Assembled Ramblings

I have, in my other blog more especially, attempted to outline a fairly a specific sociopolitical point of view. Why do I frequently still get the nagging feeling that this remains inadequate? For a few reasons, I suppose. But one major reason in particular is that one is still confronted with vastly opposing points of view that are unamenable to persuasion by reason. Why is this the case?


First of all, how rational is my own point of view? Classical liberalism and its modern variants are adequate to the task of good governance for the most part. One struggles find alternatives. The premodern monarchy or aristocratic institutions admired by some conservatives? The city-states of ancient Greece? Or can we still profit from Aristotle's taxonomy of polities?


But what does this even account for? Surely one must confront relevant cultural issues regardless of the system of government, even if government conditions their terms to one degree or another? Inter-ethnic relations, gender relations, family life, religion, education and knowledge are of course all matters that precede contemporary liberal society. What disposition must one have to these matters?


At some point ideological questions go back to metaphysical and philosophical commitments. These commitments are then at issue. To the degree that one takes seriously the implications of a particular commitment, one is led to form cultural bonds on this basis. In this way we see modern separation of church and state distorted. The public discourse of secularism is blurred with the private discourse of atheistic naturalism. Being as incoherent and underfocused as it is, however, this naturalism does not manifest itself culturally in all of the uniform (or relatively uniform) ways that Christianity or another religious faith tradition might. It is relatively open-ended. It can accomodate both the educated atheistic urban professional couple and the poverty-stricken broken family that nevertheless continues its condition of poverty with unrestrained sexual infidelity, teen pregnancies, drug use, etc. Because it demands no homogeneity of culture, it can be used by anyone for any purpose.


But on almost all legal issues, I am opposed to the religious right. I am, however, also opposed to the left's historical imagination, in White's metahistorical sense of the term. The Christian religion is perfectly respectable as a philosophical point of view. It certainly has a richer history than naturalism, and there's no reason to problematize it with precommitments to naturalist assumptions in the way that many have. The equal treatment of women is certainly a laudable social goal. How often has it been threatened? The typical social histories telling the story of women's oppression tend to overlook that rape, sexual harassment, and forms of disrespect towards women were duly chastized by traditional faith communities. Labor of many kinds has always been performed by women, especially in the late 19th and early 20th century. Has it ever been true that widespread disregard for the human rights of women has been uniquely problematic? Or in societies in which it has taken hold, are there generalized human rights concerns?

It is difficult to fight through the bogeymen set up by left-wing sensibilities in the intellectual establishment. The left may say that the right believes women are inferior to men and should be subordinated to them. When one attempts to dispell this notion by simply pointing out that there is a disagreement over certain historiographical and sociological contentions, such objections are usually thoughtlessly disregarded as pure propaganda in service of the stealth aspiration, pre-attributed to the disputant, to bolster assumed oppressive relationships. A bizarre scenario arises in which everyone agrees on the fundamental notion of social equality, but vitriol persists.

Liberal internationalism and world federalism are laudable as well. They are nevertheless dismissed by many on the left as fig leaves for neo-imperialist intentions and contrasted with the supposedly more authentic "proletarian" internationalism that will come about through eventual world revolution. Concentrations of business interests and power are also wrongly analyzed as emanating from endogenous features of capitalism (here conceived broadly as an all-pervasive social system and not simply an economic system).

The issue posed with respect to the capitalist/socialist dichotomy is actually much less starkly polarized than many conceive. The old ultraleft position that can only see in every quasi-socialistic insitution (from co-operatives to welfare provision to government ownership) the taint of capitalist string-pulling is simply untenable. The results of reform campaigns are never seen as simply an evolving social consensus, but rather the tenuous product of working class struggle under capitalistic constraints. This is of course backed by the pseudo-empirical evidence of the Reagan/Thatcher reaction or another misunderstood historical example. The post-war consensus broke apart because its institutions were no longer properly adapted to a post-industrial context. The idea that there could be a complex of social forces that does not yield easily to one-dimensional formulas escapes a great many people.

The consensus formulated by heavyweights like Noam Chomsky that, say, "right"-libertarianism (or capitalistic libertarianism) would be a virtual neo-feudal tyranny is nothing but overblown rhetoric. Anything that perpetuates the notion that all those don't agree with Chomsky's idiosyncratic anarcho-syndicalist position are really shilling for a system that is corrupt through-and-through is deemed admirable. It is astounding how narrow-minded the bulk of respected academics have become. Chomsky has himself proclaimed on prior occasions that he believes his own anarchism to be a post-industrial expression of classical liberal aspirations. That there could be no legitimate room for others who actually adhere more faithfully to classical liberal principles in the contemporary mileiu is an utterly flabbergasting insinuation.

Surely if a person is half-sane classical liberalism cannot be a totally reprehensible philosophy.

Some Thoughts on Evolutionary Biology

I've recently decided to commit myself to skepticism concerning evolutionary theory. While I have been seriously religious for several years prior to this point, that actually hasn't been the primary motivating factor propelling my recent skepticism. In fact, for a time I was an atheist, and I personally mocked Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe at a presentation he made during my time as an undergraduate. I'm by no means a hard-line dogmatic Creationist, and I don't particularly believe I have anything to gain by questioning evolutionary theory.

Why, then, the skepticism? For one, I haven't gotten the sense that most promulgators of evolutionary theory are actually honest about the epistemological hurdles one has to jump over to actually propose a coherent theory. Second, until recently I haven't had much contact with intellectually serious proponents of Intelligent Design and evolutionary skepticism. While I may change my position on this as I learn more, I'm very excited by the tradition out of which David Berlinski comes.

