the problem here is that you are the activist in the debate and revolt against the pragmatism that Valentin describes and which is based on his observation... He sees constructive pragmatism (?) on the winning side and does not have a problem with it. - This position is 100 % opposed to yours, and it will be impossible to find consensus or compromise.
Spot on! This is the problem I had with Jake the whole time. I could hardly reply to his posts, because to me it looked like fiery ideologic activism. I'm not passing judgement, just telling how it looked from here.
Lines like these: are unions at fault for actually fighting the war that the fatcats started instead of rolling over and playing dead or stealing train drivers' pensions or dismantling of civilised society by people who want to throw us back to the 19th century
to me are ideology, sloganeering (no offense, Jake, I just say how it looks for me), and I can't bring myself to even comment on it, which, to Jake or DoDo, looks like I would be eluding the subject.
And Jake's discourse (which I don't judge) is filled with this kind of stuff. For instance, he says Bush stole elections. Officially speaking, I agree; but still he was voted by a huge part of the population, almost 50%. Or Greenspan, who enjoyed the same prestige under the Clinton administration. Or the idea that elected officials would not be the only legitimate representation of government. This to me is either absurd, or coming from a revolutionary. Elected officials are not the only instance of democracy, but they are the only legitimate government, that's why we put them there! To me, this looks like coming from a wildly idealistic spirit, which I can understand, but with whom I can hardly debate pragmatism, because he looks too much into his own "thing" to be open to anything else. To me it looks like a continuously defensive-aggressive position, which is not my "scene" at all - I know I could never convince someone who has honest, strong convictions - and I'm not even interested in convincing, since rational pragmatism is not an ideology, but a methodology. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
you cannot dissect all their lies one by one. That'd turn into a battle of attrition that you cannot hope to win, because it takes only two minutes to write a bald-faced lie, but it takes half an hour to debunk it.
This (replacing lies with strong convictions) is a bit how I felt too during my three or four debates with Jake. I felt I would have had to go in the finest details on a huge range of topics, practically covering all the societal issues today. It was far easier to say "unions must act political" and then asl for details from myself; I could simply not go into all that detail, and it was not the point, anyway. Talking pragmatism and technocracy to me does not imply explaining why social neolibs or socialists are not pragmatic. These are ideologies attested as such - QED.
Also Jake used the puppy skinning metaphor and ended saying...
we do not applaud his pragmatism when he compromises so that only one cute puppy is skinned alive
I pointed this before to Nomad: compromise is not the same thing as rational pragmatism. It's not just compromise (which can sometimes be a solution) or just pragmatism/real-politik. It's also rational, it's also humanistic. I wonder how much liberals and humanists today have in common with the original ones.
Finally: I agree with Jake's definition of ideology. As to... Pragmatism to what end? : A better life for all involved. As simple as that. Not the communist society, not the freemarket, globalised society, not any other pre-described society. A humble, yet an "enlighened" purpose. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
I felt I would have had to go in the finest details on a huge range of topics, practically covering all the societal issues today. It was far easier to say "unions must act political" and then asl for details from myself; I could simply not go into all that detail, and it was not the point, anyway.
Well, if you're going to discuss politics, you have to be prepared to discuss policy - preferably in some detail.
That doesn't mean that you have to provide detailed argument against every off-hand example tossed out, but it means that you should be willing to go into detail on at least one to three points. If you want to assert that this or that politician (nevermind the whole political culture of all of Western Civilisation(TM)) adheres to this or that conviction, surely it's not unreasonable to expect you to take an example or two and go into some detail to demonstrate how you think they support your contention?
I pointed this before to Nomad: compromise is not the same thing as rational pragmatism. It's not just compromise (which can sometimes be a solution) or just pragmatism/real-politik. It's also rational, it's also humanistic.
But humanism is an ideology, at least in its original incarnation and under my definition of ideology, which you say you agree with.
A better life for all involved.
Who are "all involved" and what is "a better life?" For most values of "all involved" and "a better life" the above sentence represents an unachievable objective. So the question becomes one of tradeoffs. Which measure of "a better life for all involved" is more important, median income or aggregate income? Are they both red herrings, because "a better life" has nothing to do with income? Is the Brazilian rainforest more important for "a better life for all involved" than access to cheap beef for consumers?
