Truepeer - Flenser
Flenser, speaking of Derbyshire, would you agree with this "racialist" take on constitutions? If so, would it be possible to have a polite discussion to flesh out the pros and cons?
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/003968.html
posted by Rick Ballard @ 4:28 PM
25 comments
25 Comments:
I don't know if anyone wants to address the Auster article or his anti-neocon "racialism", or get into the question of what kind of constitution the US should be encouraging in Iraq. Certain comments from Roger Simon's blog, which led Rick to set up this post, suggested to me that there might be an appetite for a discussion of how quickly cultures and peoples can change. So, just to see if anyone wants to pick up on any of this, I'll pose a few questions and thoughts for lack of any more focussed comment I want to make.
Might we address the question of how quickly a culture like Iraq's can change when its basic demography does not change much? No doubt a culture rooted in a landscape changes much more slowly than the individual emigrant.
If people from all over the world have immigrated and adapted themselves to the American constitution, is that any kind of reason to put faith in the possibility that republican, representative, democratic governments can be fostered by the US in places with no republican traditions? On the other hand, how much longer can tyrannical or self-isolating societies survive on this earth, survive either themselves or those leading, often nuclear-armed nations, who might no longer tolerate the kinds of violent outflows (e.g. terrorism) that are inevitable to tyrannical and closed societies, given their internal scapegoating dynamics?
Might we address the question of how quickly a culture can change without destroying itself? More precisely, how much can our own self-critical or resentful qualities erode our inherited western culture and still find new and productive ways of representing who we are, while moving forward with faith in either our tradition or present systems?
Finally, shall we get into the question of race? I am not a believer that much about our cultures can be explained in terms of our genetic inheritance. It is not implausible to me that certain historically isolated groups, say Ashkenazic Jews, might have demonstrated a statistical propensity for certain traits such as intelligence, traits selected for due to environmental pressures over a number of generations. But, ultimately, it seems meaningless to me to speak of intelligence without reference to the cultural matrix that makes intelligence possible because necessary as a means of succeeding in the culture. Some cultures are surely more likely to survive into the future than others, not simply because of the numbers of people belonging to them but because a rich culture - how would we define this? - will breed more achievements than one whose means of human self-understanding, e.g. its religion, are less well developed. I do not take all cultures to be equal in respect to their capacity for anthropological knowledge.
Thus to the degree that the idea of race remains meaningful - and it applies to the whole of humanity only metaphorically because it does indeed remain meaningful, not least to those who criticize its sociobiological uses - we need to explore what it is that best explains the real differences in the world and the problems that many peoples and cultures have in coming to terms with the modern world, problems that have been witnessed not least among those peoples who led the way into a modernity of liberalized markets with exchanges and forms of knowledge increasingly removed from any particular context. One problem for the "conservative" is that it looks to him like the "liberal" leaders in his culture have so often been heretics, full of anxieties, doubts, and self-destructive behaviours. But in addressing this, is the conservative not simply in search of the means for people to retain faith in themselves and their culture so as to become more productive and hence a yet greater force for change? Is the so called "neocon", a conservative force? Or is the only real conservative someone who thinks we can go back to lost traditions?
Is it time for western countries to again do more in the way of picking and choosing their immigrants? Are certain groups, perhaps because of religion, less likely to integrate into western countries and more likely to breed resentful violence that cannot be risked in an age of WMD? This would seem likely if it is indeed the case that western culture must be primarily understood in terms of its Judeo-Christian heritage. And yet Christian and secular missionaries are succeeding all over the earth. What kind of "conversion" should we wish to see in immigrants, so that they may play by the democratic, political rules of the game both in the west and in the now global marketplace more generally, and what differences should they maintain in order for our collective human culture to grow in strength through its ability to differentiate itself in more numerous ways? Is our ability to differentiate ourselves not essential to the deferral of all forms of conflict?
This is the link to the comments at Roger L. Simon's that prompted this post.
truepeers,
I'm going to do a little research before replying. English Common Law constitutions exist in a variety of places with a variety of races and cultures. The new Iraqi constitution appears to be a meld of a bit of the Common Law plus the French style common to the old Iraqi constitution (also common to Syria and Turkey, I believe). I want to look a bit more before actually trying to say more. I'll probalby have to dig up Montesqieu's 'The Spirit of the Law' again, too. There is more of him than Locke in the US constitution and he made some rather harsh comments concerning racial and cultural differences and suitability to various forms of governance.
A domani.
Take a look at a portion of this piece previewed a bit by Steve Sailer and comin out this week in Commentary.
In reply to the first question; "How quickly can a culture like Iraq's change when its basic demography does not change much?" I would reply, potentially, very quickly. Ataturk transformed Turkey in a relatively brief period. The Ottoman system was rotten but it had the weight of centuries of custom to give it legitimacy whithin Turkey.
