The Ground of Meaning

In 1979, Jean-Francoise Lyotard realized that we had reached a crisis-point in the history of science. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard announced that this crisis will force a revision in the methodology used by science in contemporary society and on the cultural imperatives that are bringing about these changes. The postmodern individual, Lyotard says, is one who no longer believes in the grand narratives that have legitimized both the social basis of cultural basis of social knowledge and the epistemological basis of scientific truth. Converging postmodern philosophy with the history of science, Lyotard indicates that a historical shift begun in the works of Nietzsche calls on us to abandon conceptual systems founded on these grand narratives. Many previous writers and thinkers provided a foundational basis for a thesis such as this one. For instance, Hans Blumenberg says that the history of scientific thought illustrates the curious development of trends in thinking. In the history of science it is not uncommon for a single scientific proposition to emerge and over the course of time come to assume a status of force and truthfulness. As more and more scientific results adhere to a basic supposition, propositions that initially seemed strange and counterintuitive becomes unquestioned and axiomatic truths. This is the story of the development of the philosophy of science. In this way Lyotard's work may be seen as developing from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1955), which conceives of the history of science as being a succession of paradigmatic shifts or revolutuions in seeing the world. Lyotard's viewpoint is also shared by thinkers such as Paul Feyerabend, who views the further development of scientific thought as being dependent on dissenting viewpoints and even outright anarchist forms of methodology. Benjamin Woolley acknowledges the possibility for a postmodern re-alignment of scientific knowledge when he says that under the influence of such modern viewpoints, the events that occur in physical reality become removed from the phenomenona associated from them. Woolley gives as an example recent events in international warfare, such as the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. According to Woolley, this war was so dominated by media coverage and critical analysis that the events of the war itself became, to use Jean Baudrillard's phrase, merely a simulcrum of the real. Baudrillard's condemnation of postmodernism, Woolley says, is a reaction to the postmodern conclusion that reality no longer exists, that life itself has become an image without reference to anything other than itself. The world where the real is abolished, suffocated out of existence by the advancement of manipulative images that can be altered by the free commerce of truth and illusion, is a world dominated by hyperreality; this is a world where the real becomes an aesthetic hallucination without origin or reference. According to Frederick Jameson, a basic feature of postmodernism is the progressive transformation of life into textuality, wherein the experience of the temporality of life is akin to the expereience of language. By this Jameson means that human existence and the experience of the passage of time are being re-conceptualized into, essentially, effects of language. To clarify his meaning, Jameson relates this statement to a reading of the poem "China" by Bob Perelman, where the experience of the real is not only mediated through signs, as in a modernist text, but in an example of a postmodern literary artwork, the only references made at all are to other images. In postmodern discourse, images refer to other images only; the intrusion of the real is not only prohibited, it is delegitimized, removed from the realm of the plausible and moved to the realm of the mythic. Unlike the modernist appreciation of the literary work in which unity is to be found within the text, in postmodern criticism this unity is re-located to the province of myth and insubstantial being, or what Jameson calls, "The bound unity of the absent book." Similar to the way Jameson views the literary text, Lyotard sees science as a narrative founded on myth. Lyotard targets those myths legitimize the methodology promoted by research institutions that insist on the continual drive for the new and the modern. Specifically, these myths are the liberation of humanity from the oppressors, which originates in the French Enlightenment, and the unity of all speculative knowledge, which derives from the Germanic and Hegelian traditions. Lyotard's text came as a reaction to the explosion of information which demanded the creation of a new medium for the dissemination of rhetorical discourse, one which could better accomodate the writings of the postmodern mind. Electronic hypertext, the internet and the world wide web make available a field of interconnections that were previously unbreached. A component of Lyotard's report of the epistemological uncertainty of the postmodern subject is a critique of the work of Jurgen Habermas. In particular, Lyotard distrusts Habermas' faith in an immanent social evolution within an intersubjective community. Such a belief, Lyotard says, is no more than a reconceptualization of those totalizing modernist belief-systems that expectantly awaited the development of a social, political and philosophical consensus. Rejecting such expectations, postmodernism repudiates Hegel's idea of a consensual culture in a world of absolute spirit, substituting in its place Marx's belief that the only consensus that can be arrived at will take place when we make ourselves at home in our alienated being. Lyotard observes a transformation in that status of knowledge that, he says, began at the end of the 1950s, occuring simultaneously with the end of post-war European rebuilding and with the emergence of a new stage in the logic of capitalism. The future outcome of history has been problematized to such an extent that predictions of future development are always highly uncertain. Lyotard recognizes that the leading sciences and technologies are based on language theory and are for the most part driven by language processing instruments. "In a society whose communicative component is becoming more prominent day by day," Lyotard says, "language assumes a new importance." This includes, of course, the computer, a machine whose data storage and retrieval capabilities make it the foundation of contemporary techne. While the future impact of the transformation of societal knowledge cannot be determined from the standpoint of the present, Lyotard suggests that these changes in the accessibility of knowledge will have social effects comparable to the increased access to knowledge at the time of the Renaissance. These changes include the dissolution of the directive inherited from the Greeks which commanded the student to 'know thyself' in order to acquire learning. Lyotard sees these old principles as swiftly becoming obsolescent in the face of the educational imperatives which see the education of students as being mutually exclusive from the development of character and individuality. The educational arena, once the province of a humanist liberalism that regarded free inquiry as the highest good, becomes a marketplace of information as, concomitantly, the logic of the commodity is carried over into the relationship between teacher and student, who adopt the roles of producer and consumer. With the restructuring of the values behind the economy of learning, knowledge comes to be manufactured according to its market value. The preeminent goal when knowledge is stripped of its use-value, says Lyotard, is exchange. Technocratic nations of the future will continue to place an emphasis on science and for this reason, the margins of difference between wealthy countries and impoverished countries will continue to increase, until an overwhelming abyss divides the postmodern and premodern worlds. He believes that information will continue to expand in stature and value until, like a precious resource, nation-stated will battle one another for rights of possession. The new stage in territorial warfare is the inevitable result of Lyotard calls "the mercantilization of knowledge." Revealing his Marxist roots, Lyotard predicts the withering away of the State dues to the ceaseless bombardment of messages circulating without ideological or epistemic reference. Who will know the truth in this world of multinational corporations and proletarian culture ? This is one of Lyotard's most resounding questions. Since the earliest advancements in Western civilization, scientific knowledge has found itself bound by narrative, that is, stories that serve to regulate and determine the projected course of history. These stories, once the grand recits of a highly productive and transformative worldview, have since faded into cultural memory, living on as the etiolating ghosts of a future history that failed to come into being. Lyotard notes that research in the 1960s exhibited a demoralized affect that corresponded to a slackening of revolutionary ambitions in both the human and natural sciences. Lyotard sees no place for revolution in the non-ideological postmodern age; the order of post-industrial society, while in a demoralized state, is nevertheless impervious to a sudden outbreak of revolutionary spirit. One area where support is lacking is that of legitimation, for the demoralized world finds self-legitimation to be a daunting and overwhelming task. In particular, postmodern society finds it difficult to organize and promulgate the normative