Williams on Ethics, Knowledge, and Reflection

bernard williams

This conclusion is disappointing for those who hoped that we could argue somebody into morality. But Williams is adamant that this was always an ill-conceived hope.

The very excellent A. W. Moore taking on the devastating brilliance of Bernard Williams.

Williams wants to challenge the idea that moral notions are through and through pure . . . This purity, Williams argues, is an illusion, except at a level which those who think in this way would themselves regard as hopelessly superficial.

Among the most important of these are the ancient Greek ideas of selfhood, freedom, and shame. Williams argues that we have not, contrary to popular belief, advanced from these to a more refined conception.

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Tom Petty

music

I realize that Runnin’ Down a Dream is going on for a decade old, but I’ve only just been able to view it via Netflix. Reading about Petty c. ’79 when there was still serious rock journalism (Melody Maker and NME) he always struck me as a man of integrity and decency without resorting to the shallow and ubiquitous virtue-signalling of many a “name”. As with Nick Lowe, Petty is one of the few occupying a special sweet spot between the hollowed out franchises of the big “circus” acts  and gameshow musical non-entities. While the documentary is itself quite conventional (the usual talking heads), its strength lies in its leisurely pace, allowing a story to be told in Petty’s own words and to showcase his amazing back catalogue. Bogdanovich to his credit (unlike Scorsese) leaves his artistic pretensions at the door and let’s the music and characters speak for themselves.

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How Brexit shattered progressives’ dearest illusions

liberalism

a quasi-eschatological faith in historical progress

Well put Damon! Here is one of the more insightful, philosophically literate and least hysterical or pompous analyses.

On this topic I have written the following in a forthcoming paper.

Epistemic humility is not seen as a cultural virtue: it is the zeitgeist of the modern age that we exist in a (misperceived) linear trajectory of progress, progress here taken to be coextensive with improvement – morally, socially, technologically, economically and scientifically. Progressivism thus conceived is clearly a “grand narrative” notion which on closer scrutiny is subject to all the weaknesses of such constructions. It is impossible to determine whether a change for the better in one part or aspect of the system is progressive for the system overall since there is no Archimedean point from which progress can be assessed. If one substituted “progress” for the more apt “resolving of incoherencies,” then they might not have fallen foul of this notion. Every change alters some state of affairs, destroying or modifying it – that much one can accept. Robert Musil captures this idea:

“It seems to me,” Ulrich said, “that every progressive step is also a retrogressive step.

Progress exists always in one particular sense. And since our life as a whole has no sense, there is as a whole no progress either.”

Leo Fischel lowered his newspaper. “Do you think it better to be able to cross the Atlantic in six days or to have to spend six weeks on it?”

“I should probably say it’s definitely progress to be able to do both . . .” (Musil, Man Without Qualities).

Granted we live, in some real sense, the best of times (for example, reductions in child mortality, vaccine-preventable diseases, access to safe water and sanitation, malaria prevention and control, prevention and control of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis control and declining poverty). But we also live in the worst of times – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Holodomor, Cambodia and more besides – the dark side to technocracy and bureaucracy.

It’s very disturbing to see how the “progressives” for many years were the ones who strongly promoted democracy as a substantive theory of the good rather than merely as a procedural mechanism, Condorcet-like voting paradoxes aside. But what if even the calls for so-called “deliberative democracy” (assuming this idea is even practically feasible) delivered the same result? Now that the regressives have the result they didn’t want, their default position is akin to the “people’s  democracies” of the old Eastern Bloc countries. (I even noticed this disingenuous stance to the result of a free speech debate some months ago). Switch out “The Party” for the snooty and smug intelligentsia (Left and Right) as to knowing the demos’ “real” interests and preferences. And the political establishment across the Western world wonder why things are so fucked up? All the pundits, theorists, fuck-wit celebrities are akin to the surfer or diver who is focused on the waves and not the swells or the sets. “You know when you’ve been Tango’d” (by the orange candidate) — he’s the establishment’s creation — the regressives and their complicitous conservative “cucks”, not to mention “Davos Man”. There is only one sane liberal choice now — Gary Johnson.