I have my own preferred answers to those questions, and many of those answers are unashamedly ideological. But at least I'm not hubristic enough to pretend that those answers offer "a better life for all involved" - usually, my preferred answer would deprive a billionaire somewhere of some of his money. You might object that this does not materially degrade his prospects of a better life - and I would agree - but I'm willing to bet you a beer that he doesn't see things that way...
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Or maybe the old humanism was actually much less an ideology in the sense we confer this word today, and quite pragmatic in itself.
(just count how many times you pointed to places of imprecision in the definition of humanism that you give; feeling those places with something is what tursn it into a true ideology; without them, it's a rational way of organizing society)
(it reminds me of those adorers of the God Reason, and also of that statement, that God is Reason, and Reason was God.... our humanists were catholics in disguise - oh the horror!) Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
feeling those places with something is what tursn it into a true ideology; without them, it's a rational way of organizing society)
No, leaving them out renders the sentences unintelligible.
"Progress" is simply not well-defined unless one specifies the end towards which the progress is aimed. Similarly, "equality" is not well-defined unless one specifies what measure should be equalised (income? Rights? (Which rights?) Safety? Freedom from material want?), and among whom it should be equalised (Europeans? Christians? White people? All of humanity?). "Society" isn't well-defined unless one specifies who belongs in it. Is "society" the society of land-owners? Of gentlemen? Of nobles? Of all citizens? Of all residents? Of all humans?
Of course, those questions would all lead to a political debate that doesn't well suit the claim of unavoidable progress towards reasonableness as a historical inevitability, which is quite central to the narrative. So those questions are usually swept under the carpet. But just because they aren't answered explicitly does not mean that they aren't answered at all.
A framework is all that is needed, when you filled in with something precise, you think you provide a ideal to the society, when in reality you limit their choice. Original humanism and liberalism was much more rational and acceptable than living in a continuous and more and more intense polarisation and cat fight. Your argument that I read somewhere, that the "others" (the class enemy, the fatcats etc) are already doing that, is fallacious. Expose their flaw, don't make the same mistake. Turn the other cheek and work relentlessly in the proper way, which is not more sloganeering in the other sense. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
On the contrary, leaving them out allows the society to freely choose its way.
Leaving them out permits the listener to substitute whatever he feels is the appropriate definitions. To a sincere believer in the doctrines of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, imposing Shari'a in France would be Progress, because it would bring the world-wide Caliphate a step closer. To the CEO of Halliburton, the Iraq war was Progress, because it made him a couple of billion $ richer.
I.o.w., society does not have a set of preferences w.r.t. the direction of progress. Only individual people can provide those definitions. But when they do - or rather, when their definitions differ from the ones you've provided for yourself - you label them ideologues and accuse them of dogmatic obstinacy.
You tell people what you think is good, raise the thing at faith level, and declare that everybody disagreeing is a neocon, neolib, propagandist, anti-unions.
Bah, humbug. Nowhere have I called you a neocon or neolib propagandist.
I have called you anti-union, with, I think, considerable justification, because you repeatedly convey an overly simplistic view of the labour market which places blame on unions for problems that are actually caused by employers, or for which blame is at least equally shared by employers and unions. And refuse to even take council of the objections raised against that view. If you wish to interpret this as a knee-jerk ideological reaction, that is, of course, your prerogative. I'll leave it to others to judge whether you're right.
Turn the other cheek and work relentlessly in the proper way, which is not more sloganeering in the other sense.
That's been tried. It's been tried with creationists. It's been tried with HIV/AIDS deniers. It's been tried with neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers. It's been tried with perpetual-motion frauds. It's been tried with homeopaths and crystal healers. And it's been tried with Friedmanites. It didn't work.
Reason and logic and pragmatism work well and fine when you operate in a climate of general good faith and mutual trust. But the thing is, I don't trust the right wing, and I don't for a second believe that they're arguing in good faith. So when debating a professional wingnut, it's for the benefit of the audience, just like debating a professional creationist.
And if you believe that reasoned argument, detailed expositions of policies and proof of how those policies further the common good of the vast majority of society is more convincing to the body politic than sloganeering and propaganda... then you really have very little business accusing others of Utopianism.
The society can at some point arrive at conclusions too. Like, women are discriminated. (good one). All women are discriminated anywhere they're not in equal numbers with men (absurd ones).