Ataturk was no champion of democracy but the changes effected during his 15 years as head of government pulled Turkey toward the West so decisively that it has remained Western oriented since his death in '38. The basic means used to make the changes were decrees backed by brute force but he did extend the decrees into areas - specifically education - that ensured the promulgation of Western ideas to the extent that they became accepted.
Wrt Iraq, I remain uncertain as to the degree of change necessary to counter the rise of Islamofacism.
Flenser, as I understand both your question and Auster’s concerns (some of which I may share, but I would not articulate them in his “racialist” terminology, which, as I read him, he himself is only ambivalently wedded to, i.e he says it is alright to defend common "white" values by using other ethnic, national, or religious, terminology), the question most broadly is this: what are the differences among ethnic, racial, religious, and national identities (how do we use these terms, and how should we use them), and what aspects of which can or should be preserved by a self-consciously conservative politics?
But on another, more strategic, level, the question is this: in defending important cultural values that we have variously inherited from the past, is it, tactically, in our best conservative interests to accentuate their genealogies - or to explain, with all the historiographical difficulties involved, what was culturally necessary for the world in which we now live to have come into being - or should we just defend our values (which, genealogically, have particular ethnic, national, or religious origins) in an abstract and universalizing language, so that all can share in them without concern that they do not share them as equally as those with ancestral ties to the groups in which these values first began to be articulated?
A third question, and this may be more directly addressing yours, Flenser, is to what degree are arbitrary (perhaps even irrational) markers of a particular group identity necessary and good. I tend to see rituals and markers of group status to be essential at the national or state level because they are unavoidably a part of any politics I can imagine. But, in consumer society and global economic exchange, as I previously argued, such markers of difference can be traded and used by all, and this is generally a good thing I think. In the long run, I would maintain that the maintenance of national differences is essential to the political health of the global community. Utopian one-world thinking is a sure recipe for our losing our inability to order ourselves and defer conflicts. Utopian thinking breeds violence more readily than cautious nationalism. But in believing in the inevitability of national differences I would admit that ethnic particularism is something that can be readily eroded. I don't want to say it should - ultimately, I think it is up to the people who still have ethnic identities how much to give up in order to do what they must to fit into a national polity. Ethnicity, as I would define it, is culture whose meaning is dependent on an involved relationship to a particular landscape and its people. National identities can transcend national borders, so that there can be, e.g., anglophiles and francophiles who have never been to England or France. But there is much about ethnicity in France that you will only really understand if you are born and live there among the people. It is what is different in each region of France, and different in a way that no literary culture with national ambitions has well articulated.
Anyway, the point I want to make is that I'm not sure there is a distinctively "ethnic Japanese identity" - there is a Japanese national identity and a country, Japan, with an array of ethnic particularisms. Similarly, I don't think of Jewishness as an ethnic identity. Rather it is a national one - a nation being defined by its secular high culture and/or its universal religion (a universal religion is defined by its ability to articulate human truths that are universal, and not just self-referential and dependent on arbitrary sacrificial knowledge of local deities, rituals, shrines, etc.)
There are certainly Jewish ethnic identities - e.g. East European Jews have their EE ethnic identities. But while I don't expect Jewish identity to fade away in the US, it seems to be the case that Yiddishness, for example, will (sad to say). That's the difference between national and ethnic, and as a general rule I am much more interested in defending national identities than ethnic ones, not simply because I think it is more realistic and necessary, but because I really don't have much in the way of any ethnic identity myself. I am largely a product of national cultures, as I understand them.
It is going to take me a while to better articulate all this, but I'll leave it here for now. In the meantime, if anyone doesn’t like my question, by all means jump in and shape the direction of this discussion otherwise.
Rick, there seems to be a problem with your link.
Re, Turkey, the fascinating question of course is how deep do Ataturk's nation-making policies go? Is there still a possibility for them to be overwhelmed by some kind of Islamicism. Can Islamicism and nationalism go hand in hand? In other words, is the desire for an Umma or caliphate simply antithetical to any vision of a world composed of nation states?
Sailer link
Works in preview - let's see.
I was referring, for example, to that comment of Yama's that he can travel a short distance in Japan and find people who speak the language in noticeably quite different ways, or Roger's comment on regional distinctiveness in cuisine. But there is really a conceptual problem here, because once there exists a national culture to which all have to belong on some level (they are schooled in it, go into national bureaucracies, armies, etc.), then the ethnic or regional identities become compromised and reduced in scope and scale. (Yet local differences may remain important.)
Furthermore, when people immigrate to places like North America, we tend to see people from all corners of Japan as similar and so we accord them the same "ethnicity". But, ultimately, this is just a label of social scientists and its relationship to reality is paradoxical as are all labels - the label is always somewhat arbitrary in its conceptualization or origin even as it is used successfully to point to (less fully capture) some widely acknowledged realities.
Historically, people came to America as ethnics and only became nationals here. For example, Calabrians who came in the nineteenth century became Italians (and Americans) in America, not in Italy where nation building had only really gotten started in the late nineteenth century and is still in some ways incomplete.
