Notorious P.A.T. points me to Noam Chomsky’s (spot-on, IMHO) to answer to the question I asked about Niebuhr:
You almost never find anyone, whether it’s in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, ‘I’m really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.’
Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called ‘the theologian of the establishment’. And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it’s what you do if you’re an intellectual). But, what it came down to is that, ‘Even if you try to do good, evil’s going to come out of it; that’s the paradox of grace’. And that’s wonderful for war criminals. ‘We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.’ And it’s influential. So, I don’t think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they’re doing, they’ll say: ‘We’re trying to preserve the peace of the world.’ People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice’, and so on.
I’d like to add that, whatever one thinks of Burke and Niebuhr and the rest, the question isn’t what their philosophy is really like, were they great thinkers, etc. The question is what (possibly dumbed-down) aspect of their philosophy is justifying whatever kookie thing David Brooks thinks the country should do.
It’s the same with religion — I read the New Testament once and I still don’t see evidence the Baby Jesus hates teh ghey so much.
Update. To be clear, I’m not seconding Chomsky’s claims about what Niebuhr actually says, to the extent that he’s making such claims (I can’t tell for sure if he is). I’m just saying that, based on what I have read about how conservative thinkers use Niebuhr, Chomsky is describing their reasoning very well.
Ruemara
The problem you’re having is that you’re not looking for a philosopher who thinks what you do. When you approach enlightenment like that, you will see the necessity of your own personal evil in baby jebus.
Edit- Not that I’m saying you really hate teh ghey. Rhetorical.
Ruemara
Whoa! What’s up with that? FYWP!
licensed to kill time
I think the question is, what effect does the philosophy have on the real world? It matters not a whit how elegant the underpinnings of the philosophy if the outcomes are shit.
That kinda rhymes.
Xanthippas
Well, you can add me to the list of people who are tired of hearing Obama and Niebuhr mentioned in the same sentence. And if there ain’t such a list, there ought to be.
Legalize
It’s just another tome in the how-to-be-a-self-serving-sociopath-without-alienating-the-rubes series. They’re simply rotten people. The end.
MikeJ
This is excellent. We no longer need to read and understand what any individual thinker really said, merely know that someone we dislike cites them, even improperly. Then we can claim that they say anything we don’t like.
gnomedad
The real message of Niehbur, IMO, is that anything you do will have a mixture of good and evil as a result, and there is no substitute for ceaselessly re-examining what you are doing and what your motives are. I don’t need Chomsky to recognize that someone who can’t be bothered with self-scrutiny can use Niehbur to justify himself. Chomsky can be pure because he’s not running the show — no one can meet his standards.
One of the most toxic symptoms of the teabaggers is their constant whining about Obama’s “apology tours”. We can do no wrong!
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Hm. Ends justify means.
And, Collateral Damage.
Got it.
El Cid
It also becomes odd to hear pundits and politicians citing famed philosophers and intellectuals when the arguments they are attempting to forward are either weak or quite trivial.
I realize that we aren’t Vulcans, and that invocations of famed or beloved figures can sway more people than simple arguments.
I.e., “A decent society makes sure that its trials are fair and just,” versus, “As George Washington / Whoever said, a decent society makes sure that its trials are fair and just.”
But then you have things like “The Powell Doctrine” which basically say that before going to war, try to do everything else which might work, and if you do have to go to war, make sure and do what you need to do to win and not be stuck there forever.” WOW. So f***ing brilliant. GOD AR THNKRZ R DEEP.
(And then, of course, you ignore your own advice if the President really wants you too, and so you end up waving a bottle of salt or whatever at the UN so that we can invade & occupy Iraq, so there’s that.)
gnomedad
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
This is true. The questions is: do you acknowledge this or deny it? Bush/Cheney transmuted this into “Evil becomes good when we do it because we’re the good guys.”
geg6
I just have to say, Doug, that you have deeply disappointed me with this whole thing about Niebuhr. You first admit you know nothing at all about him. And then you accept as definitive a description of him by Chomsky and Notorious P.A.T., which is like accepting a description of the writings of St. Augustine by Christopher Hitchens and one of his fanboys. Intellectually shallow and dishonest and not what I would expect from you.
I’m done with this subject because I can see I’m arguing with people who either don’t have a clue about Niebuhr or who are intent on distorting his philosophy/theology.
This is probably the most disappointing thread I’ve ever seen on this blog.
Uloborus
@MikeJ:
I’m kinda with Mike here (although I always worry I misunderstand someone’s sarcasm). Blaming Niebelung because people use him to justify a black and white viewpoint when his entire point seems to be that the world is full of shades of gray is… pretty much exactly like blaming the Beatles because Charles Manson though ‘Helter Skelter’ told him to kill people.