I never placed blame on unions as such. I protested against abuse of the right to withdraw labour. When it transgresses their right to labour, especially more so when it's for an unworthy cause, even worse when it's a tiny minority abusing their strategic position (air traffic controllers), some people can get very very annoyed and vote for someone who promises minimum service.
On the last part, I could agree with you, the problem is that it seems by and large the public is getting fed up with excessive activism from all sides.
My question was quite simple actually: faced with such polarisation, would the society not tend to counter-react by particularly picking leaders and movements which profess moderation, balance, reason, pragmatism ? That was the whole idea of the first blog, not to challenge your ideological position.
The second blog (which no one noticed, but then is that even surprising, I wonder) went further and analysed those situations, where technocrats, experts, bureaucrats tend to impose by claiming themselves from pragmatism.
It was an almost academical reflection (in all humbleness). It became flaming and polarising because of guys like you who claim to recognise the conspiration behind the text and pass to action against the enemy. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
You'll have to come up with better examples of doctrines abusing the humanist/liberal framework.
What's wrong with them?
If obviously off-the-wall insanity like six-day-creation can pass muster in public debate, then what hope do we have of combating superficially plausible-sounding nonsense like the Laffer Curve?
But "society" does not magically arrive at those conclusions ex nihilo. They become socially accepted because they are propagated by individuals and groups within the society.
So if you insist that "society" is the only entity to legitimately impute meaning into the narrative that you claim to be operating according to, then you are essentially saying that you defend the Conventional Wisdom and the status quo.
Which is a perfectly acceptable position. But it's not unideological.
I never placed blame on unions as such. I protested against abuse of the right to withdraw labour. When it transgresses their right to labour,
Emphasis mine.
That is placing blame on the unions. Because the fair and balanced description of the situation is that their employers are abusing their right to lead and distribute the work by hiring people to fill critical positions who are not paid not to strike. That's a case of irresponsible cost cutting, just as surely as not providing emergency brakes or fire extinguishers for the trains. So in this case, employers are entirely to blame for the mess, and expecting the unions to help clean it up is a lot like expecting the taxpayers to foot the bill for bailing out Wall Street.
If an employer decided to hire employees who could quit (and be fired) with a day's notice, we would not blame the employees for quitting, even if it disrupted service - we'd blame the employer for being short-sighted by hiring workers on a contract that allowed them to quit. So blaming the workers for striking when they're employed under a contract that permits them to strike seems entirely out to lunch. The workers aren't responsible for being employed under that contract - in a capitalist economy, it's the employer's prerogative to lead and distribute the work.
I did actually read it, and I substantially agree with your criticisms of technocracy and the illusion of meritocracy. I just reacted to the underlying assumption that technocracy is established because people want to run things in an unideological fashion - far more often, as is presently the case, technocracies are established and enshrined in order to lock a specific ideological position deep into the institutional framework of society.
You can also choose to emphasize the "can" in the conventional wisdom. Instead you add "only". Vicious, vicious debater.
Not placing any blame. Mere constatation that rights sometimes oppose one another. I then said one can choose to ignore it, for a better cause than hanging on to corporative privileges, or if it wasn't just a handful extremists (sometimes even out of union support) blocking the whole airport or railway or television. Otherwise I broadly agreed with no-strike more-pay strategical areas idea. You just keep speaking from an union/worker viewpoint (ideological), picking favourite categories, as if employers would be a necessary evil at best - while I am neutral.
Not because people want to run things unideologically, but that some people or categories promote technical expertise as unideological, impartial and as such the best - obviously not true. It remains that not all economical technocrats are neolibs - many are quite to the left, for that matter. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
You can also choose to emphasize the "can" in the conventional wisdom. Instead you add "only".
Because when anybody other than "society" does it, you call it ideology and denounce it as hopeless utopianism.
You just keep speaking from an union/worker viewpoint (ideological), picking favourite categories, as if employers would be a necessary evil at best - while I am neutral.
No, I'm just telling you what the definition of capitalism says: In a capitalist society, it is the employer's prerogative to lead and distribute the work - and to ensure that staffing is adequate for the task at hand is an obvious corollary to this. And if the employer in question can't find enough qualified work... well then he's just shit outta luck, but that's not the employees' problem. No political school of thought that I'm aware of - left, right or centre - disputes this. Comes with the whole "private ownership of the means of production" thing, which I gather is rather central to capitalist economic models. It's in any PoliSci textbook you might care to name.