I really don't know a lot about Japan. But I imagine if you looked in the CIA handbook you would also find them saying something like 95% of Chinese are ethnic Han. But China is a country with great regional differences howevermuch most people may see themselves as descending from a common Han ancestry (not that Chinese are focussed on questions of their fundamental, i.e. pre-China, pre-imperial origins). Today's generation of Chinese are much better at communicating with each other across regions and sharing in something of a common national identity, but they are still more "ethnic" than national in various ways. I have witnessed conversations between northern and southern Chinese, in which English was the lingua franca, having a great deal of difficulty understanding each other's particular beliefs and practices and in defining what Chinese culture is in comparision with the west.
Ethnic and national are categories that are readily confused. But if we think historically, it is a little easier to appreciate a difference. Historically, tribes simply defined themselves as the people living in a place. Each people had their local gods, rituals, sacred sites, and arbitrary distinctions of how to behave and do things, practices that were socially significant but not explicable in terms of any universalizing reason. Maybe one tribe would fry their rice, while the one in the next valley never did. They would not be able to explain the basis for this difference other than in terms of their myths and rituals, i.e. they would not be able to explain, from outside of their myth, the basis for the myth's emergence. Typically, national identity emerges when people commit to universalizing religions and high cultures and begin to incorporate various regional myths in a larger vision that allows them to step outside of their myths and explain them with some larger, universal human reason. For example, many native American intellectuals today do this with their tribal myths, so perhaps it is more accurate to say they belong to nations than to tribes, though of course people will always quibble with such labels because both identities today intertwine to some degree.
The names of most tribes self- defined in the past as simply the people and practices belonging to a specific place, are no longer remembered. Over the long term, survival for one's culture or identity has meant incorporating it within some larger national unit whose high culture transcends and erodes to some extent the particulars of place. In the original example of nationhood, the Jews have survived without any territory because of their universalizing religion. Those who once saw the Hebrews as just another tribe(s) in their neighborhood are now long forgotten. All cultures are not equal; those that can access more powerful truths about the nature of humanity have a higher survival rate. Thus, at a certain point of historical development, the local ritual order makes a deal with a new national leadership, in order to survive, creating a nation of many - to use my terminology - "ethnicities" that are no longer fully independent and self-governing realities, but are still relevant to defining people and ordering relationships.
Truepeers,
Now you are touching on what I was referring to as the 'glue' that allowed assimilation to take place more easily in America than other places.
The opening statement of the Declaration;
"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.." can be understood as an apologia written by a group of traitors whose fate was certain - unless they succeeded. They were subjects in revolt against a King - and Kings occupied a postion ordained by God according to rather common theological teaching of the time. In order to justify their treason they reached back a bit further to make a theological connection to the Law of Nature as determined by Nature's creator - God. They then proceed to identify certain principles - unalienable rights - as 'endowments' - gifts by the Creator. The identification is preceded by the sophistry that "these truths are self-evident" when they are nothing of the kind.
As a Christian I understand this to be a theological statement asserting Genesis 3 as trumping Romans 12 - and as providing the "moral" basis for the treason. Secondarily, a Jew might well recognize the Gen 3 "endowment" of the "unalienable rights" and have no theological basis for rejecting the argument.
I think part of the question that you are asking is; "Can a Muslim accept the theological premises enshrined in the Declaration?". If they cannot, assimilation will be problematical.
Does the phrase "God given right" have any theological meaning within Islam?
Rick, I don't really know enough about Islam to judge whether they would have a theological problem with the Declaration, though i assume that anything that would seem to clash with the Koran would indeed be a problem. I was thinking more generally about the problems of adapting to the role that the sacred plays in consumer society and in free market capitalism. The most remarkable thing to my mind about Islam is that despite the recent fortunes ni some countries thanks to oil, they have been able to do so little with their wealth in terms of expanding their economies. There seems to be in Islam a serious problem with adapting to capitalism. It is of course easier for those individuals who are living in largely non-Islamic countries, and it seems to become progressively more difficult the more Muslims there are about. I won't explore this farther now because I am using someone else's computer. I had what smelled like an electrical fire with mine this afternoon, so I don't know when i will be up and operational again to continue this conversati
Knucklehead, I think you have caught up perfectly. But let me first reply to Flenser.
Flenser, I must defer to the dictionary, though please note that it remains for me a problem that the dictionary practically equates ethnic with national, as indeed most people do today. We no longer say Galician, but Ukrainian, Cornish but English, Sichuanren but Chinese. So why does our language need two words, ethnic and national? One for the sociologists and one for the political scientists?
you write: I'm more in line with the view that an ethnic group is one with a shared racial, national, religious, linguistic, or cultural heritage. That shrinks the number of ethnic groups in the world to to more manageable numbers, perhaps a few thousand
-i would say, yes, an ethnic group is defined (and defines itself) along racial and linguistic lines. But a shared national or religious heritage? That is much more problematic because we have multiethnic countries and religions. We would have to identify a particular kind of religious or "national" experience to consider it a defining characteristic of the ethnic group. And then we would simply be going in circles because this particular kind would be the ethnic kind...