One thing that I've noticed as I've begun coming forward with many of my objections is that I am being too rationalistic. Evolution is defended precisely because it does not assume a rationally ordered world. This gives me some pause. The creationists are supposed to be the ones stewing in their irrational prejudices, not the evolutionary materialists.

Part of my philosophical project, as it will be articulated in greater depth, is to advance a form of Christian Neoplatonism. Plato's emphasis on the importance of the study of mathematics to the good life will be a feature of this project, and this will ultimately tie into the mathematical objections to evolutionary biology advanced by Schutzenberger, Berlinski, and others. For the record, I personally adhere to an Augustinian framework hypothesis with respect to the origin of the world and am supremely deferential to allegorical interpretations of scripture.

So more to come...

Some Ramblings on Feminism

It's pretty hard to know what to do with feminism. Ideologues come up in the most random of places it seems, and usually the axes they grind have little if anything to do with reality.

Several weeks ago I was in a discussion with a "progressive theater" feminist talking about the pay gap. I pointed out that there are laws against pay discrimination, that in fact they have just become more strict, and that most of the observed pay differentials are due to career choice and number of hours worked. She never explicitly disputed these facts, but this didn't stop her from later making arrogantly off-handed comments about her boyfriend making twice as much money as her because he was a man.

Feminism doesn't seem to really have a point as a consciously espoused ideology, other than to bolster some kind of cultural predisposition that sees itself as diametrically opposed to whatever "traditional" family life has been caricatured as.

For the most part, it seems like feminism has most of its relevance autobiographically. The notion that there is a long-standing cultural prejudice that women are simply meant to be domestic servants doesn't have a terribly firm historical basis. For a significant part of American history (not to mention world history) when most of the economy was still agricultural, women participated in the activities of managing the family farm to no great extent less than men. Social life itself was primarily based around the domestic environment for both sexes.

It's true that women were not permitted to vote, for instance, but was this widely perceived as a travesty of justice? The public political sphere is now a locus of power to an extent that it was not in previous eras. Government bureaucracy and the state management of various aspects of personal life were never given a huge role in in the affairs of society until the 20th century. In an age in which there were many more loci of social life, much more decentralized into localities and based on the relations of private property (mostly in land at that), what was the purpose of political institutions?

It is hard to imagine politics having much more significance than that of a Property Owner's Association. That is, politics was perceived as the mutual agreements made amongst owners of property for its management insofar as those property owners had mutual concerns that could not be addressed individually. The public sphere, instead of being an end in itself, was thoroughly rooted in the affairs of the private sphere.

Indeed, examining the major demands of feminist movements, it is almost entirely clear that feminism has no basis apart from industrial/post-industrial society and state bureaucracy. In point of fact, the word "feminism" was never so much as coined until the 1880s. The movements in the 1970s to open up various spheres of employment to women that had previously been closed only existed because modern society had created those roles in the first instance. Significant municipal police departments, for instance, didn't exist until the industrial age. Demanding that the state intervene further in the institution to rationalize it according to the dictates of gender equality was only one further step in the state management of society that the police department was itself a product of. Nothing particularly radical was achieved by such a movement.

The upshot is that there were aspects of the way that society was organized in times past that account for previous gender norms and institutions in those periods far better than any insinuations of a haughtily contemptuous patriarchy. What does exist as evidence of its existence, as I said, appears to be mainly autobiographical and anecdotal. There is a video on youtube.com in which a female Rabbi is describing her "awakening" to feminist ideas. She mentions how, when she was a young girl, she and a friend gasped at an ad that showed a woman in a hammock with her husband hanging clothes on the laundry line. This is somehow supposed to be taken as evidence of the entrenched social prejudices they had internalized as a result of male dominance.

I myself have lots of stories from my childhood about misconceptions I had about the world and naive prejudices I developed that were purely the product of my own lack of life experience or understanding, having nothing to do with any grandiose cultural perjudice I had absorbed. Once when I was really young I saw my father receive change for a 20-dollar bill after purchasing a meal at a fast food restaurant. I noticed the smile on my dad's face as the cashier gave him his change. I thought for sure this was a great restaurant; afterall, they hand out money when they give you your food. The idea of making change had not occurred to me.

Why can't being floored at the idea of a woman relaxing while a man does a domestic chore be the same kind of thing? Are we to take it that there were no women in existence living in an "unconventional" life situation at the time this ad was published? No female business owners? What about Elizabeth II? Is it simply possible that these girls were just reacting from a prejudice developed from their own limited experience of sheltered middle-class domestic life at a particular phase of American history?

So, yes, it's hard to know what to do with feminism anymore. People say things like "feminism is the radical notion that women are people!" The first time I read that was on the door of the office of the Campus Women's Organization at my college. My first thought was "when did I say they weren't?" What were these people even referring to? Is it the fact that men want to have sex and try to go out and "get laid"? That's treating a woman as less than human? Well, come on, what is?

I used to struggle really hard to express just what it was about feminism that bugged me. In fact, I'm still struggling to express it now. I think what it comes down to is the desire to not be brow-beaten for everything I do that comes off as the least bit stereotypically male, the fundamental faith that men and women (while psychologically different in incredible ways) have the ability live with one another peacably in a loving relationship that doesn't involve constant sparing over the politics of domestic life. But for the most part I guess there's nothing I can do anymore but let these feminists go on their rants as the urge happens to hit them, secure in the knowledge that I don't have anything to prove anymore.