Fortunately you are right that not all economic technocrats are neolibs. There are still holdovers from saner times. But far too many have drunk the Reaganomics kool-aid.
Who says that definition ? Prerogative ?... Conferred by...? This all sounds so ideological, I feel itching at almost each word of yours. Political schools of thought - a rational pragmatist's anathema ! "Capitalism" could rather be seen as the natural state of things, rather than an ideology in itself. PoliSci schools remind me of certain economy books indoctrinating students with freemarket doctrines. Yuk. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
It works exceedingly well for science, because in science cheaters are usually caught sooner or later, and then they're run out of town on a rail, covered in tar and feathers and branded with a big, fat sign in the middle of their face saying "liar."
In politics... not so much.
And while capitalism could indeed be seen as the "natural" state of things, so could feudalism, clientism, oligarchy, corporatism, serfdom, tribalism and a host of other more or less undesirable ways of running society. Capitalism is no less artificial than social democracy - if you want a truly "natural" state of affairs, look at tribalism and feudalism; they seem to be the state societies move towards when their citizenry stops paying attention.
Who says that the definition of capitalism is that the employer leads and distributes the work? Well, originally this particular formulation of capitalist principles was taken from an early Danish employers' union manifesto - more specifically from their demands for concessions from the Danish labour movement, in return for ending a major lockout. It was subsequently written into the September Agreement, which you might call the constitution of the Danish labour market.
It's right up there with private property when it comes to defining capitalism.
You're the first person I have ever met who disagrees that the definition of capitalism is private control of the means of production - or at least that capitalism means universal private property rights, to which private control of the means of production is an obvious corollary.
Of course, you can make up your own definition of capitalism if you want, but if you want to substitute some idiosyncratic definition of capitalism, then you have to at least tell us what that definition is.
And I wonder what the "natural state of things" even means. It sounds like more "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, know what I mean" speak. What is "natural" about capitalism - under your definition, or the dictionary definition, I don't care which? Why has a system that's "the natural state of things" only existed for two hundred years or so, tops? And why does "the natural state of things" seem to regress towards feudalism when left unattended (a problem that already Adam Smith was aware of when he wrote of the necessity of trust-busting)?
Then you bring people in for work. Becoming an employer changes things, because people are not machines, personal and social problems are posed, which is why there are work laws and statutes to regulate the thing and protect employees.
Still pondering, without relating to any highminded philosophical book, for the moment. Dude :) Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Well for one, private property is the normal state of things. Always existed, only in danger when no rule of law, or by abuse.
No. You'll have to argue that a bit more than simply stating it. Indeed, one of the first large States, Egypt, had everything owned by the Pharao. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
"Always" is a very long time. And I would point out that in most cultures, the notion of individual private property does not actually exist, because the individual is wholly subsumed in the clan or family.
Additionally, very often in European history, peasants didn't actually own most of their stuff - they rented it from their local nobles.
That's not so much "means of production" but private property you bought with your money. Period.
You can shout that there is no difference between capital goods (means of production) and consumer goods until you go blue in the face, but that doesn't change the fact that the rest of the world makes that distinction.
Land has, throughout most of European history, either been owned communally or held in fief from one's feudal sovereign. Agricultural implements have been variously privately and communally owned, but certainly weren't usually bought and sold on open markets the way they are under full-fledged capitalist systems. With a few notable exceptions (such as the Freemasons), even the proto-capitalist craftsmen in the cities worked in guilds, which communally owned the means of production, and did so essentially since the dissolution of the Roman empire and the start of the Middle Ages.
(None of which, of course, means that these constructs were in any way egalitarian or remotely similar to what most Marxists would understand when they say "communal ownership" of the means of production. They just weren't capitalist in any sense of the term that my dictionary recognises.)
Employing people to produce goods for third parties is a relatively recent invention - it used to be that most work was done either for oneself (as, e.g., with subsistence farming, an activity that used to take up more than 90 % of all economic activity in pre-capitalist societies) or on commission. This only really changed once industrialisation made mass output of cheap, standardised goods practical.
Well, very often the feudal nobility didn't own their stuff: it was granted by the king, at least in principle?
Things were much more nuanced even then, and often peasants had property of their land and house.