And if you want to say in cases like the Japanese, that they are all ethnic Japanese because they share, rather exclusively, in a common national and religious tradition, why not say simply that they are today all members of the Japanese nation, though in the past their ancestors were more ethnically diverse (given the relative isolation of premodern times) than today?
I once skimmed a book by an anthropologist who was trying to define ethnicity, and if I recall correctly, it was a catalogue of its many historical uses and forms and it simply ended by saying "and this is what ethnicity means today or is today but tomorrow who knows if it will be a useful category." A word is just a word, connected to reality yes, but not in any transparent manner. The word is ultimately a trace of the event or scene in which it first emerged and on which it is subsequently used, and to which we should refer if we want to take the name game further. In other words, the best analysis is historical: we should pay attention to how the word is used in a place and time and not look for universal definitions, because human society is dynamic and what is always the same is relatively little. As long as we pay attention to how the writer is using a word, we don't need to come to strict agreement on its use, though a writer should defer as much as possible to common usage in his own place and time, and maybe I sin a little here.
Anyway, I would not say that Japan is made up of many ethnic groups. What I said is a little more defensible, that it is home to many ethnic particularisms. This is an awkward phrase to be sure, so why not just say that all the local peculiarities of Japan are all just Japanese, just like Boston peculiarities are American? My point is not to say that we must draw a hard and fast line between what we label ethnic or national, but that it is best to think historically; if we want to explain something we do it best by explaining it in terms of its origins, and not simply according to current uses (e.g. the USA is best defined by the constitution before turning to the present scene). What I imagine to be local or regional in Japan reflects the fact that Japan has a much longer history as an agrarian and peasant-dominated world (in which the polity was imperial, not national) than the US, so we are comparing apples and oranges when comparing what is "ethnic" in US and Japan. What is distinctively regional in Japan may in some cases be due to modern inventions of local "traditions"; but I imagine much of it is to be explained by the emergence of cultural patterns in a time before there was much in the way of an integrating national culture. Thus, while the Japanese today may claim all within their borders for Japan and Japaneseness, there remains a sense in which it is useful to understand cultural phenomena in terms of their historical emergence in a pre-national environment. That's why I like to distinguish ethnic from national. (But as I said, I don't know much about Japan, and I may really be making a bad assumption about how the inevitable differences were understood in premodern Japan.)
I suppose this habit of thought developed when I was a student reading histories and theories on the emergence of nationalism and nation states, which are, in most countries, a rather recent phenomenon. One of the big questions raised was how did a world (once largely ruled by multiracial or multiethnic agrarian empires, with relatively freer tribes on the borders - e.g. Japan) of many thousands of ethnicities evolve into a world of a couple of hundred nation states? What ethnic groups succeed in becoming or being an important part of nations, and why do most fail? Why do some achieve nations (with a universalizing high culture) and nationalism but not states? These seem to me good questions, and those who wish to pose them will be inclined to define ethnic and national as different cateogries even as they know that today people use them almost interchangeably.
Anyway, the point of all this is to anticipate the question of whether it is possible simply to live, and live well, in the rather abstract collective of nationhood, or whether people are inevitably drawn to more primitive markers of "race" or "ethnicity", and whether these need to be defended alongside nationhood. Should the USA or individual Americans have a job of protecting a particular American cultural inheritance and not only a legal, political, or constitutional inheritance (is the latter conceivable without the former)? And I will try to turn to this question when I next have a moment.
I'm having a bit of a problem with the definition of ethnicity.
I would prefer "those sharing common praxis derived from a common ethos" rather than nationality or race. The boundary then becomes the ethos, which may be a bit easier to distinguish.
Back a bit later.
There are many interesting comments to respond to. The hour is late and so I will only be able to begin to respond to them implicitly. What I want to do now is explain why I had Auster on my mind in the first place, and anticipate how I want to develop my response, to him and to the other ideas that have been raised here, sometime tomorrow.
I linked to the Auster comments as I have been reading him for a while now; he is one of the more intelligent (though he has his blind spots) critics of the "neocon" position, neocon being a rough indicator of how I tend to locate my own thinking. What is interesting about Auster is that he sees the need to argue that our higher ideals cannot be full and proper guides to our political positions, that there must be a distinction between religious and political consciousness. (A Christian, however hard he tries, cannot fully follow Christ in this world, but must make some concessions to worldly realties... while on the other hand, Auster's stereotypical neocon who idealizes worldly exchange supposedly ignores the transcendent basis of culture and thus makes an inverse kind of mistake about human nature and the intractability of our religious differences.)
