Imperial agenda. Now apply this to the Eustonite discourse on the need to support “Iraqi democrats”. If this isn’t an entirely platonic reference to entirely hypothetical people, it usually excludes most of the Iraqi people, including most of their elected representatives. In fact, sometimes it seems to refer exclusively to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

I’ll just conclude with Baudrillard. The linguistic turn in philosophy does not claim that there is no reality outside language. What it does posit is that language is a means for ordering cognition, and we can’t have unmediated knowledge of reality. The most we can hope for is to achieve a working approximation. Got that?

Now, there is no shame in not understanding Baudrillard. Alex Callinicos, the Greatest Living Philostopher Known to Mankind, doesn’t understand him. Nor does Johann Hari. Then you have the dumbed-down version from Wheen. What all these characters in common is that none of them seem to have read, or understood, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Rather, they prefer the weasel argument of referencing the title and taking it absolutely literally. What Baudrillard meant was not that there wasn’t a war – his essay dealt with the gap between the actual war experienced in the Gulf, and the simulacrum of war experienced by the media audience in the West (or better, the global North).

Now, let’s apply this to Decency. Orwell, let’s remember, picked up his rifle and went to Catalonia to really fight fascism, putting his life on the line in the process. During the Balkan wars, there was a segment of the commentariat who thought that “fighting fascism” was coterminous with writing op-ed pieces calling for the bombing of the tribe they had decided to be the epitome of evil. The laptop bombardiers of Farringdon were, in a magnificent vindication of Baudrillard, virtual warriors playing at fighting a virtual war against a simulacrum of a foreign nation. This might have been amusing, but it was intensely aggravating for those of us who went out to the Balkans and tried to do some useful work, only to be derided as “appeasers” or even “Chetnik fascists” by people whose only contribution had been to hold forth over lunch at the Gay Hussar.

And so it goes. We hear endless calls to “fight fascism”, “show solidarity”, “support democrats” and “take sides”. What this seems to boil down to is “write columns in the Observer” and “slander the people we used to agree with”. Hear that? It’s Baudrillard chuckling, and Orwell spinning in his grave.

12 Comments

The greatest living analytical philosopher

June 21, 2007 at 9:18 am (Academia, Linguistics, Philosophy)

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 It’s a long time since I’ve read Joe Heller’s Good As Gold, so I’m paraphrasing here, but there was one scene in particular that I remember. The titular professor is talking to a student disappointed that he enrolled in a course on “Monarchy and Monotheism from the Mediaeval to the Modern” but then finds himself reading Shakespeare’s history plays. The professor explains that anyone interested in literature should read Shakespeare, but the faculty are savvy enough to know that nobody will unless they call it something else. Hence the misleading course descriptions.

The student replies that he isn’t interested in literature but religion, and only enrolled in English because they seemed to be offering so many courses in mysticism and transcendent experiences. He asks whether he should transfer to Theology and Gold replies no, they’ll have you reading Weber and Durkheim. If you’re really interested in religion, he says, you should try Anthropology, but be quick or it’ll all be subsumed into Urban Studies and you’ll be reading Shakespeare’s history plays again.

Do you think this is an exaggeration of academic life? Consider the trouble that Philosophy departments, at least the analytically minded ones in the English-speaking world, have had with the anti-philosophers. Kierkegaard, they reckon, really belongs in Theology. Does Nietzsche belong to Philosophy or German, or something else? I don’t know how things are run now at Queens, but it used to be striking that Marx was palmed off on the Thomists in Scholastic Philosophy, basically because Jim Daly was keen to teach Marx and nobody in the Philosophy department was interested. Bergson, of course, is barely taught anywhere, but that’s another story.

This brings me back to Analytical Philosophy. At the risk of provoking Chris, it’s my somewhat jaundiced opinion that, except for maybe two areas, AP in the narrow sense (as opposed to a broader speech community identifying with the AP tradition) is more or less dead as a research paradigm. Most of its practitioners have given in to historicism to some degree or other. However, those two related areas – formal logic and meaning – are pretty damn big ones. In the area of meaning in particular, there is quite a rich tradition starting with Russell, Carnap and the early Wittgenstein (although not the later Wittgenstein) and carried on by Quine and Chomsky.