laws set in place by the founders of modern society. This becomes a particularly difficult quandry when it comes to matters of science. Traditionally, the results of scientific research were scrutinized by a legislative body that. working within the carefully codified body of authorized discourse, determined whether or not a scientific statement was significant for the community at large. However, what happens when a statement can no longer be legitimized in the traditional manner ? If the right to determine the truth is, like the right to determine what is just, a subject open to multiple viewpoints, then once can forsee how Lyotard's vision of the future world burdened by a heteroglossic miasma of competing scientific bodies is in fact a possibility. In this scenario, the scientific world of the future is like today's political world, where an unyielding set of cultural prejudices leaves much of the globe in turmoil. Moreover, if knowledge and power are two sides of the same question, then the ruling classes have simply retreated to the next highest level, stacking the cards against the marginalized social groups that postmodernism seeks to liberate. Ironically, in this new age of computers and information superhighways, the questions that stand before us are the same ones we thought we had resolved. Lyotard admits as much, saying, "The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers." From the slave-owning societies of antiquity, to the large land-owners of the fuedal periord, to the bourgeois estate of the capitalist age, science has been integrated into to logic of the social world as a means to ensure the optimal rate of production. Marxism is directed by a different conception of knowledge; it does not privilege the same regime of values that the logic of capitalism does. On the contrary, Marxism perceives the world as fundamentally non-totalizable and dis-unified. The less radical forms of postmodernism believe that the modernist constructs are no longer applicable in the age of late capitalism, while the more radical views of postmodernism believe that these constructs, such as the individual bourgeois subject, never really existed at all. Such constructs are social and philosophical propagande designed to produce a sense of confusion over those who xcould radicalize the social world against the status quo. Lyotard's view of the postmodern individual exhibits many of the same qualities as Jameson's view of the postmodern literary object. The individual is not referred to a large chain of referents 'outside' of his own being but only to a self that moves around like Brownian particles, haphazardly and incessently. The self does not exist as an independent subject anymore but is bound in a concatenation of complex references, in a sequence of mobile identities. Although it may appear to the uncareful reader that Lyotard seeks to delegitimize the paradigm of contemporary science, in no way does he believe that the concepts of which the scientific tradition was founded on are now deprived of meaning. Rather, Lyotard makes a case that in order to institute the revitalization of scientific inquiry, deficient empty words and texts must be extirpated in order to arrive at the truth about science. "The war is not without rules," Lyotard says, "but the rules allow and encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterence." It is equally important to understand Lyotard's conception of knowledge as the ground for a postmodern sense of meaning that is binary but not denotative. Postmodern knowledge is not merely a set of denotative facts; it is more than a simple fulfillment of criteria that are either true or false. In the educational institutions of the future, the categories of knowledge (episteme) will be further differentiated, no longer suspended in opposition between simple perception (aisthesis) or opinion (doxa). The Greek post-Socratics termed all of these statements -- evaluative, prescriptive, denotative and performative -- as expressing opinion. By extinguishing all traces of the narrative form in scientific discourse, Lyotard conceives of a future where episteme is again reconfigured. Made up of two sub-groups, postmodern episteme is composed of prescriptive knowledge or payment knowledge, which serves to increase technical skills and evaluative knowledge and investment knowledge, which serves to increase productivity. Where will we find the true knowledge of existence, the knowledge acquired through training in the liberal arts ? This type of knowledge has been abandoned for it has been judged as lacking adequate use-value. In the early scientific era, education was deemed an important factor in the establishment of social boundaries and for this reason it viewed itself as a rational, narrative knowledge. In the postmodern age, however, education no longer has this exclusive function and for this reason only denotative statements are valid; all other, Lyotard says, are excluded. The replacement of universities with schools seems to be a necessary corollary of Lyotard's philosophy. After all, schools are functional while universities are merely speculative. We might expect to see an early manifestation of the reorganuization of the educational institution in the United States, for this country was the first to implement the organizational system of the German university as the model for the foundation of their own system of higher education. The figure of scientific method is converted into a myth which lingers on in its ignorance, unaware that its two main pillars of support, dialectics and metaphysics, rely on beliefs in original reference and transcendental presence, both of which have been set aside by modernist philosophers. Lyotard attempts to re-historicize the concept of science by re-situating scientific knowledge in the context of the learning self. Postmodernism, which has developed from the proletariatization of society, has gained discursive power from the synthesis of the twin philosophies of existentialism and Marxism. By conflating these two systems into a single text, it allows them to manifest a more significant presence in our lives. In fact, this is one of the reasons why the grand narratives of science can be left behind, for the inauguration of a postmodern scientific outlook is contingent on the needs to liberate the bourgeois class from the traditional authorities. While postmodernism appears to announce the death of the God of scientific inquiry, I believe Lyotard calls on us to accept science of a new re-articulated basis. In this context, scientific knowledge can be seen as a network, simultaneously erasing and re-installing the ethical values of the demoralized sciences because it realized it could not provide a stable and transparent future. The foundation of the methodology of postmodern science, although similar in structure to both the scientific tradition that led to the catholic precepts of Copernicus and Galileo and to the splintering that took place at the time of Locke and Bacon, contains nethier dogmatism nor an easily recognizable code of morality. Postmodernism sees science as dead because contemporary society, with its logic of the commodity and its staunch emphasis on the culture of the individual, has entirely obfuscated the natural world. Postmodernism is about recovering voices that were once hidden and removed from view. Deriving inspiration from the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, postmodern theorists such as Lyotard are laboring in the scientific tradition and are working to re-legitimize the scientific paradigm. It has been said that his work is, essentially, an attempt to re-invigorate the scientific methodology that he feels has been subverted by a demoralized ethical training. Like Feyerabend's call for an anarchist ethics, Lyotard speaks of the need for a radical super-moral ethics for the seeker of postmodern scientific fact, smashing all the idols of Western civilization in his attempt to rationalized a non-totalizable universe. Postmodern theory represents an attempt at rediscovering the primal sense of scientific thinking which has been debased and forgotten. Yet there is another acute sense of the meaning of scientific reasoning, for postmodernists believe that tradition in unable to preserve the truth perpetually. Rather than promoting a scientific truth on the basis of an authentic rationality, postmodernism willfully conceals the accepted standards of scientific truth, permitting the real and original component of meaning to be lost in history, in the shift from futurology to the nostalgia of a future anterior. The ethical component of this change in the reorganization of knowledge is the shift from the legitimzation of denotative statements to the legitimation of prescriptive statements. In this way, statements that pertain to justice can be legitimized as the only ethical solutions valid for society's needs. Knowledge in the postmodern era is no longer a subject that is studied for its own sake, but is something that accrues its value in the application, its legitimacy arriving only when it allows the manifestation of the ethical face of morality. Working towards a joint resolution, the philosophies of Lyotard and Nietzsche implicitly predict the dawn of a new age and the emergence of a new type of individual subject, one who knows the secret complimnetarity of scientific truth and narrational fiction and, by preaching their unification, becomes a revolutionary in the deepest sense possible; this person is one who has moved beyond these grand narratives and has forged a new epistemological code through the strength of their rhetorical will.