The tendency to assimilate religious and political consciousness, not least among those who think they don't have relgious ideas, is the recipe for what Auster sees to be the unrealistic idealisms of both the left and the neocons. He has a point.
And this is why Auster talks up ideas of race consciousness. He does not mean that we should be racist in any punitive way, that we should wish to deny others basic human rights. But he does think it inevitable and right that we favor our own to some extent. This means favoring the people who share our culture, a sharing that for him (and this is what I want to explore) has inevitably some "racial" component. The fact is that today, whatever may be the case tomorrow, the traditional American culture Auster wishes to defend is still largely a white culture. That's not an argument to deny this culture to nonwhite Americans, nor to criticize this culture as exclusive (all cultures have their historical boundaries as well as their global interactions and exchanges); rather, it is just to acknowledge that one should sometimes act in ways that will defend one's cultural values, and their demographic position, values which in this instance belong to a popular culture that has long thought of itself as white, a label whose popularity is no doubt due in good part to the mixing (and eroded distinctiveness) of many European ethnicities in America, and thus a label that only the more reactionary and righteous will write off as exemplary of social Darwinian racism.
Nonetheless, do we need to acknowledge the historical reality of whiteness, or should we turn away from the label? As a white person, I suppose, with an intimate relationship with a nonwhite woman, the very idea of whiteness, and indeed race and interracial, makes me uncomfortable. But should it? This is what Auster forces me to ask.
For Auster, the non-utopian reality that one must favor one's own, however homo or heterogeneous one's own happen to be, entails what is his core political position in this world as it is today: the need to limit immigration into the US to a level that does not make it impossible to assimilate newcomers to American norms. He is particularly opposed to Muslim immigration because he thinks devotion to the Koran is simply incompatible with American values rooted in Judeo-Christian and secular traditions.
As I say, since I am sympathetic to the neocon position, being someone more optimistic than Auster on issues such as immigration and our ability to integrate newcomers into a workable and indeed necessary national-cum-global marketplace, I would like to develop a counter-argument to his position, respecting him as a worthy spokesman of what he calls the traditionalist conservative position, and finding his voice more interesting to debate than the stale victimary rhetorics of the liberal left establishment.
To this end, I will attempt to integrate Auster's idea (I think he gets it ultimately from Eric Voegelin) that we need to distinguish religious and political consciousness; our universalizing ideals and hopes cannot impose too much on the practical reality that we must make real choices that inevitably distinguish those we favor. Since we have to make such choices, it would seem we should spend time considering what or whom we should favor. I want to integrate this idea with a defense of neocon positions on Iraq, globalization and a somewhat less race conscious approach to cultural conservatism.
To this end, I want to pick up on, or work against, one of Auster's articles, "What is European America" which I link here.
I am particularly interested in one of the comments by Bill Carpenter, whom I know from the Generative Anthropology listserv where he is a most brilliant commenter. Bill seems to be trying to moderate Auster's rhetoric with its focus on whiteness. In moderating Auster he provides, to my mind, an even stronger position for me to work from/against, which I hopefully will start to do tomorrow. For now, I will just reproduce Bill's 2003 comment, and draw your attention to his argument about our need to forge particular attachments as an alternative to the overly-resentful or unworldly approaches to reality that lead us into gnostic heresies:
Mr. Auster's analysis of liberalism as requiring a Buddhistic absence of attachment is related to Voegelin's analysis of modern political theories as based in gnostic heresy. The heretical view at the base of the non-attachment principle is the view that the creation was totally corrupted by the fall of man, and that any engagement in the material world, the social world, the historical world, is damnable. Sometimes such a tendency is referred to as angelism, especially when it takes forms such as extreme pacifism. (The Jainist daughter in Philip Roth's best novel, American Pastoral, is a fine portrait of the Leftist as angelist.)
As Mr. Auster suggests, the rejection of race as a meaningful or "interesting" category appears to be tainted by the wish for non-attachment. But race is obviously real. It should be considered part of the creation. Does that give individuals, perhaps through their political leaders, an obligation to preserve the races? That is a highly unpopular theory, but most countries are allowed to preserve their cultural and racial character by restricting immigration as they see fit. That is all I would argue for. However, at the popular level, most people marry within their own race. I believe most people socialize primarily within their own race, and look for mates among their own race. They understand that doing so will better preserve the continuity between past and future generations. We need to teach that this is normal and acceptable behavior, not nasty and racist.
I share Mr. Sutherland's reluctance to recover European American culture by referring it to its polyglot roots. The Common American Civilization is colonial and British in origin, with Massachusetts and Virginia as its two poles. Everyone who has come after has entered into, sometimes with immense enthusiasm, a British colonial, then a distinctly American civilization, characterized by high valuations on Christianity, rule of law, self-government, industry, enterprise, self-reliance, patriotism, civic responsibility, family responsibility, and a liberty that furthers each of those values within a self-sustaining order.