But hold on, you say. Isn’t Chomsky the leading figure in modern linguistics? Yes, but that just goes to show how difficult these academic categories are. Just about every practicing linguist at least pays lip service to the importance of Chomsky’s work, even if it has no relevance whatsoever to their own research. In that sense, we are all Chomskyans now. And very few people will put in a kind word for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even though many practicing linguists will have at least a sneaking feeling that Sapir and Whorf were onto something.

The reason for this is that Chomsky’s work, though extremely important and valuable, is only marginally connected to areas like sociolinguistics that interest me. In fact Chomsky’s work is on such a level of abstraction that it’s perhaps more accurate to call him an analytical philosopher of mind rather than a linguist. And this isn’t merely a question of Chomsky’s admiration of Russell the man – there is a direct connection between the Chomskyan paradigm of language and mind, and the idea you find in Russell that language can be boiled down to something approaching mathematical logic.

This works for Chomsky, partly because Chomsky these days posits a fairly minimalist model of universal grammar, and partly because Chomsky, as I’ve said, works at an abstract level where linguistics overlaps with psychology and philosophy, and tends more to philosophy the more abstract it becomes. Chomskyan linguistics is to all intents and purposes a different subject from applied linguistics, and I tend more and more to the view that they should be formally separated.

This is not to say that Chomsky’s insights can’t be applied on a practical level. However, lots of people have tried to apply them in a mechanical way and have ended up looking like idiots. The basic reason for this is that, as the later Wittgenstein brilliantly demonstrates, and as any sociolinguistic fule kno, grammar isn’t logical. Language, as it exists in the real world, is not amenable to being bent into a logico-mathematical framework.

There is of course an alternative to a formal separation, and that’s to strengthen the practical aspect of linguistics. It is a long-running scandal that you can qualify in linguistics without ever doing any fieldwork, just by writing essays on deep structure. Since much of the most important work to be done in linguistics remains in the field of description, it’s my belief that every PhD candidate in linguistics should be required to do at least some fieldwork, even if their interests lie on the abstract level. And, who knows, some insights from this practical work may turn out to be of value in those more elevated registers.

3 Comments

In defence of scholasticism

June 14, 2007 at 11:17 am (Far Left, Ireland, Philosophy)

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Over on Dave Osler’s blog, there has been a discussion going on about British Labour Party membership and the strength or otherwise of the Labour left. I don’t intend to enter that discussion, but I was struck by a contribution from Mark P of the Socialist Party, than whom nobody’s imagination ranges further. Mark regards discussing the Labour left as analogous to “medieval scholastic debates about the numbers of angels in each choir of heaven.” I’d love to know who these scholastics are, because this doesn’t correspond to any scholastics I’ve ever read. I suspect that we are dealing here not with actual scholastic philosophy, but with a vulgar Marxist’s idea of what scholastic philosophy ought to be about.

This calumny against the scholastics has been doing the rounds a very long time. I heard the late Tony Cliff, with a good deal more wit than Mark P, do a version of it dozens of times. And like many of Cliff’s wisecracks, it was older even than he was, stemming from the Protestant Reformation and subsequently from anti-Catholic philosophers like Hobbes and Locke. And it was a pretty boring joke even in Hobbes’ day.

Allow me to explain. Luther’s concept of justification by faith alone meant getting rid of scholasticism, which attempted to introduce reason into theology, notably in Augustine’s use of Platonic concepts to explain the Trinity. Luther moderated his position in his later years, realising that the Christian couldn’t do without reason altogether, but the Hobbes-Locke paradigm was even more insistent in erecting a Chinese wall between Keplerian experimental science and religion, which was to be determined by reference to the Book. Scholasticism was damned because it didn’t respect these boundaries, and held that rational thought could be brought to bear on matters of religion. This meant throwing out a huge and rich tapestry of thought, including even someone like Bacon, probably Europe’s first experimental scientist, and who could only be rehabilitated in scientific tradition by pretending he wasn’t a scholastic.

The parody of scholasticism comes from this background, and parody it is. There are few thinkers more rigorous than Aquinas, the undisputed master of the Aristotelian dialectic, who makes most of our twenty-first-century Marxists look like doltish obscurantists. Forgive me for waxing Thomist, but I think there’s actually a lot to be learned in terms of method and categories from the scholastics. As a little experiment, let’s apply Aristotelian categories to the scientific materialists of the Irish left.