Rorty (review)

While I might not have all the necessary background reading in language philosophy (Quine and Sellars, as well as Putnam and Davidson are notably absent from my purview), I admire Rorty's attempt to bring Marx, Freud and Sartre under the aegis of academia and its banner of legitimation. I finished Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature today, as well as John Dewey's Art as Experience, which I thought was a pleasure to read in comparison with what were in my opinion Rorty's misplaced attempts to reconcile revolutionary philosophers like Heidegger with the unhappy consciousness of reactionary philosophers like Kierkegaard. I see Rorty's writing of his book as stemming from a professional philosopher's desire to establish his own self-worth -- and that of his discipline -- amid a host of academic discourses, and I see his philosophical position as developing from a longing to negotiate the cultural policies that would carve out a place for philosophy without making a good deal of compromise; the afterward says that he wrote other books, which I would like to peruse, as he seems to be a thinker I could use as a friend.

Work (review)

This work concerns Zola's fantasy of the growth of a new society guided by the formation of a healthy association of labor groups and the overthrowing of the wage-system that the author sees as enchaining humankind to a system of rewards and punishments. It leaves one asking, why did this society of the future not come to fruition at the time it was written, in the early 20th century, or sooner ? The masters of war saw to it that man would be continuously divided along racial and class lines, along any lines they could devise that would serve as a pretext for the exploitation of capital, to make any flickering flame of intellectual talent but to bend to become the slave and the penitent of capital. The invention of atomic weapons was the final triumph of the real politics of war, the two great wars of the 20th century saw to it that humanity would forever be unsatisfied with reality-presented-as-fact; humanity withers and fades away in the triumph of commercialism and mass-culture, religion disappears under the fallen edifice of a church not longer supported in a world where money is God and greed becomes society's sole guiding principle. When work becomes a matter of manipulating the instruments that one has been accustomed to since just after leaving the nursery, as in Zola's society of the future, the postmodern age begins as the workers reconstruct society on the basis of a female-centered empathy for the poor and abused, those citizens previously relegated to society's contemptuous negligence. This book is very relevant for 21st century America and, specifically, for a post-Trump political age.

Mansfield Park (review)

I read this book and simultaneously thought of Harold Bloom's student who voiced her opinion that she didn't have to read Mansfield Park in order to argue that it was about the corrupting influence of patriarchal society and Austen's view of the desultory influence of male desire on the lives of women in early modern world. However, now that I have read this beauteous novel, in my opinion Mansfield Park is a personal story, a model for women to emulate rather than a cautionary tale about the debilitating constrictions associated with a patriarchal world. Jane Austen offers the story of Fanny Price as the story of a woman who attains full maturity and finds her place in society, as she traces the psychological solidification of a woman who successfully navigates the hazards of an early 19-century coming out as a coming-to-be. I feel I feel these types of Marxist renderings of classic literature entail a twisting of meaning and a lack of ability to experience pleasure in reading, as the experience of the text is placed under a regime of signs regulated by an absolute value in terms of the velocity of money. I have thought long and deep about how this kind of thinking has influenced the women I have known and my conclusion is the following: to me it is a sign of how love has become alienated as a result of our superficial contact with politics in daily life. (This paragraph is too compressed for a short review, but it contains my basic reaction to the text.) The danger of a superficial reading of philosophy stems from an overly logocentric, semiotically surface-level, interpretation of the Bible. The retreat or detour into the surfaces is wrong-headed because the wholly conceptual realm of Truth is imageless and why God is invisible to us. This is my philosophy, January 23, 2021 - Andrew B. Noselli