Immigrants historically have joined in the unfolding of this civilization, not its demolition. I think as a practical matter we would achieve more promoting the rebirth of the Common American Civilization, not the rebirth of White American Civilization, though the CAC is white and British and Christian in origin.
Here is Murray's Commentary piece.
I'm still digesting Auster's piece, Knuck's comments, and Truepeers comments. I'm trying to frame my thoughts (such as they are) on the differences in ethos and praxis between followers of Islam of Turk, Syrian, Egyptian and Arabic ethnicity. It may be simpler to use an Arab/non-Arab dichotomy and simpler still to use a Bedouin/non-Bedouin split.
Those differences are hinge points concerning the potential success of Western style constitutions.
Flenser, I think a lot of Jews consider it a relgious imperative for the people of the Exodus not to desire to hold power but to serve some greater human thirst for freedom. Of course it is then easy enough to get confused over the competing human imperatives of equality and freedom, but that's something that all people inevitably confuse.
But having said that, a more serious comment would have to tackle the problem of secularization. I think it is fair to say that the more secular the Jew the more inclined to left wing politics. It's not a hard and fast rule, just a tendency that needs to be explained. Conservatism in Jews, as you note, has largely been to do with maintaining the integrity of one's own ethical community of Jews. It has not been concerned with conservatism as a movement for politcal power in the wider society, except perhaps occasionaly in situations like the late Austro-Humgarian empire where the choice, as many Jews rightly saw it, was either to side - usually in the guise of socialism - with the many new nationalisms seeking dissolution of the old empire, or to side with the officially "liberal", but pratically conservative, emperor as a buttress against the inevitable antisemitism of the new nationalisms and socialisms.
Eventually, of course, Jews get their own nation, Israel, and there are arguably today just as many conservatives as liberals in the nation reflecting the tension between the universal religious/secular idea and the particular ethical conception of God's chosen people.
The link between secularism and leftism is shared with (post)Christians. It is the desire to build a universal society to overcome human divisions. Only historical experience has shown us the problems with such a desire. And it is easy enough to imagine why many Jews from the eighteenth century were attracted to it. If they were going to leave their ghettos, with what other cultural supports could they find their way in the larger world? With limited options for joing clubs, etc., Freemasonry and socialism were perhaps the two most accessible and popular routes for Jews seeking a broader membership in society. Those routes were much easier, obviously, than conversion to Christianity and they provided people a means to participate in larger commercial or bureaucratic networks. To be a successful bourgeois in the 19th or 20th century (especially outside of the anglophone world) it was almost necessary to become a liberal. Romanticism led most people, Jew and Christian, in the direction of anti-market politics as a paradoxical form of adaptation to the demands of market society. Whether as aristocrat or socialist, one opposed the bourgeois market that one would eventually enter, as a way of first getting to know and master the ways of the marketplace. The rebellious son who eventually sells his charismatic opposition to the market within the marketplace - can I interest you in a Ferrari, Flenser? - is what we need to be able to explain. And in time the radical youth becomes the more cautious parent with property and bills to pay.
With liberal market society, only a few Jews with specialized trades could have remained insular and survived in the new global market economy that was largely the invention of Christianity. Jews either had to remain ghetto people or grasp at the promise of liberal society, as offered by either the liberal emperor or the socialist international. Conservative nationalism, outside of Zionism, was not really an option for any Jews until the post-WWII period. A figure like Disraeli is much the exception that proves the rule. Today conservative nationalism is possible for Jews in countries like the US and Canada and for that we should all be grateful.
But if we do not need to change our politics, talking about group differences obligates all of us to renew our commitment to the ideal of equality that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Steven Pinker put that ideal in today’s language in The Blank Slate, writing that “Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
What confuses these debates, Rick, is that the people involved on both sides actually have no way of explaining where our moral or ethical intutition of a fundamental human equality comes from in the first place. It is clearly not inherent to the animal pecking order, so where did it come from, did it just fall to earth as star dust?
As a follower of Generative Anthropology, I would argue that we need to reflect on how the ethic of equality inheres in the use of language. Our social functioning as linguistic beings depends on our equal sharing in the signs we use to communicate what is communally sacred (and later, what is merely significant to the secular world). At the origin of human symbolic language, there must have been a new kind of equalitarian community that broke with the animal pecking order by ordering the protohumans equally around a sacred sign (in the beginning was indeed the word) and the nascent sense of a divine being who appeared to subsist as guarantor of the sacred or eternal values across time.
And if this is correct, if our idea of equality is inherent in the very nature of human culture, well then genetic differences take a back seat since there are obviously limits to which we can ethically recognize claims to differences in things like intelligence between groups. To create any basis for justifying existing differenes between groups - however much these may be empirically measurable - will remain a scandal to the cultural mperative of equality. If an imperative of the culture by which we order ourselves and keep from killing each other, is that we all share equally in the signs of language, then we cannot justify any inequality in our attitudes toward people (say at the job office door) simply because of some statistical correlation between intelligence and group membership.
