cheese it, the cops!

Truth as something impossible to deconstruct

New post at the Veterans Today Daily Report. Some silliness but also a plea for workplace tolerance and the return of four letter words. 

We really do not appreciate the elegance of variances of "fuck" and "motherfucker" as universal pronouns, nouns, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and exclamations. As brevity, simplicity, and compatibility go, these words can rule conversations. 

It might be worth it to develop grammatical rules for use of fuck and motherfucker. Worth considering as a doctoral dissertation topic for someone do theory of knowledge and semantics, perhaps. 

They are somewhat impossible to deconstruct. 

 

 

Self-Esteem and Bauxite

By Crispin Sartwell

Political and economic realism - the sort associated with figures such as Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and even Karl Marx - was once common wisdom. Realism of this sort holds that, whatever their grand rhetoric or lofty ideals, political leaders and nations operate fundamentally in pursuit of their own self-interest, to increase their wealth and power. Few analysts, looking at the American role in the world today, seem to take that approach. They think about politics not as occurring in a world of concrete economic or military realities, but in a realm of pure symbology, a world of signs, emblems, indications.

All Korea experts and pundits seem to agree, for example, that in meeting with Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump gave Kim what he really wanted: a chance to appear on equal terms with the President of the United States, a recognition of his legitimacy as a world leader. They treated the sheer fact of the meeting, or the way that American and North Korean flags were displayed behind the leaders with equal emphasis, as the sorts of things Kim was trying to achieve, as what he most deeply wanted.

If so, Kim was behaving irrationally by the standards of political realism. Self-esteem enhancement is not in itself a practical outcome in the real world. Feeling oneself to be the equal of the President of the United States would no doubt make some people feel good. It won’t in itself help your economy or keep you from getting invaded or overthrown. That kind of symbolic transaction isn’t, in itself, much of anything. It’s quite hard to tell, for example, whether his detente with Trump helps or hurts Kim domestically, with the North Korean military or with popular opinion, such as it is.

We seem to be operating with an anti-realist or irrealist theory of political motivation: world politics is conceived as a struggle over imagery, in particular as a psycho-drama in which people and nations are working out their low self-esteem. At the moment, competition over unnatural resources seem more explanatory than that over natural ones, and we seem to think of the self-image of political leaders or of nations as the immaterial material over which the world struggles. This resource, a kind of psychic energy, seems to be scarce, and you don’t extract it from the ground, but from other leaders. Certainly, self-esteem seems to be the basic commodity in which Trump traffics: he often seems to be concerned primarily to enhance his own at the expense of other people’s, or to enhance other people’s in order to get what he wants from them.

That, however, doesn’t mean that the stuff is real, or that devoting your foreign policy or your life to it is sensible. If Kim really thought that a sheer handshake with POTUS was in itself some sort of tangible advantage, he needs a little lesson in capitalism: that sort of legitimacy and $2.50 will get you a chai latte. Feeling really good about yourself as a nation doesn’t in itself feed anyone or even line the pockets of the leadership.

People were taken aback, for example, that Trump praised Kim repeatedly as strong, smart, trustworthy, talented and so on. One thing Trump has noticed, I think, is that dealing out praise (and for that matter ridicule) doesn’t directly cost you anything. Profligate spending on compliments and insults - which appear at the moment to be the currency of international affairs - doesn’t increase the deficit. That Trump lurches from criticism and threats to fulsome praise suggests something about the nature of symbolic resources: they don’t actually cost anything, so you might as well deal them out freely. If they do affect people’s behavior, or if you can achieve something concrete by their use, why shouldn’t you?

Of course, the only reason they do affect people’s behavior is because those people have decided to move with you into your symbolic realm and to worry with you about the distribution of imaginary resources. So, for example, Trump’s insults directed at Justin Trudeau are greeted as an international crisis rather than, for example, a spat between egos. And if Trudeau lets Peter Navarro’s “special place in hell” affect Canadian trade policy, he is surely behaving irrationally. It is a flimsy world order, and one that perhaps exists only in the imagination, that can be interrupted by a few scorching Tweets directed at the G7.

One lesson that Trump’s own self-esteem drama and very casual way of doling out praise and insults should teach us is that we should pull back and regard what he says as, in general, neither particularly harmful nor particularly helpful in the real world, and also as not very closely connected to it. As we try to figure out what is actually going on, we could all use a return to realism. To reach any understanding, we’re going to have to get a bit less confused as between resources like self-esteem and resources like bauxite.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is Entanglements: A System of Philosophy).