Reading List 2020

READING LIST 2020 Albert Camus - The Plague - Literature - 320 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Isaac Bashevis Singer - Shosha - Literature - 278 pages - Paperback ; Emile Durkheim - The Division of Labor in Society - Sociology - 416 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Rainer Maria Rilke - Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose - Literature - 375 pages - Hardcover ; Martin Heidegger - The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays - Philosophy - 208 pages - Paperback ; W. Somerset Maugham - Collected Stories - Literature - 1,100 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Daniel J. Boorstin - The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself - History - 686 pages - Paperback ; Balzac - Droll Stories - Literature - 494 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Kenneth Burke - The Philosophy of Literary Form - Literary Criticism/Philosophy - 469 pages - Paperback ; Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen - The Life of Goethe - Biography - 42 pages Terry Eagleton - Ideology of the Aesthetic - Literary Criticism/Philosophy - 415 pages - Paperback ; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life - Autobiography - 403 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Harold Bloom - Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds - Literary Criticism - 745 pages - Paperback ; Voltaire - Philosophical Dictionary - Philosophy - 400 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Mircea Eliade - The Sacred and the Profane - Religion - 232 pages - Paperback ; Dave Robinson - Introducing Kierkegaard: A Graphic Guide - Philosophy - 176 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Soren Kierkegaard - Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs - Philosophy - 255 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Herbert Marcuse - One-Dimensional Man - Philosophy - 295 pages - Paperback ; Soren Kierkegaard - Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession - Philosophy/Religion - 224 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Jeff Collins - Introducing Heidegger: A Graphic Guide - Philosophy - 176 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Anton Chekhov - The Darling and Other Stories - Literature - 225 pages - Project Gutenberg ; Anton Chekhov - The Duel and Other Stories - Literature - 225 pages - Project Gutenberg ; Andre Malraux - Man's Fate - Literature - 365 pages - Paperback ; Anton Chekhov - The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories - Literature - 250 pages - Project Gutenberg ; Anton Chekhov - The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories - Literature - 200 pages - Project Gutenberg ; Charles Dickens - David Copperfield - Literature - 1,002 pages - Paperback ; Bertrand Russell - A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day - Philosophy - 906 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here - Popular Fiction - 402 pages - Paperback ; John Dewey - Leibniz's New Essays Concerning Human Understanding: A Critical Exposition - Philosophy - 300 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Bertrand Russell - Power: A New Social Analysis - Philosophy - 279 pages - Paperback ; William Faulkner - The Hamlet - Literature - 409 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Jean-Paul Sartre - We Have Only This Life to Live: Selected Essays, 1939-1975 - Philosophy - 536 pages - Paperback ; Soren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening - Philosophy - 200 pages - Amazon Kindle ; James George Frazer - The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion - Anthropology - 875 pages - Paperback ; Emile Zola - The Ladies' Paradise - Literature - 480 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Isaac Bashevis Singer - In My Father's Court - Literature - 307 pages - Paperback ; William Shakespeare - Henry IV, Part One - Literature - 225 pages - Amazon Kindle ; William Shakespeare - Henry IV, Part Two - Literature - 225 pages - Amazon Kindle ; David Hume - Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion - Philosophy - 160 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Daniel J. Boorstin - The Creators - History: A History of Heroes of the Imagination - 747 pages - Paperback ; Alain Badiou - Trump - Politics - 80 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Bertrand Russell - Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits - Philosophy - 430 pages - Paperback ; Charles Taylor - Hegel - Philosophy - 594 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment - Literature - 694 pages - Paperback ; Robert Musil - The Man Without Qualities - Literature - 1,500 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Andre Gide - Fruits of the Earth - Literature - 210 pages - Paperback ; Carl Gustav Jung - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious - Psychology - 390 pages - Paperback ; Theophile Gautier - Captain Fracasse - Literature - 300 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Bertrand Russell - Religion and Science - Philosophy - 269 pages - Paperback ; Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism and Other Writings - Sociology - 405 pages - Paperback ; John Maynard Keynes - The Essential Keynes - Economics - 558 pages - Paperback ; Theophile Gautier - Constantinople - Literature - 298 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain - Literature - 708 pages - Paperback ; Henri Lefebvre - Critique of Everyday Life - Philosophy - 875 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Fyodor Dostoevsky - Memoirs From the House of the Dead - Literature - 366 pages - Paperback ; Paul de Man - The Rhetoric of Romanticism - Literary Criticism - 300 pages - Paperback ; James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson (excerpt) - Biography - 600 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Harold Bloom - Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human - Literary Criticism - 745 pages - Paperback ; Abraham Joshua Heschel - Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion - Religion - 296 pages - Paperback ; Henri Lefebre - Sociology of Marx - Philosophy - 214 pages - Amazon Kindle ; G.K. Chesterton - St. Thomas Aquinas - Religion - 260 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Idiot - Literature - 707 pages - Paperback ; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays: Discourse on Metaphysics; On the Ultimate Origination of Things; Preface to New Essays; The Monadology - Philosophy - 96 pages Jean-Paul Sartre - Between Existentialism and Marxism - Philosophy - 298 pages - Paperback ; Ezra Pound - Instigations of Ezra Pound: Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character (by Ernest Fenollosa) - Literary Criticism - 315 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Fredric Jameson - A Singular Modernity: An Essay on the Ontology of the Present - Philosophy/Literary Criticism - 256 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children - Popular Fiction - 533 pages - Paperback ; Gertrude Stein - Three Lives - Literature - 262 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Fredric Jameson - An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army - Philosophy/Literary Criticism - 336 pages - Amazon Kindle ; John Updike - Just Looking: Essays on Art - Art Criticism - 200 pages - Hardcover ; William Faulkner - The Town - Literature - 394 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Charles Dickens - Nicholas Nickleby - Literature - 837 pages - Paperback ; Aristotle - The Nicomachean Ethics - Philosophy - 329 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Henry James - The Author of Beltraffio - Literature - 40 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Thorstein Veblen - Theory of the Leisure Class - Economics - 320 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Harold Bloom - The Western Canon - Literary Criticism - 493 pages - Paperback ; Max Weber - From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology - Sociology - 450 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Bertrand Russell - The Scientific Outlook - Philosophy - 221 pages - Paperback ; John Updike - Always Looking: Essays on Art - Art Criticism - 216 pages - Hardcover ; Will Durant - On the Meaning of Life - Philosophy - 152 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Fyodor Dostoevsky - Demons - Literature - 867 pages - Paperback ; Louis Althusser - Philosophy For Non-Philosophers - Philosophy - 215 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Friedrich Nietzsche - The Anti-Christ/Ecce Homo/Twilight of the Idols/The Case of Wagner/Nietzsche Contra Wagner - Philosophy - 300 pages - Paperback ; Jacques Maritain - Christianity and Democracy/The Rights of Man and Natural Law - Philosophy - 195 pages - Amazon Kindle ; David Harvey - A Brief History of Neoliberalism - Economics - 206 pages - Paperback ; Baruch Spinoza - The Ethics: with the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and selected letters - Philosophy - 304 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Henri Lefebvre - Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life - Philosophy - 128 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Eric J. 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Yeats - Per Amica Silentia Lunae - Literature - 51 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Charles Eliot Norton - William Blake - Literary Criticism - 50 pages - Amazon Kindle ; William Blake - The Complete Works of William Blake - 450 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Gabriel Marcel - The Philosophy of Existentialism - Philosophy - 128 pages - Paperback ; Sigmund Freud - Reflections on War and Death - Psychology - 30 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Paul Feyerabend - Against Method - Philosophy - 312 pages - Paperback ; Voltaire - Zadig - Literature - 95 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Henrik Ibsen - Peer Gynt - Literature - 125 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Walter Pater - Studies in the History of the Renaissance - Art Criticism - 231 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - Philosophy - 230 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Dante - The Divine Comedy - Literature - 735 pages - Paperback ; Mark Twain - Pudd'nhead Wilson/Those Extraordinary Twins - Literature - 288 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Anton Chekhov - The Bet and Other Stories - Literature - 142 pages - Project Gutenberg ; John Kenneth Galbraith - The Affluent Society - Sociology - 291 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Charles Dickens - American Notes - Travel - 334 pages - Paperback ; Anton Chekhov - The Chorus Girl and Other Stories - Literature - 180 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Anton Chakhov - The House With the Mezzanine and Other Stories - Literature - 120 pages - Amazon Kindle ; William Wordsworth - The Major Works - 769 pages - Paperback ; Gabriel Marcel - Being and Having - Philosophy - 246 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Mary McCarthy - The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays - Literature - 213 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Etienne Gilson - From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution - Philosophy - 241 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Simone de Beauvoir - The Ethics of Ambiguity - Philosophy - 164 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Eric Hobsbawm - The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 - History - 351 pages - Paperback ; George Santayana - The Life of Reason - Philosophy - 971 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Abraham H. Maslow - Towards a Psychology of Being - Psychology - 200 pages - Amazon Kindle ; David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals - Philosophy - 128 pages - Amazon Kindle ; David Hume - Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion - Philosophy - 156 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Bernard Williams - Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy - Philosophy - 202 pages - Paperback ; Euripides - The Bacchae - Literature - 96 pages - Amazon Kindle ; George Bernard Shaw - Major Barbara - Literature - 225 pages - Amazon Kindle ; John Dewey - Psychology and Social Practice - Psychology - 52 pages - Amazon Kindle ; John Dewey - Essays in Experimental Logic - Philosophy - 448 pages - Amazon Kindle ; John Dewey - Studies in Logical Theory - Philosophy - 453 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Percy Byshhe Shelley - The Major Works - Literature - 855 pages - Paperback ; Frederick Copleston - A History of Medieval Philosophy - Philosophy - 403 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Albert Schweitzer - Out of My Life and Thought - Autobiography - 255 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Edmund Husserl - Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology - Philosophy - 427 pages - Paperback ; Lawrence Durrell - The Lawrence Durrell Travel Reader: A Middle Western Legend - Travel - 375 pages - Amazon Kindle ; William Blake - The Complete Works - Literature - 450 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Peter Kropotkin - Memoirs of a Revolutionist - Autobiography - 356 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Joseph A. Schumpeter - Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - Political Philosophy - 464 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Gertrude Stein - How to Write - Literature - 382 pages - Amazon Kindle ; John Cowper Powys - The Complex Vision - Philosophy - 348 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Ernst Cassirer - The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language - Philosophy - 326 pages - Paperback ; Noam Chomsky - Deterring Democracy - Politics - 424 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Noam Chomsky - How the World Works - Politics - 336 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Lord Byron - The Major Works - Literature - 1,093 pages - Paperback ; Henry James - Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, A Bundle of Letters & The Point of View - Literature - 520 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Emile Zola - Fruitfulness - Literature - 463 pages - Amazon Kindle ; John Stuart Mill - A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation - Philosophy - 750 pages - Amazon Kindle ; Thomas Mann - Joseph and His Brothers - Literature - 1526 pages - Hardcover ; Emile Zola - The Dream - Literature - 224 pages - Paperback ; Emile Zola - Le Reve - French Literature - 212 pages - Amazon Kindle ; 160 books and a total of 57,789 pages