Murray seems to recognize this. Says we must treat everyone as an individual, not according to their group membership, even as he accentuates the reality of group differences. What kind of paradoxical game is this?
And even if we say, let's just judge every individual as an individual and insist on equality of opportunity, if not equality of outcome, we will retain the problem that groups of people marked as less successful, less equal, less able to accord equal opportunities to their children, will emerge from our free competitions and will remain as such a scandal to our inherent sense of human equality.
THis is why even as market society becomes more free and efficient in the exchange of differences, the calls to recognize victims of the system do not cease.
Market efficiency creates lefist bureaucracy even as it fights against it. Perhaps only by recognizing this hard and paradoxical reality can we come to terms with the need to be realistic about the state and what it should be doing. In other words, we may need to recognize, to some degree, the legitimacy of those hard-to-like leftist elistists who appoint themselves the arbiters of the victimary claims of their less fortunate clients, if only as a way to be clearer about when such victimary claims are indeed legitimate and to be addressed with the least fanfare, and least cost, and thus not allow ouselves an endless inflation in victimary politics and centralized state solutions.
One wonders if Murray envisions a world in which we increasingly see humanity as just six billion individuals who should not be judged according to the nonetheless observable differences among groups? What are the implications for his ideas of race and group membership when it comes to the politics of culture? It seems to me that if we are to recognize different racial or ethnic groups (and why shouldn't people have the right to identify themselves accordingly) it must be in accord with the fundamental imperative of human equality. The ensuing paradoxical politics may make us hypocrites in Murray's eye, or maybe they will remind us of a more fundamental truth of culture: we must ever increase the freedom of people to exchange their differences in the marketplace, even in political markets where affirmative actions are bought and sold, valued and devalued. This is because at the origin of humanity we are all equal in our exchange of the sacred sign/thing and we are only human as long as this sacred equality in exchange continues. A free exchange always implies a difference that is traded and an equality that is the formal basis for exchange. We cannot escape this paradox.
I think that is a pretty good assessment of the dynamic at work. It leads to the follow on question - can two or more culturally conservative groups coexist within a single border? Or must each see the other as incompatible with their own continued existence?
-on first thought, I don't see why two cannot coexist as long as they agree on certain common rules and laws; in other words they both must respect the need to conserve the basis of the state. So, e.g., Jews in the US should respect the CHristian (as well as Jewish, as in Judeo-Christian) basis of the founding culture. It is obviously harder for conservatives from a very different culture to integrate into the US. Were you thinking about Islam?
In fact, if the conservatives are into things like female circumcision and the violent oppression of women, and are not willing to make some compromises in their view of what traditions need to be conserved, perhaps conflict is inevitable in the long run unless they remain a small group that can be mostly ignored.
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Yes, I think that people who refuse to integrate at a certain level and who take this as reason to be offended by the larger and pre-existing society need to be excluded. The thing is, not all Muslims are like that. And the question remains how much can and will Islam change (because surely it must if it is to survive), or how likely will westernized Muslims leave the faith? That complicates any talk of excluding Muslims, more than other immigrant groups, all of which have some problems in integrating. But I agree, a nation must have the right to limit numbers of immigrants and exclude those whom it comes to think cannot be peacefully integrated. But I am not convinved that America does not remain a powerful integration machine though it is surely going through some weak moments of late.
Where I think I differ with Auster is in the degree to which he thinks Muslim integration is hopeless or unnecessary. It is clearly going to be difficult, but in small numbers it is not a big problem. It is when you get large numbers of poorly integrated people that there is a problem... and it only takes a few to do major terrorist damage.
So why take the risk? The essential problem with Auster's argument is that it assumes it is possible to isolate ourselves globally from the Muslim world and thus protect ourselves from violent outbursts. Easier if we are not dependent on their oil, but in any case this strikes me as much more unrealisitic in the historical long run than neocon calls to integrate the whole world into a single global economy (not society), defended by a growing consensus on democratization and nonviolent interaction among states.
To some degree I think we must further integrate even the most resentful anti-American and anti- free market cultures into the global economy. And that inevitably entails some amount of migrants who can act as middlemen between advanced and less advanced countries, and as models of modernized living. So I see it is a bit of a poker and numbers game, while recognizing the obvious risks involved. But there are big risks in a world of nuclear proliferation, any way you cut it.
To address these, first of all, there has to be some immigration but zero tolerance and harsh penalties for anyone preaching or performing violence. There needs to be much less tolerance for victimary rhetorics on the part of the Arab and Muslim world and the dependence of the western left on inflating and trading in these rhetorics needs to be stopped. The left's de facto support for the terrorists, its desire to see the US lose the current war is an outrage beyond words. The real problem may be at home. If western culture were healthier there would be fewer problems with immigration.
Beyond that, we have to see how the usual resentments of youth can be recycled into the system and eventually turned to productive ends. Isolation would prove more deadly over the long run, I believe.