EU_damon

I am the blues

blues

Sensitively directed (i.e. unobtrusively) and superbly edited documentary about the last generation of blues musicians playing the thoroughly diminished Chitlin’ Circuit — one of whom has sadly since passed on since this film was made. For me, the revelation of the film were the ladies — Barbara Lynn and  Carol Fran. Catch it if you can.

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Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia: The full interview

regressive left

Based Mom and Based Goddess let rip on the toxic cocktail of cultural infantilization, the new Stalinism (kangaroo courts), free-speech, identity politics, advocacy posing as academic inquiry, willful ignorance of the past, the ethics of teaching (intellectual dishonesty), utopianism, “cultural appropriation”, radical social constructivism, and on crapping on the “secret people” (gamergate) — totemic of those whom the political classes and the so-called “intelligentsia” (Left and Right) have incessantly disparaged and hectored and are still profoundly oblivious about. Hence the recent UK plebiscite and the rise of the orange man! The “regressive left” now have to pay the piper and unfortunately we all have to suffer their excesses. But they are not going to give up without the dirtiest of fights: they will double down and continue to smear any contrary view (as per Sam Harris).

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The Secret People

political philosophy

David Marquand in the New Statesman on “something is stirring among Chesterton’s secret people”. Here is a review of Marquand’s Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain

England and the English now face the primordial questions that face all self-conscious political communities: “Who are we?”, “Who do we want to be?” At bottom, these questions are philosophical, in a profound sense moral, not economic or institutional. They have to do with the intangibles of culture and sentiment, not the outward forms that clothe them.

What makes something “Kafkaesque”?

Kafka

You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces

— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

[t]he bewildering mechanisms of power in stories such as The Trial also “point to something much more sinister”—the idea that arcane bureaucracies become self-perpetuating and operate independently of the people supposedly in power, who are themselves reduced to functionaries of mysterious, unaccountable forces. Tavlin quotes Hannah Arendt, who studied the totalitarian nightmares Kafka presciently foresaw, and wrote of “tyranny without a tyrant.”

Kafka’s comic vision, I think, ultimately partakes in what Miguel de Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life.” But he does not fully deny his characters all freedom of choice, even if they frequently have no idea what it is they’re choosing between or why.

The Rule of Law in the Modern European State

michael oakeshott

David Boucher’s article from a decade ago freely available here. The shit-storm that we are now in is a consequence of complicitous “ruling class chatter” (Left and Right) and “enlightened” technocracy, a politics of faith that has become way out of wack with the politics of scepticism.

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The European Union required of its aspirant members formal adherence to the political criteria, but not substantive adherence.

. . .

How might we characterize the association of the European Union? It is not a civil association to any recognizable degree, its laws and directives are on the whole instrumental in facilitating common purposes. In this respect it is more like what John Rawls and David Gauthier described as a common enterprise for mutual advantage. In fact it may be that the European Union is exactly that type of association that Oakeshott called Baconian or technological in which the office of government is understood as little more than the custody and direction of the enterprise by enlightened technocrats.

. . .

It must not only have the character of law by conforming to a recognized and authoritative procedure, but must also embody those elements of justice intrinsic to law. To what extent those elements can be manufactured, if they do not already exist, is highly debatable. If they are ignored, and the criterion is applied as a formality without reference to the culture that sustains it, then the rule of law in the hands of the EU is likely to be exactly what Judith Shklar dismissively says it is, namely ‘ruling class chatter’. The intrinsic elements to law, such as its indifference to specific persons and interests, the principle of equality before the law and the rejection of privilege and of secret and retroactive laws, those very things that serve as a bulwark against arbitrary rule, require not only formal subscription, but also the will and political culture to animate it with the spirit and not merely the principle of law.

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