CDs played October 2020 to April 2021

I played the following CDs from October 2020 to April 2021: Eric Clapton, "Just One Night" [2 CDs] ===== The Pogues, "Rum, Sodomy and the Lash"; and David Bowie, "Earthling" ===== Richard Thompson, "Celtschmerz: Live UK '98"; and Can, "Soundtracks" ===== Grateful Dead, "Dick's Picks, Volume 33: Oakland Coliseum, Oakland CA (10/09 & 10/1976)" [4 CDs] ===== The Pogues, "Red Roses for Me"; and David Bowie, ". . . hours . . . " ===== Bill Evans and Tony Bennett; and Dave Brubeck, "Jazz Impressions of New York" ===== The Rolling Stones, "Undercover"; The Pogues, "If I Should Fall From Grace with God" ===== Grateful Dead, "Dick's Picks, Volume 16: Fillmore Auditorium (11/08/1969)" [3 CDs] ===== Frank Zappa, "Zoot Allures"; and Yes, "Close to the Edge" ===== Can, "Ege Bamyasi"; and The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Bravo! Brubeck!" ===== Santana, "Shape Shifter"; and Roger Waters, "Amused to Death" ===== Grateful Dead, "Dick's Picks, Volume 29: Lakeland Civic Center, Lakeland FL (05/21/1977)" [3 CDs] ===== Frank Zappa, "Uncle Meat" [2 CDs] ===== Grateful Dead, "Dick's Picks, Volume 25: New Haven, CT/Springfield, MA (05/10-11/1978)" [4 CDs] ===== Pat Metheney, "What's it All About?"; and Bill Frisell, "Big Sur" ===== Joni Mitchell, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns"; and Roxy Music, "Avalon" ===== Roxy Music, "Flesh+Blood"; and Donald Fagen, "Morph the Cat" ===== Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Endangered Species"; and Frank Zappa, "We're Only in it For the Money" ===== Grateful Dead, "Dick's Picks, Volume 36: The Spectrum, Philaldelphia, PA (09/21/1972)" [4 CDs] ===== Eric Clapton, "Old Sock"; and Bill Frisell, "Gone, Just Like a Train" ===== Eric Clapton, "Clapton"; and Vince Gill & Paul Franklin, "Bakerfield" ===== Grateful Dead, "Dick's Picks, Volume 29: Fox Theater, Atlanta, GA (05/19/1977)" [3 CDs]; and The Rolling Stones, "The Brussels Affair, Live 1973" (Goat's Head Soup Super Deluxe) ===== Charlie Haden & Pat Metheney, "Beyond the MIssouri Sky"; and Emmylou Harris, "Pieces of the Sky" ===== Bill Evans, "Everybody Digs Bill Evans"; and T-Bone Walker, "Stormy Monday" ===== Bill Frisell, "Blues Dream"; and Lou Reed, "Ecstasy" ===== The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Red, Hot and Cool"; and Dave Brubeck, "Jazz Impressions of Eurasia" ===== Led Zeppelin, "THe Songs Remains the Same" [2 CDs] ===== Richard Thompson Band, "Ducknapped!"; and Can, "Tago Mago" ===== END