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Sorry that was an ungainly (ungamely?) peace of writing, the post I've just re-read above. But I won't delete it, since maybe it says something you want to respond to. Rick, Knuck, Flenser, et. al, just let me know how/if we can get this conversation on track again.
Flenser, I've just finished reading the NIsbet article you linked. THere is much to discuss there regarding the nature of our associations, much to qualify what I wrote earlier about our attachments. And there is much to consider in regard to what we are doing in the blogosphere: we obviously have a desire for new kinds of attachment beyond consumer society, a desire to pull down the overly centralized monoliths of our media, economic, and governing institutions and to discover our personhood through a renewed engagement with civic concerns. So how can we move from the inchoate desire to reinvigorate our civic engagement, via the virtual reality of the blogosphere, and the motivating focus of a global war, and move towards more realistic forms of association? Or are we stuck with this kind of virtual reality, and the struggle to transcend it through influencing a wider public opinion, given the inevitability of the isolation of must of us from real institutional power?
Here’s my favorite passage from the Nesbitt chapter:
It has surely become evident by this time that the
most successful and allegiance-evoking business enterprises and
cultural associations in modern life are those that regard themselves
as associations of groups, not of raw individuals. To recognize
the existence of informal social relationships, to keep
central purposes constantly alive in these small groups, and to
work toward the increased spontaneity and autonomy of these
groups is, I believe, the cardinal responsibility of the great private
association.
Only thus will the large formal associations remain important
agencies of order and freedom in democracy. Only thus will
they succeed in arresting and banishing the augmenting processes
of insecurity and moral isolation which now paralyze
individual wills and strike at the roots of stable culture.
There is a vast difference between the type of planning—
whether in the large State, industry, or the school—that seeks
to enmesh the individual in a custodial network of detailed
rules for his security and society’s stability, and the type of planning
that is concerned with the creation of a political and economic
context within which the spontaneous associations of
men are the primary sources of freedom and order. The latter
type of planning is compatible with competition, diversity,
rivalry, and the normative conflicts that are necessary to cultural
creativity. The former type is not.
Nesbittt’s emphasis on the conditions necessary for the flourishing of personhood is welcome. Personhood, as opposed to individualism, is a concept that enters western culture with Christianity, though Nesbitt does not dwell on its religious roots. This may be indicative of the political problem. There needs to be some way as we move forward to reconcile our Judeo-Christian past with that intellectually significant part of contemporary society that clings to worn out varieties of liberalism out of a basic distrust or even hatred of religion. Whether you are a believer, or not, in order to have a strong sense of your culture you need to understand the anthropology that stands behind it, and central to this is understanding how the idea of god, however imagined, provides a guarantee for shared cultural representations. When we get the idea of going beyond good and evil, we get lost.
This is why I think it is so important that we make available an understanding of the anthropological truths inherent in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in strictly secular, anthropological terms. A concept like personhood, which everyone uses, usually in ignorance of its origins, would be an example of how we can illuminate the importance of religious ideas for secular society, and provide a greater connection for people to their past.
Flenser, I agree with much you have to say about the limits of liberalism and cosmopolitanism, the latter being a concept that, originally, was roughly equated with the Jew who, one might suggest, can be a cosmopolitan because this state of being is not originally rooted in dilettantish superficiality, but in Judaism and its principles for endlessly awaiting the unfigurable Messiah. When would-be cosmopolitans forget the Jewish principles behind the idea, they become the kind of wandering relativists you note.
Personhood, a concept derived from persona, the mask of the actor, and the leap of faith that the actor must take in order to perform in the footsteps of his role model, is a Christian concept that one might imagine to be at some odds with notions of the cosmopolitan man of many potential faces. The Christian makes a commitment, above all, to one model of personhood, Jesus, while the cosmopolitan embraces the many worldly figures who might provide some insight into the nature of the unfigurable god who has created us in his image.
Nesbitt seems to put greatest emphasis on the need to find personhood in the institutions of local governance, the professions, and civil society. And clearly he is right to accent the importance of our developing many forms of professional distinction as a means of allowing people access to the local arenas in which they can develop the relationships and experiences that tie them to cultural traditions and the possibilities for meaningful personhood. But in doing so, he omits any discussion of the further possibilities of consumer society, with its products as signs, to provide each individual with means partially to construct his own persona. If we value consumer society – that is to say if we don’t simply give ourselves over to it and get lost in the waves – but learn to use it in productive ways, we perhaps need be less pessimistic than Nesbitt about the possibilities for enriching personhood.
But, as I say, I don’t think we can take a serious step forward culturally until we reconcile the believer and the skeptic, the two halves of our culture riven by the Enlightenment. Whatever the tools by which we are to govern and define ourselves as persons, we need first to have a serious and culturally rich repertoire of ideas about the nature and possibilities of personhood.
Hi truepeers
This discussion has been on the backburner for me for a while, but I hope to come back to it soon.
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