In the early 1990s, if you went to the SWM’s Marxism conference, you couldn’t have missed a huge banner proclaiming “No revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory”. Our modern Marxists, at least in the two British franchises, operate a dichotomy between the two. In the case of the Marxism conference, the implication was that, while we may spend most of our time running around like blue-arsed flies, we could take a weekend a year to, like, totally talk about Lenin and shit? And then go out and run around like blue-arsed flies some more.

“Theory” was conceived narrowly, in terms of group gurus writing learned articles and the rank and file being schooled in them. An example would be Militant’s Basic Education Programme for new cadre, which meant rote learning of the works of Grant, Taaffe and Hadden, plus a very narrow selection of Lenin and Trotsky articles where the greybeards argued for positions Militant found congenial. In the SWM things were less structured and more eclectic, but not dissimilar. And, as Andy points out, each group regarded itself as having a definitive intellectual system that needed no reference to anything outside itself. “Practice”, on the other hand, was and is defined in very broad terms as “doing stuff”.

It is perhaps more fruitful to apply an Aristotelian three-way distinction. According to this model, theory consists of logic and mathematics, thus pure contemplation. Practice, or praxis if you want to be pretentious, consists of engagement with the other, aiming at the creation of a higher synthesis – dialogue, in other words. Between the two you have production, meaning poetry and rhetoric – that is, doing stuff, but in a contemplative way.

When we look at our actually existing left, we find an overwhelming amount of production. The franchises’ anti-theoretical bias is well known, but this doesn’t translate into practice as most of the stuff they do is self-referential and therefore contemplative. Dialogue is conspicuous by its absence.

Take campaigns. A fruitful way of working, in the Aristotelian sense, would involve concerned people getting together, having a full discussion of what the problems were, what we wanted to achieve and the necessary action; taking the necessary action; reflecting on the action and its outcomes and trying to draw any lessons for the way forward; and so on. Note that discussion and reflection are integral to the process, and are not optional extras or inconveniences.

How do left campaigns work in practice? Have you ever gone to a meeting aimed at launching a campaign where there was open discussion? In my own experience, very rarely. The left normally follow not the Aristotelian model, but the Zoë Salmon model. As in, here’s one I prepared earlier. Here’s the campaign, the plan of action, probably a steering committee already set up. All you need to do is “join the movement”.

So where does dialogue, the root of the dialectic, come into this? The answer is, it doesn’t. The broad masses are exhorted to do stuff, but to do it in a contemplative manner. Thus we move from the Zoë Salmon model to the Paul Simon model: “Get on the bus, Gus. We don’t need to discuss much.” This is why – and the bin tax meetings were a shining example of this – when you say you should talk about what the campaign is about and what it needs to do, you get stared at like a lunatic. And production begets production, even an hundredfold.

This is the self-referential and solipsistic conceptual world of the sectarian. Repeat after me: Activity without engaging with the other is not practice, it is production. It is the intellectual equivalent of digging holes and filling them in again. Sitting on a committee with people who agree with you on every issue of importance is production. Even inscribing pithy legends on cardboard placards and walking up and down O’Connell Street on a Saturday afternoon isn’t practice. It’s just doing stuff. Not that production is necessarily a bad thing in itself, far from it, but it isn’t to be mistaken for practice.

So be careful before you diss mediaeval scholastics, because they had a sophisticated and flexible system of thought that can still be of use to us today. Meanwhile, many of our would-be scientific materialists have, as the late Frank Zappa put it, transcended mere mumbo-jumbo and entered the more elevated realms of mumbo-pocus.

17 Comments

I have annoyed a philosopher

May 23, 2007 at 6:00 pm (Academia, Far Left, Philosophy)

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While getting stuck in to Johann Hari (age 13¾) and his comical misunderstandings of Slavoj Žižek, I included a brief (and slightly flippant) thumbnail sketch of analytical philosophy. Over on the indispensable D-Squared Digest, this drew a response from Prof Chris Bertram of Bristol University, who I remember (though he probably doesn’t remember me) from the far-off days when he was on the New Left Review, before he and Norm and Branka and the rest discerned greener pastures elsewhere. I’m slightly bemused as to why Chris would defend AP, as he isn’t an analytical philosopher but a post-Rawlsian (or neo-Kantian) political philosopher. Nonetheless, I’m pleased to discover that Chris is still alive, and will post a considered piece on AP shortly.