Honestly, that whole quote you gave us fills me with fury. Yeah, you go and point to Ghandi and how he used nonviolence to change a nation, and I’ll point to a thousand determinedly nonviolent Jewish villages who got wiped out in pogroms. Giving peace a chance is not mutually exclusive with defending yourself. Whether he’s right or wrong, Obama’s attitude that fighting in Afghanistan is something we have no choice but to do is not the same as Bush/Cheney’s ‘You looking at me, punk?’ love of warfare.
Don’t we laugh at the conservative movement because they don’t believe in shades of gray?
(Note: No, Ghandi didn’t appear in that quote, I’m trying to address the attitude that anyone who advances warfare in any way is not just wrong, but evil.)
cervantes
And you can read the entire Bible from cover to cover and you won’t find any evidence that God doesn’t like abortion, either. With or without Jesus getting involved.
AhabTRuler
@Uloborus: Cain would usually appear here to point out that the man’s name is Gandhi.
Sly
Chomsky presents an interesting take on Niebuhr, sure, but what gets lost in the conversation is the role distance plays in a contributing factor to that kind of ethical calculus. A person who wishes to be perceived as benevolent (either by themselves or others) will have a lot easier time with malevolent results if those results are outside their own direct experience.
It’s a hell of a lot easier to justify incinerating an Afghan wedding party in pursuit of killing a single terrorist leader than it is to, say, incinerating the wedding party down the street. It’s a lot easier to justify redlining the Bronx so your bank will make more money, that it can spend elsewhere, than doing the same thing to New Canaan, where you’ll likely have friends and relations who will tell you what a piece of shit you are at the next cocktail mixer.
@gnomedad
This.
The Bearded Blogger
Coupla things:
1) Any text above a certain level of complexity/ambiguity can be read as a justification for whatever I want to do (see the software called “reason” in Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
2) This is not an imputation of said philosophy but of whoever chooses to read it in such a way (it is, however, an imputation of Leo Strauss, who tortured Plato until he, Plato, became a neocon)
3) Simple rules and philosophies lend themselves less to bending. The five precepts of Budhism are harder to follow than the ten commandments, etc. But sometimes complex thought is necessary to tackle complex problems: I liked candidate Obama’s call for and inclination towards complexity, I still feel I have to at least respect it in president Obama.
Cerberus
Uh, dudes who are getting upset at Doug and Noam, the point they are making has nothing to do with the philosophies of Niebuhr.
The point is in fact: That the philosophies are being misused by those who have no interest in what the philosophies really are, but are merely looking for someone “smart” to cite in order to justify or add intellectual gloss to their own inane bullshit.
The point is that there is no intellectual philosophy debate about Niebuhr’s theories and most common interpretations thereof, instead there is a bunch of nitwits using Niebuhr to sell their snake oil (which insults the man and is also far less interesting).
It is very similar (as Doug pointed out) to how they use the Bible to give rise to their vile beliefs and petty hatreds without ever having read the thing and without being open to having their mind changed by one who has (see Conservative Bible Project or “pick and choose”).
So, relax, Niebuhr isn’t the one being excoriated here.
scudbucket
The question is what (possibly dumbed-down) aspect of their philosophy is justifying whatever kookie thing David Brooks thinks the country should do.
Reminds me of GWB’s claim to being a ‘christian’ because he went to some bible study group in DC where they reverentially analyzed the claim in the New Testament invoking wealthy people to make more money (can’t find the reference).
Bill H
It’s not in the New Testament. The Old Testament is filled with it, or rather, what can be interpreted to be it. These are people who refer to themselves as “Old Testament Christians,” which is absurd because the Old Testament has pretty much nothing to do with Christ other than to sort of vaguely predict his coming. In fact, Christ came to sort of straighten out some of the hard-nosed crap that religion was doing based on the prophesies in the Old Testament that God considered to punitive and unloving, so he sent his Son to tone things down a bit.
DougJ
I just have to say, Doug, that you have deeply disappointed me with this whole thing about Niebuhr. You first admit you know nothing at all about him. And then you accept as definitive a description of him by Chomsky and Notorious P.A.T., which is like accepting a description of the writings of St. Augustine by Christopher Hitchens and one of his fanboys. Intellectually shallow and dishonest and not what I would expect from you.
I expected criticism like this and I see where you’re coming from. But I have had numerous conversations with people who said “David Brooks isn’t a crazy right-winger, he quotes philosophers!” I find this very troubling.