CDs played April to September 2020

I played the following CDs from April to September 2020: April to October 2020, comprising 21 weeks (24 weeks minus 3 hot weeks): 5 Various Artists, including Luna's "Penthouse," "Rendezvous" and "Pup Tent"; and Dean & Britta's "Back Numbers" & "L'Avventura" (to be streamed via Amazon Music Unlimited); plus Stereolab's "Mars Audiac Quintet."===== 6 Luna, including "Bewitched," "Days of Our Nights," "Close Cover Before Striking," "Romantica" and "Slide" (to be streamed via Amazon Music Unlimited).===== 5 Lightnin' Hopkins, including "Lightnin' Hopkins/Last Night Blues," "Mojo Hand/Lightnin'," "Blues in My Bottle/Walkin' This Road by Myself" and "Lightnin' and Co./Lightnin' Strikes."===== 9 Franz Liszt, "Piano Works by Jorge Bolet" (Week 1).===== 5 Various Artists, including 4 by Sonny Clark, "The Complete Album Collection: 1957-1962" and Horace Silver's "Song For My Father."===== 9 Franz Liszt, "Piano Works by Jorge Bolet" (Week 2).===== 5 Charles Lloyd, including "Fish Out of Water," "Notes From Big Sur," "The Call," "All My Relations" and "Canto."===== 5 Various Artists, including Freddie Hubbard, "Straight Life," Dexter Gordon, "Go!", Wayne Shorter, "Speak No Evil," Kenny Burrell, "Midnight Blue" and McCoy Tyner, "The Real McCoy."===== 5 Various Artists, including Lee Morgan, "The Sidewinder," Erroll Garner, "Jazz by the Sea," Art Blakey, "Moanin'," Eric Dolphy "Out to Lunch" and Herbie Hancock, "Headhunters."===== 5 Wes Montgomery, including "Smokin' at the Half Note," "Full House," "Incredible Jazz Guitar," "Movin' Along" and "So Much Guitar!"===== 5 Chet Baker, including "The Chet Baker Quartet Live Volume 1: This Time the Dream's on Me," "The Chet Baker Quartet Live Volume 2: Out of Nowhere," "The Chet Baker Quartet Live Volume 3: My Old Flame," "In Europe, 1955" and "Haig '53: The Other Pianoless Quartet."===== 5 Lynyrd Skynyrd, including "One More From the Road" (2 CDs), "God and Guns," "Last of a Dyin' Breed" and "The Last Rebel."===== 6 Paul McCartney, including "Tug of War" (2 CDs), "Pipes of Peace" (2 CDs) and "At the Speed of Sound" (2 CDs).===== (July 4 week break from new music, the HOT weeks): Week 1: The Grateful Dead, "The G.D. Movie" (5 CDs); Frank Zappa, "Cruisin' with Ruben & the Jets"; The Grateful Dead, "Dead Set" (2 CDs).===== Week 2: Bob Marley, "Songs of Freedom" (4 CDs); Little Feat, "Live at the Ram's Head" (2 CDs); Don Dorsey, "Bachbusters"; Dave Brubeck, "Just You, Just Me."===== Week 3: Bob Dylan, "Unplugged/Half-Cut," "Woodstock 1994" and "Bob Dylan's Masked and Anonymous"; Miles Davis, "Cookin' at the Plugged Nickel," "Siesta" and "Water Babies"; and Van Morrison, "Common One."===== Week 4: Miles Davis, "Aura," "Amandla," "Star People" and "Ballads"; Van Morrison, "Beautiful Vision"; Grateful Dead, "Infrared Roses"; and Tom Waits, "Small Change" and "Heartattack and Vine."===== 5 Various Artists, including Grateful Dead, "Dick's Picks, Volume 28 (Salt Lake City, Utah and Lincoln NE)" [4 CDs]; and Rush, "Roll the Bones."===== 5 Various Artists, including Berlioz, "Great Orchestral Works" [2 CDs]; John Cale, "Music for a New Society" [2 CDs]; and Charles Lloyd, "I Long to See You."===== 6 Ryan Adams, including "Rock N Roll," "Love is Hell," "29," "Cardinalology," "Easy Tiger" and "Jacksonville City Nights."===== 5 R.E.M., including "Automatic For the People," "Fables of the Reconstruction," "Document," "Life's Rich Pageant" and "Out of Time."===== 5 Various Artists, including Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume 4"; Jon Anderson & Stolt, "The Invention of Knowledge"; Bob Weir, "Blue Mountain"; Van Morrison, "Keep Me Singing"; and David Bowie, "Blackstar."===== 5 Various Artists, including King Crimson, "Live at the Orpheum"; Samuel Barber/Vaughn Williams/Bartok; Antonin Dvorak, "Stabat Mater" [2 CDs]; Francis Poulenc, "Mass in G Major"; and "Mozart at Midnight."===== 6 Miles Davis, "Miles Smiles," "'Round Midnight," "Sorcerer," "Seven Steps to Heaven," "Milestones" and "Nefertiti."===== 5 Various Artists, including Cowboy Junkies, "Notes Falling Slow" [4 CDs]; and "Nanci Griffith, "Once in a Blue Moon."===== 4 Jimmy Reed, Original Album Classics =======================================