But young Johann’s use of postmodernism as an all-purpose insult (he also ties it to that other modern swear-word, “Leninism”) is illustrative of a more general tendency among those sections of the British punditocracy who aspire to be intellectuals, and also links back to my long-delayed critique of Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? That is, and this may pain Johann, Nick and Francis Wheen, but their take on philosophy is uncannily congruent with that of the Socialist Workers Party. Our pundits may not remember this – Johann would be too young and Nick’s memory has been dodgy of late – but the SWP spent the entire decade of the 1990s on a huge crusade against the danger posed by postmodernism to civilisation in general and rational thought in particular.

This too involved some comical misunderstandings, although they would hardly have been apparent to the SWSS students who wore “Bollocks to Postmodernism” T-shirts. The reader will recall the famous book Against Postmodernism by Alex Callinicos, the Greatest Living Philostopher Known to Mankind. This was quite a stylish and enjoyable polemic, marred only by Alex’s seeming confusion as to what postmodernism was. Drawing on Renaissance Man Chris Harman’s critique of the retreat of the European far left, Alex tended to identify the postmodernists with the Nouveaux Philosophes, who of course were a completely different tendency. Therefore, apart from a ridiculous lack of proportion that implies Francis Fukuyama was leading an army of PoMo barbarians in an assault on Hackney, Alex assumes that the postmodernists were attacking Marxism from the right.

This is wrong. Alex, one assumes, will be aware that Lyotard cut his teeth in the neo-Trotskyist Socialisme ou Barbarie tendency. This is not a coincidence. The postmodernist critique was aimed primarily at the French Communist Party tradition of Marxism, or if you prefer neo-Stalinism. Therefore the postmodernist challenge was an early part of the philosophical deconstruction of Stalinism, which one would have thought would endear it to a neo-Trotskyist like Callinicos and woolly social democrats like Hari and Cohen alike. In fact, I would argue that the main problem with the postmodernists was their failure to distinguish between Marxist philosophy and Stalinist ideology, a failure rooted in their inability to come to grips with the Trotskyist tradition.

So there was a lot of value in the postmodernist approach, except that they went too far and developed into the philosophical equivalent of Lenin’s infantile ultraleftism – who can forget Foucault’s writings on the Iranian revolution? – a kind of intellectual analogue to the Spartacist League (only more polite). In fact, it is my contention that Alex would have better occupied his time by writing a book called Against Spartacism, because you’re more likely to meet a follower of Jim Robertson than a loyal follower of Derrida at a British university.

And this brings me back to the point. You wouldn’t guess, from reading our pundits, that analytical philosophy was actually the establishment position in British academe and has been for about 50 years – Cohen and Elster, cited by Chris, were revising Marxism using the techniques of analytical philosophy long before postmodernism came on the scene. Instead, they prefer to ignore what is taught in British philosophy departments in order to pretend that postmodernism is sweeping all before it. Frankly, this is bollocks. While postmodernism has gained some influence in sociology and humanities departments – which were pretty much post-Marxist by the mid-70s – it remains utterly marginal in philosophy departments. And, you know, Marxism Today didn’t require Foucault or Derrida to do what it did. It simply required Jacques, Leadbetter and Aaro.

But does this seep through into our public discourse? No, it does not. And, while postmodernism has plenty of faults, it deserves to be taken seriously, not to be used as a prop for Johann, Nick and Francis in their Beavis and Butt-Head attempts to make French thought look much sillier than it really is. At least postmodernism attempted to form a limited model of social criticism, something analytical philosophy has never been.

6 Comments

Mummy, that man with the funny accent is confusing me

May 11, 2007 at 4:30 pm (Philosophy)

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I haven’t yet managed to see the new documentary film Žižek!, which hasn’t yet made it to the provinces. I have however read the review thereof in the New Statesman by Johann Hari (age 13¾) in which Johann shows little or no understanding of what the great man is about. I’m far from being an uncritical fan of Žižek – I find him entertaining and aggravating in pretty much equal measure – but he surely deserves better than the treatment Johann dishes out.