I think it’s important to understand how dumb and shallow the arguments Brooks et al. make on the basis of Burke, Niehbuhr, etc. are. I really do. And I don’t think that doing so requires an understanding of these philosophers.
You can disagree, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that it is dishonest and shallow to do this.
aimai
My basic principle in life is that if David Brooks is for it *he’s probably misunderstood it in its entirety.* Often, a sensible, moral, person will reject anything David Brooks likes out of hand. Sometimes Brooks is so incredibly stupid and toolish that the philosopher or thinker he is touting turns out to be worth reading in his own right. But its always a mistake to read Brooks and think that he can accurately convey any of the moral or intellectual nuances of what he’s talking about.
Go Chomsky–he’s put his finger not so much on what Niebuhr thought he was doing, or wanted to do, but on the way that the David Brookses of the world understand all philosophy which is “does it excuse my immoral impulses and let me feel good about my cannibalism, or not?”
aimai
Liberty60
I happened to be browsing a bookstore and they had a display of books on ethics; one was from a prominent Evangelical preacher (damned if I can remember him- but he is on TV all the time, and relatively famous).
His book was a justification of rightwing philosophy, based on Crhistian teachings.
Except as I flipped through it, he seemed to be proving Chomsky’s point.
Capitalism? Amen.
Poverty? Well, yes, we should try to do charity. But if people are poor, under no circumstances should government get involved.
And so on and so forth. When you added it all up, it was a resounding embrace of the status quo.
Which is tragic, since Christ’s message was specifically that we should comfort the afflilcted and afflict the comfortable.
TD
“This is excellent. We no longer need to read and understand what any individual thinker really said, merely know that someone we dislike cites them, even improperly. Then we can claim that they say anything we don’t like.”
Yeah. This.
Noam Chomsky is a hack. Trying to attribute Niebuhrian thought with the broad justification of war crimes is beyond the pale.
I understand that it’s annoying when anything (images, philosophies, memes) become overly exploited by individuals who have no real understanding of their proper usage or origins; however, heaping scorn on those individuals who actually took the time and energy to construct nuanced and thoughtful philosophies because of the laziness, vainglory, and self-promotion of those they cannot be expected to control, is chidishness disguised as maturity.
The quickest way to embrace cynicism about the validity of thought itself as a worthwhile enterprise is to entertain such a worldview. If you name any idea, or any family of ideas, I can associate it with more charlatans than heros, I can guarantee that.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@gnomedad:
“It is true” that evil can come out of doing good, then … if you take the next step and excuse the evil because it was part of doing good, then I am calling it Ends Justify Means, and I don’t accept it as a rationale for whatever effort is being made in the name of doing good, unless there is no other choice, and even then, I may not accept it. “Doing good” is not an all purpose get out of jail free card for anything anyone wants to do. It’s the “World Better Off Without Saddam” smokescreen for the Iraq war, for example. It’s just bullshit, and the idea is in and of itself inherently evil, in my view.
Another example: Collateral Damage. An evil euphemism for the “they got in our way” approach to managing casualties in a war situation. And the people who use this kind of language will resort to any language and any twists of logic to insist that as long as the thing they want to do can be painted as good enough, or painted as necessary enough, then whatever horrible thing they did must be accepted as part of the bargain.
My opinion is that if you needed just one reason to insist that you have civilian control of the military, that would be enough of a reason right there.
War on terror? Just a set of excuses for horrendous policy. War on drugs? Just a set of excuses for horrendous policy. Cold War? Ditto. Domino Theory? Ditto. 911 Changed Everything? Ditto. Law and Order? Ditto. With Us Or Against Us? Ditto. Axis of Evil? Ditto.
Etc.
Llellorin
@MikeJ:
The problem is that the philosopher’s views aren’t really the issue that DougJ was wondering about. He was asking a related but fundamentally different question: “What is meant in conservative circles when Niebuhr’s name is bandied about?”
The questions are fundamentally distinct. As an easy example: conservatives invoke Reagan to argue against any and all tax increases, despite Reagan raising taxes repeatedly when it became necessary.
DougJ
it merely sets up a Straw Niebuhr.
Yes, that is the point — Brooks etc. use straw Burkes, Niebuhrs, Humes etc. to argue in favor of wars, privatizing Social Security and so on. And I think these straw philosophers can be summed up in 20 words or less, even if the real ones cannot.
The role of these straw philosophers is to give Brooks etc. an easy way of saying “look, I have no reason for this position that I could explain to you, so I’m just going to mention some philosophers and then you should trust me that if you read their collected works, you would see why staying in Afghanistan for the next century is a swell idea. If you don’t, then it just proves that you don’t understand them.”
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@DougJ:
Don’t take it too hard, but I agree with you.