Race relations, Part 3

Race relations, part 3: It is clearly common sense that the inequitable division of land between the landowners and the propertyless have led to an intensified racial conflict, and common sense might says that land reforms have no place in modern America, but common sense can be profoundly misleading: the only other large colonial or ex-colonial country where attempts to apply liberal land law reforms were made was in Latin America. Since the repression of the Nicaraguan Sandanistas, the most notable recent attempt at land reform took place in Venezuela, when, in 2001, Hugo Chávez's government enacted Plan Zamora to redistribute government and unused private land to campesinos in need.  The plan met with heavy opposition which led to a coup attempt in 2002.  When Pedro Carmona took over the presidency during that event, he reversed the land reform. However, the reversal was declared null when the coup failed and Chávez returned to power. By the end of 2003, 60,000 families had received temporary title to a total of 55,000 km² of land under this plan. Despite the land reforms carried out by the government, which, according to some sources, have reduced the so-called latifundios (which means "big land-ownership"), most receivers of the land didn't have any knowledge about how to cultivate the land and grow crops. In many cases, peasants didn't even water, since water infrastructures were still missing in most of the regions. Moreover, in some cases, campesinos didn't gain direct ownership of the land, but only the right to farm it without having to pay the rent and without sanctions from the government, and in some cases the land wasn't given to single peasant family, but managed in communes, according to the rules of socialism. According to some sources, the expropriated land amounts to 4-5 million hectares.(Quote from Wikipedia) The great bulk of Judaism which inhabited the rapidly growing ghettos in the eastern part of Poland and Lithuania were divided in their allegiance between the learned intellectualist rabbis of the orthodoxy and the ecstatic and poverty-stricken star of Chassidim; recession is a sign of insufficient or imperfect liberalization; with their liberation from the ghettos many jews began to question their allegiance to such traditions as restrictive dietary laws, prayers in Hebrew and the wearing of special outfits that set them apart that set them apart as Jews. For centuries, Poland was home to one of the largest and most significant Jewish communities in the world. Polish monarchs of the Piast dynasty invited the Jews to the country awarding them rights of status and total religious tolerance.[24] By the mid-16th century, 80% of the world's Jews lived in Poland. Thanks to a long period of Polish statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy, the immigration of Jews to Poland began to increase already during the Crusades because of systematic persecution of Jews in Western Europe. Jewish settlers built their own settlements in Poland. By the mid-14th century they had occupied thirty-five towns in Silesia alone. The Catholic Church, however, was opposed to the tolerant attitude of the Polish royalty. The 1266 council of Breslau applied the Fourth Council of the Lateran limitations on the Jews to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Gniezno, forbidding side-by-side life of Jews and Christians and setting up Jewish ghettos. In large cities, residential quarters were assigned to them, as found, for example, in Kazimierz, later a prominent district of Kraków. In the Kazimierz city, a 34-acre "Jewish Town" was set up by king Jan I Olbracht in 1495 for the relocation of Jews from Kraków Old Town after a citywide fire. Kraków's Kazimierz is one of the finest examples of an old Jewish quarter to be found anywhere in the world. The Jewish quarter was governed by its own municipal form of Jewish self-government called kehilla, a foundation of the local qahal. In smaller Polish towns, ethnic communities were mostly integrated.Nearly complete genocidal destruction of the Polish Jewish community took place during the German occupation of Poland and the ensuing Holocaust. The World War II ghetto-system had been imposed by Nazi Germany roughly between October 1939 and July 1942 in order to confine Poland's Jewish population of 3.5 million for the purpose of persecution, terror, and exploitation. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in all of Nazi occupied Europe, with over 400,000 Jews crammed into an area of 1.3 square miles (3.4 km2), or 7.2 persons per room. The Łódź Ghetto (set up in the city of Łódź, renamed Litzmannstadt, in the territories of Poland annexed by Nazi Germany) was the second largest, holding about 160,000 inmates. Over three million Polish Jews perished in World War II, resulting in the destruction of an entire civilization.A more complete list of over 260 ghettos with approximate number of prisoners, date of creation and liquidation, as well as known deportation route to death camps, is available at Jewish ghettos.  Starting in 1939, Adolf Eichmann, a German Nazi and SS officer began to systematically move Polish Jews away from their homes and into designated areas of large Polish cities. The first large ghetto of World War II at Piotrków Trybunalski was established on October 8, 1939,[37] followed by the Łódź Ghetto in April 1940, the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1940, and many other ghettos established throughout 1940 and 1941. The ghettos were walled off, and any Jew found leaving them was shot.The situation in the ghettos was usually brutal. In Warsaw, 30% of the population were forced to live in 2.4% of the city's area. In the ghetto of Odrzywol, 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by 5 families, between 12 and 30 to each small room. The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on replenishments supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 181 calories per Jew, compared to 669 calories per non-Jewish Pole and 2,613 calories per German. With crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and little sanitation (in the Łódź Ghetto 95% of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers) hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and starvation.The liquidation of WWII ghettos across Poland was closely connected with the formation of highly secretive killing centers built by various German companies including I.A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, and C.H. Kori GmbH. 254,000–300,000 Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone to Treblinka extermination camp over the course of 52 days during Grossaktion Warsaw (1942). In some of the ghettos the local resistance organizations launched the ghetto uprisings; none were successful, and the Jewish populations of the ghettos were almost entirely killed.[42] Jews from Eastern Poland (areas now in Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine) were killed using guns rather than in gas chambers, see Ponary massacre, Janowska concentration camp.(Quoted from Wikipedia) On occasion public protest meetings between desperate men led to the direct action of riot, which entailed the smashing of machine shops and houses of the rich; giving rise to the belief that oppositional groups mobilized outside the state apparatus and within some separate entity called civil society; large-scale protests and rallies for racial-equality have captured public attention and amplified calls for policy reform in recent weeks. In 1956, during a British Parliamentary debate, a Labour spokesman said that "organised workers were by no means wedded to a 'Luddite Philosophy'." More recently, the term Neo-Luddism has emerged to describe opposition to many forms of technology. According to a manifesto drawn up by the Second Luddite Congress (April 1996; Barnesville, Ohio), Neo-Luddism is "a leaderless movement of passive resistance to consumerism and the increasingly bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age."The term "Luddite fallacy" is used by economists in reference to the fear that technological unemployment inevitably generates structural unemployment and is consequently macroeconomically injurious. If a technological innovation results in a reduction of necessary labour inputs in a given sector, then the industry-wide cost of production falls, which lowers the competitive price and increases the equilibrium supply point which, theoretically, will require an increase in aggregate labour inputs.(Quoted from Wikipedia) In 2020, the current state of relations between African-Americans and Whites reflect real problems in society and anticipate the transformation and the extension of the world of sciences which have produced our modern scientific universe.  The idea of having employers consider race in hiring and promoting decisions should be the economic goal of the protest movement, or, more beneficially, the creation of jobs that would enable minorities to withstand the global recessions of the early 2000s.  While American utilitarianism never monopolized middle class liberal ideology, it provided a radical axe with which to chop down traditional institutions which could not answer the decisive questions, "Does it contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people?"  Blacks are a greater portion of the population that is exposed to impoverishment; they face discrimination and limited works or advancement opportunities and the effects of generational poverty, making it more likely that their children will inherit the poverty they experienced. As much as the the upper-class deny it, society continues to be haunted by the murderous scourge of racism and increasingly so as the new century advanced; white power is 2020 functions less as a neoliberal institution more so as a center of raw power; the underclass lesson is that neoliberalism stands for the broad set of idea positing the market and market-centered values as the ultimate civilizing agent at home and abroad.  Unlike the class-revolution of the 1960s, these political movements of the 21st century were not intended and even planned.  As usually happens in periods of rapid industrialization it has deleterious consequences. The riots of the 60s had negative effects on black people's income and employment, for whom a recession is not merely a matter of insufficient or imperfect liberalization: examples of racism abounded, including prejudice, xenophobia, internalized oppression and the growing sense of resentment over white-privilege; in short, beliefs about race influenced by the dominant culture.  Nevertheless, what counts about the period from 1964 to 2020 were not that by later standards its economic changes were small, but that fundamental changes were lacking; while it may be crucial to preserve the integrity of the financial system, the irresponsible and self-aggrandizing individual operators within it produces speculative volatility and chronic instability; ethinic minorities face discrimination in the labor market and limited access to education and healthcare even when the economy is going well. The protestors look towards economic benefits that are beneficial in the long run, even though losses in the short run--as they often are in social reforms--are serious.  The initial attempts to colonize the foreign markets in areas such as automobiles and manufactured goods are not going to alleviate the economic conditions of the laboring classes, especially when insurer's base premiums on a driver's socio-economic status, as they invariably do in ways that disproportionately affects African-Americans, thus making state-mandated insurance more expensive for them as a proxy for race. Not for the first or last time in the 21st century are the tactics of the western world see to open a country to trade, that is, to the superior competition of the industrialized sector of the world; but its embedded liberalism produced individual isolation and passivity of our atomized societies; if embedded racism cannot be removed, the alternative is to deinstitutionalize it from American society -- by force if need be.