Politics and Geography

By Crispin Sartwell

There’s recently been a revival of an argument that goes back to the 18th century: that the form of government prescribed by the Constitution gives more representation to rural than to urban people, and to people from relatively sparsely-populated states than to people from populous ones. The clinching demonstrations of this are the composition of the Senate and, less extremely, the electoral college. Now, everyone takes the position on this matter that would help their own side get elected. Nevertheless, the question does show something fundamental about the nature of political representation.

The political reasons for the phenomenon are familiar from your history textbook: the US originates as an alliance among independent states. The less populous states were concerned that their voices and interests would be drowned out or swamped by those of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York; they had to be cajoled into the nation. Similar assurances about representation were required, for example, by smaller nations in constituting the European Union, and the United Nations pays lip service at least to a principle of equal sovereignty among nation-states, not representation in proportion to population. It had to start there if it expected smaller nations to join.

Most of us do not, any longer, think of the US as an alliance of independent nations; we consider the United States a single political unit in some sense. Under that presumption, and as an abstract matter in democratic political theory (which is liable to start with a principle of equal representation or one person/one vote), it is hard to argue that the 600,000 or so people of Wyoming should have the same representation in the Senate as Florida’s 20,000,000.

But whatever the theoretical and practical drawbacks of the system as it stands, it also shows some of the real complexities and some of the possibilities for beauty or profundity that lurk within the practices of political representation. The neutral, abstract scheme of one person/one vote yields a kind of minimalist or hyper-simplified picture, but the concrete practices of political representation on the ground are variegated, swirling, showing many relations of human beings to one another and to other bits or dimensions of the world.

In almost any real democratic system, the space or geography of the nation is represented to some extent as well as its human population. This is striking, in that it suggests that, in representative politics, the physical configuration of a country as well as its people is the subject represented: what the picture is a picture of, as a portrait represents the person who sat for it or a still-life painting a bowl of fruit. A democracy in some sense represents the place in which it is located as well as people it encompasses as citizens. In addition to being a portrait of the people, that is, a representative system is a sort of landscape painting or topographical map of the terrain it operates within.

The spaces that Florida and Wyoming occupy in the Senate chamber correlates better to their relative physical size than to their relative population, and in general the Senate comes closer than the House, for example, to resembling the sweep of the nation across the vast central plains and mountain west that has been central to the national narrative. Obviously, this doesn’t work so well for Delaware, but the point is that the different principles on which different branches and levels of government are selected ends up yielding a remarkably complex depiction of a nation.

Any representative democracy and indeed almost any political system is obliged to represent geographies as well as populations. Geography, after all, accounts to some extent for the distribution of populations in the first place. But any political situation or system of any size coordinates smaller units: provinces, counties, townships, and so on, and reflects to some extent the physical environment it occupies.

Indeed, when we think about America, we do not think of it only, or even primarily, as a group of people, but as a physical terrain (purple mountains and fruited planes, sea to shining sea, and so on). We might think of it, as well, in terms of located sub-cultures: Latino culture in southern Texas, peoples meeting in New Orleans at the mouth of Mississippi, Appalachia, and a hundred others. The principle of one person/one vote irrigates all the deserts, flattens all the mountains, and bridges all the rivers, but even the attempt to apply the principle with perfect neutrality ends up connecting to the highly differentiated landscape and acknowledging the connections of the people to it.

Every political system represents the space it occupies as well as the people occupying that space, and represents them as inseparable. We may want to ameliorate specific political inequalities that this generates, but I think it is more something we should try to become conscious of and even celebrate than something we should seek to expunge. 

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is Entanglements: A System of Philosophy (SUNY 2017).

Lying liars, gross incompetents, and vague lunacy

Too much Monkey Business seems equally appropriate for an article about the current state of affairs. 

 

Latest article at Vets. Not often you get to set George Will up as inspiration. I am waiting for the explosion when he realizes that Kim Jon Un punked him and when he sees the stuff about the Baby Trump the Blimp floating around London during his visit. Plus, NATO will probably just ignore him and Putin will give him orders. Sucks to be Donald Trump; sucks worse, however, to be a citizen of the country he's sort of in charge of...