Napoleon
@Cerberus:
It also insults snake oil.
Sentient Puddle
@Bill H:
Aren’t those called “Jews”?
iLarynx
scudbucket
@TD:
“This is excellent. We no longer need to read and understand what any individual thinker really said, merely know that someone we dislike cites them, even improperly. Then we can claim that they say anything we don’t like.”
Yeah. This.
Noam Chomsky is a hack.
I’m suffering from hysterical laughter at the unitended irony of stringing these two thoughts together.
Shell Games
When you know your ideas are crappy, throw in a quote from a famous dead guy and hey presto – you CAN polish a turd.
some people build their fortunes on it:
http://wonkette.com/412702/is-stealing-from-the-poor-good-for-the-poor-who-are-stupid
Jay in Oregon
@cervantes:
And plenty of evidence that God supports killing kids; that whole “every firstborn son of Egypt” springs immediately to mind.
I suspect the children living in Sodom and Gomorrah didn’t fare so well, either.
geg6
@Cerberus:
I beg to differ.
I will again say that this description is a deliberate distortion of Niebuhr’s thinking. It’s dishonest and shallow and is meant to lead to him being excoriated by anyone calling themselves “liberal” or “progressive.” Which, given the fact that Chomsky is well known for distorting and lying about the positions other people, even other liberals and progressives, have taken, doesn’t surprise me. But to accept Chomsky as definitive in regard to Niebuhr is as ridiculous as reducing Chomsky’s outlook to his defense of Holocaust deniers.
aimai
Dougj’s point at 26 seems to me to be a very important one. I think we might want to ask ourselves whether there is an interesting difference between the times that certain conservative hacks appeal to “great men” and “philosophers” to explain away their violent, militarist, and anti tax fantasies and when they appeal to “the man in the street” and “taxi drivers” and “returning soldier emails.”
One thing that I’ve noticed is that when modern conservatives appeal to 20th century philosophers they strip out the context, which is the horror of the first adn second world war, and tend to focus on the windy, theoretical side of the moral philosophy. They resort to taxi drivers and Palin and the uneducated man in the street when they want to talk about the glories of war and bombing people–gut level pleasures. And they turn towards bloodless philosophers whose actual lives and experiences are not remembered by the hoi polloi when they want to justify loftier things and distance themselves and their readers from responsibility for choices that lead to bombing and killing.
aimai
Jay in Oregon
@Sentient Puddle:
I’m reminded of Stephen Colbert doing his This Week With God sketch on The Daily Show referring to “Jews for Jesus; or as I like to call them, ‘Christians'”.
liberal
@TD:
Sounds like you’re making an argument ad hominem. Furthermore, if you look at the historical record, Chomsky’s right re Niebuhr. (Meaning, the political context in which N. made his comments.)
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Sentient Puddle:
LOL.
The Bearded Blogger
@iLarynx: Can I get a A-men!
Bob
Jesus wouldn’t sign up as a member of most “Christian” churches and groups.
Karl Marx learned what was being done in his name and declared that he, himself, wasn’t a “Marxist”.
Neo-cons and “liberal hawks” said that the 2003 Iraq war was a Kennanite thing to do – – but Kennan himself said it wasn’t. (Previously, Kennan had opposed the “domino theory” nonsense and he had opposed the Vietnam war, but supporters of that war, too, had said that it was a Kennanite thing to do.)
Similarly, Niebuhr is misrepresented both by the right-wingers who claim to be Niebuhrists and by the left-wingers who believe those right-wingers.
If you’re a left-winger, and if you’re a total pacifist opposed to ALL WAR NO MATTER WHAT then you’re not a Niebuhrist.
But if you’re not a total pacifist, then you’re a Niebuhrist yourself, and the rest is just details.
geg6
@liberal:
Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. And if that’s true, then Chomsky’s a Holocaust denier.
Because both statements contain the same amount of truth.
scudbucket
@DougJ:
I agree. I was responding to geg6’s criticism that you have in fact done the same thing, which I think was a misplaced criticism. Feel free to post the first comment and delete this one.
Shell
Even Scrooge thought he was just a good business man.
Svensker
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
You are putting words in peoples’ mouths.
Saying “evil can come out of doing good” is not the same thing as “the ends justify the means.” The first statement can be twisted to mean that, but it does not mean that. It is much more a caution against getting carried away by your own wonderfulness in “doing good” without taking into account the unforeseen consequences.
Bill H — the NT does have some stuff against homosexuality in it, although Jesus never mentioned it. The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, condemns gay sex quite vigorously, although there is some modern scholarship that thinks that he is focusing particularly on the abusive older man/young boy relationships in Greece and Rome at the time.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@aimai:
Sure, but just remember, America was founded as a Christian Nation.