That's only true for the freeholders, which were not the majority in most countries (and in some countries, such as Denmark, for instance, didn't even exist for several centuries).
This blog was about the bad sides of pragmatism - technocracy, bureaucracy, shutting down the debate with a pretention of expertise, opposing rights so that to not confer any. You turned it into a ideologically polarised fight. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
I could not care less about sloganeering of any kind.
... says the guy who talks about "promoting a better life for all" and who pronounces that "ideology is dead, so what now?"
Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, pot.
You can blast at neocons, or Sarkozy, or catholics all you want, I don't feel personally touched, it is but the lack of fairness and truthfulness that annoys me.
I challenge you to find somewhere I said something untrue.
Fairness, OTOH, is to some extent a matter of perspective, so it is possible that you find some of my assumptions or conclusions unfair. Which is to my sorrow, but does not change their merit.
This blog was about the bad sides of pragmatism - technocracy, bureaucracy, shutting down the debate with a pretention of expertise, opposing rights so that to not confer any. You turned it into a ideologically polarised fight.
It was ideologically polarised from the word go. By claiming the death of ideology, you lent a shroud of normalcy, legitimacy and even historical inevitability to the current political climate - a climate that is very much dominated by ideological dogmatism, as I explained in considerable detail. I fail to see how disputing the assumptions fundamentally underpinning your diary constitutes an irrelevant threadjack. But maybe that's just me.
As for the fight part... well, we could go back through the comments and see who started what and who called whom names. But frankly, that would probably be an exercise in futility. At any rate, I don't think any of the participants has reason to be particularly ashamed of his or her conduct.
Untrue stuff? Your whole point of view was heavily biased. Like when you deny any place for argumentation in neocon propaganda, I reply that many americans were still convinced of some of the more logical bits in it, since they re-elected Bush, and you reply the elections were stolen, choosing to ignore the fact that plus or minus several thousand votes, about 50% actually voted for him. You're propagandizing against a supposed propagandist, which is why I'm telling you you're wasting your time. I don't believe in any hard right, neocon or neolib theories, I have certain rightwing values (like the moral value of effort) and leftwing one (like fighting inequalities as a genuine societal goal), and some more. But my stance is not ideological. You probably think anyone must have an ideology, like you have one. The world is polarized, the good and the bad, the fatcats and the oppressed, and any attempt to say differently is a support for the actual state of affairs. If you're trying to prove the inherent relativity in any such position, that's what I call an exercise in futility. We can abstractize stuff to no end, my original points, where I presented several views of certain topics and the polarisation ("extremisation") of debate that usually follows, remain unchallenged - just like the examples I gave on pragmatic Sarkozy.
Had you paid more attention, I did not argue in support of the present situation, but about a change of approach, for nuancing and de-polarising stuff in order to keep in touch with reality. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Pronouncing ideology dead, can that e ideologic ? :)
It can, as in the case of Fukuyama. But that's beside the point, because I was using it as an example of sloganeering - which it indisputably is - not of ideology.
I reply that many americans were still convinced of some of the more logical bits in it, since they re-elected Bush, and you reply the elections were stolen, choosing to ignore the fact that plus or minus several thousand votes, about 50% actually voted for him.
There are several ways to steal an election, of which actual ballot stuffing is only the crudest one. Massive media dominance also counts as a way to manipulate elections - at least when Vladimir Putin does it...
And as an aside, it's closer to 25 % given the turnout.
Had you paid more attention, I did not argue in support of the present situation, but about a change of approach, for nuancing and de-polarising stuff in order to keep in touch with reality.
Depolarising the situation requires a good-faith effort from both sides. The Left has - broadly speaking - shown its good faith by moving towards the centre. The Right has - broadly speaking - responded by moving farther to the right. You're barking up the wrong tree here - we've scratched their backs, it's their turn to scratch our backs now.
And precisely in what way, if I may, would "pronouncing ideology dead" be even remotely similar to "sloganeering" ? (let alone I challenge you to point me wherever such a declaration would be made at all).
Been there, done that, gave the reference to Fukuyama. What more do you want? A detailed dissection of The end of History complete with an analysis of all the misleading sloganeering in it (of which the death of ideology is but one among several)?
"beside the point, because I was using it as an example of sloganeering"
So (unless I misread your english) I rightly ignored it. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
My bad.