Race relations 2020 (Part 2)

Dear Ari, I reflected on your comments and have some additional comments to make; they are as follows: Your brief rebuttal reminds me of the words of Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister who was installed when Britain was at the height of its imperial power; reflecting of the revolutionary movements of the 1840s, he said, with great confidence and determination, "that commerce may go freely forth, leading civilization with one hand, and peace with the other, to render mankind happier, wiser, better...this is the dispensation of Providence." Truthfully, I don't think you fully read what I wrote about the protestors; I felt I was if anything a little bit too hard on them; I characterized them as ideologically unsound having no politics except to walk around with T-shirts that say, "I can't breathe." So, too, you decry any attempt at improving society through what you call "social engineering"; however, I call the methodological removal of superstition and ignorance from the population an example of social engineering. You suspect them of carrying out a left-wing anti-capitalist program, but you don't allow for a critique of capitalism, which I think is a deficiency in your argument. Historically the first truly non-secular country, America was founded upon idealism and the idea that happiness meant contentment for the greatest number of its citizens; however, the American dream of home ownership is a dream frequently out of reach for many and, in addition, the standard of living is in danger of falling due to an increase in social inequality; the leading philosophy of our Darwinian neoliberal world is that only the fittest should survive. Despite my initial misgivings as to their ideological unsoundness (or rather unformed-ness), I see these groups of people as legitimate critics of capitalism who reject an obvious dehumanization through the powers of the dominant classes and seek to overcome alienation from their social home through their protest activities. If I were to give these groups any advice, I would call on them to remember that it was not until Karl Marx altered his stance towards socialism from one of welcomeness to one of historical inevitability that Marx's politics became most disturbing to the bourgeoisie: like Hegel, Marx was an evolutionist from whom civilization evolved through a series of class societies. Each one of these class societies were progressive in spite of the injustice they imposed; this level of injustice acted as society's internal contradiction, both setting a barrier to further progress and empowering the forces for its further becoming; late capitalism was the last of these stages; and what Marx demonstrated, as E.J. Hobsbawm says, was that "capitalism too contained a set of internal contradictions that barred the way to further progress and at a certain point would plunge it into a crisis from which it would not emerge." In addition, Hobsbawm continues, "Marx argued that capitalism became its own grave-digger in that it fostered the growth an increasingly discontented proletariat, while the concentration of power into fewer and fewer hands made society increasingly vulnerable to be overthrown"; these protest movements may be seen as the continuation of the long war between the religious and the radicals that threaten to bring our social experiment to a close. Finally, I want to state my belief that philosophy will finally be able to engage in the production of empirical knowledge when it is no longer tied to the state; your type of thinking would never have allowed the Jews of Europe to emerge from their ghettos. I am very interested in your response to what I had to say, Best wishes, ABN

Race relations 2020

Race relations 2020: America's last war having failed to destroy the country, hordes of young people both white and black are seeking to position themselves to the forefront of history in demanding a more equitable society and condemning its especially harsh treatment of African-Americans. This being not 1964 but 2020, these protestors demand unspecified concessions from society while believing their lives to be anterior to history: the postmodern, college-educated crowd, mostly city-dwellers and unemployed due to the Coronavirus pandemic, are caught between existentialism and Marxism: they don't simply want to be the inheritors of a moralizing political tradition, but it is clear to me that they have nothing that will not be swept away by time and the police and hunger and the resumption of sporting events, despite the virulence of their rejection of racism and fascism and the overtly combative practice of policing these United States in the 21st century. It is true they are counter-ideological disbelievers in all messianic faiths like communism, and it is rare for a protest rally to have a religious figure as central to their demonstration. Therefore, it strikes me that these protestors are liable to be defeated by their lack of unifying ideological symbols as they make their case for the struggle against the dominance class power. Should they look to the non-violent stances of Gandhi and Martin Luther King? They can't look to me, unfortunately, as I am disabled and a stay-at-home. However, it remains to be seen who can stand up and unify these protestors. The last Presidential candidate who was both a brilliant orator and whose highly skilled rhetorical powers allowed him to stand head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of leading masses of people was Bobby Kennedy, in my opinion. However, he vanished from an assassin's bullet and was killed because of his compassionate outspokenness. Even now, fifty years later, his silence is a force in the procession of the protestors politically-motivated discourse.