Steven Poole has already written a quite excellent riposte to Johann, which I won’t recap in any real detail. I agree with Steven that Johann shows little sign of understanding what postmodernism is. There is no shame in that – even Alex Callinicos, the Greatest Living Philostopher Known to Mankind, doesn’t understand what postmodernism is. But Žižek isn’t a postmodernist, and cribbing from Francis Wheen’s Mumbo-Jumbo and throwing around “postmodernist” as an all-purpose insult doesn’t really make a case. Likewise, Johann finds Lacan impenetrable. Again, I find Lacan pretty obscure, and that’s with a background in Reichian psychoanalysis. But Lacan’s obscurity doesn’t prove Žižek’s charlatanry, unless you hold to the philistine English view that anything difficult must be smoke and mirrors.

There are also some rather distasteful guilt-by-association arguments, of the Marko Attila Hoare variety. As in: Žižek approvingly quotes Alain Badiou; he must therefore subscribe to Badiou’s entire bill of goods; Badiou used to be a Maoist; therefore Žižek is an apologist, at least by proxy, for Mao’s atrocities. Not only is this unconvincing, it doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. For instance, in the Balkan wars Badiou took a pro-Serbian position, while Žižek has quite a pronounced streak of Slovene chauvinism.

What I wanted to pay some attention to is the question of exactly why Hari doesn’t get Žižek. A commenter on the Poole review noted that Johann has a double first in philosophy from Cambridge. Now, Johann is a smart bloke, but that doesn’t necessarily qualify him to comment on, oh, most modern European philosophy. Cambridge, erstwhile stomping ground of Russell and Wittgenstein, is the spiritual home of analytical philosophy, which is to be sharply distinguished from the continental Hegelian tradition.

Let me explain. The Hegelian approach to philosophy is basically historicist. The analytical approach is pseudo-scientific – “pseudo” because, as Sokal and Bricmont could tell you, philosophy is not a science. Nonetheless, it aspires to be scientific, and especially to approximate mathematical thought. Remember that 99% of scientists don’t give a rat’s ass about Newton’s life and times, or the historical context of the development of Newtonian thought. They don’t even read Newton’s books. What they want is to have Newton’s laws clearly written down in a textbook.

Well, analytical philosophy is a bit like that. Its methodology is based on the idea that a philosopher’s work can be boiled down to succinct “propositions”, and the task is to critique those propositions. Historical background, context, even translation from foreign languages, are of no interest to the analytical philosopher. If you have an essay to write on Wittgenstein’s concept of free will, you can read the works of Wittgenstein and the relevant contextual literature to your heart’s content, but your essay will hinge on Wittgenstein’s propositions. In fact, if you are a skilled bluffer, you can just go to the index, find three or four quotes on free will, and build a massive interpretive apparatus around the propositions. The propositions stand alone, and your interpretation can only be judged on its own coherence.

This actually works pretty well for Wittgenstein or Russell. It doesn’t work at all well for any philosopher who can’t be easily reduced to “propositions”. This is why Cambridge’s responses to Nietzsche have been uniformly wretched. It explains why Baudrillard drives English philosophers haywire. And it’s also a clue as to why Johann, for all his smarts, seems to be totally clueless when it comes to Žižek, Badiou or indeed Derrida, who he lashed a while back.

It occurs to me that an awful lot of these comical misunderstandings could be avoided if a) Britain followed France’s example of giving secondary-level students a basic grounding in philosophy, and b) the tyranny of analytical philosophy was replaced by a return to a more historicist approach. I don’t, for example, believe that a philosophy student should be let loose on Nietzsche without at least a minimal grasp of German language and literature, and the history of Nietzsche’s time. This would be quite a challenge to traditional English philistinism, but it might be worth it for bringing some clarity of thought. Of course, we Irish aren’t in much of a position to talk, as there is virtually no philosophical activity on the Emerald Isle, barring a few Thomists in the religious orders. A few steps on that road over here may be in order.

And if you get the chance to see Žižek the movie, please do. Once you get a grip on the accent, old Slavoj is quite the turn.

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