Amirite?
Sentient Puddle
@Jay in Oregon: I may need help understanding this one, but from the little bit I’m reading, Jews For Jesus are Christians. As for where they get off calling themselves Jews…
Actually, fuck it. It’s this sort of brain-contorting logic that drives me away from religion in the first place.
The Bearded Blogger
@geg6: I think DougJ intended something more along the lines of his post at 26, but his writing today isn’t really top-form. I totally agree that thinkers should not be blamed for misinterpretations of their thoughts… Anyway, love thy Niebuhr…
aimai
I’ve got to come back to say that I just don’t get the Chomsky hating–I mean, jeezus, the guy is a very well respected and important academic linguist whose contributions are foundational in his field. He also cares a lot about political issues and wars and civil rights from a leftist perspective. He’s not a horrible person. He’s not a liar. Or a hack. He’s not Nader. He’s a very serious, thoughtful, brilliant person. The quote abstracted above talks about Niebuhr’s position in the academy/political realm as it is used by the establishment. It is part of a discussion of the ways the notion of the “best and brightest” and the “technocrat” have been used in both communist and capitalist/democratic societies as ways of smothering democratic/mass action. He’s not saying that Niebuhr was a bad person. He’s not saying that this is all that you could take away from Niebuhr’s work. He’s saying that certain kinds of moral and scientific thinking get exalted in modern society because they can be used to legitimize social, economic, and political norms. If they can’t be used that way they don’t get heard, picked up, published, and echoed in the academy or in society. This is the point he’s making about “people with NYTimes columns.”
Philosophers who truly challenge us, religious leaders who refuse to legitimize the government’s actions, are always killed. The ones who survive, or who are quoted frequently by those in power, have been co-opted. That’s as true for Socrates as it is for Jesus. And its true for the bits of buddhism that got sucked up by the New Agers. This part of what Chomsky is saying is totally independent of what Niebuhr meant to be saying, or even how well he is loved and used by some of his followers.
aimai
Uloborus
Hmmm. Alright, you guys are saying I am misunderstanding both Chomsky and Doug, and that neither of them blames Lichtenstein for the way others misuse him. Alright. I don’t know Chomsky in other contexts, and it really reads to me like they are. But that doesn’t mean that they ARE, just that it reads to me that way. I apologize to both if I was wrong.
Really, this is age-old. People make up their minds, then find some flimsy piece of evidence to justify it. Misquoting someone out of context and misrepresenting what they meant goes back to the Greeks. The idea was that it’s arrogant to claim you’re smart enough to figure anything out. You have to claim you were just convinced by someone everyone knows is smarter than the rest of us.
Conservatives love this stuff, too, because they were trained in traditional Christian thinking, where you cherry-pick the line about stoning men who lie with men and ignore Jesus’s lengthy speech going ‘Yeah, the bible says to stone adulterers, too. You know what? Fuck that shit.’ They’re neck DEEP in ignoring context.
Shygetz
It is terribly shallow. Why? Because it is possible (not likely, but possible) that Brooks is accurately representing Niehbuhr. You, however, have quite openly stated that you have no knowledge as to whether or not he is accurately representing Niehbuhr, but you just want a pithy offhand response. How can you ever hope to understand how dumb and shallow Brooks’ argument “based” on Niehbuhr is without understanding what Niehbuhr says? I won’t say it’s dishonest, but it is certainly shallow.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
I’m quite aware of that. But we are working with people who easily jump from “doing good” to excusing evil, in case the period between 2001 and 2009 manage to slip by your attention?
It’s the excusing of the evil, not the fact that an evil thing came out of a good thing, that is the problem. It is the erasing of the line that is the problem. Once we start to dull down our abhorrence of terrible things by focussing on how much good we are doing, then we are morally finished, as far as I am concerned. Because doing that is the personality of the latter Cheney Administration and everything it did.
Jay in Oregon
@Sentient Puddle:
Per Wikipedia, Messianic Judaism is considered a branch of Christianity.
I think it has to do with the fact that they are ethnic Jews that have converted to Christianity, and retain certain Jewish customs.
The Bearded Blogger
A minor but important point here: Chomsky isn’t a deep political thinker. He is the most important linguist of the 20th century but, as he himself has said, his political writings are not the work of scholarship but merely a public person trying to be a responsible citizen and bringing certain things to light. It’s great that Chomsky sheds light on things like operation Condor and he’s brave and responsible to do it, but he is no political philosopher.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
I love that so much, I am definitely stealing it and taking credit for it when you are not looking.
Sure, that’s evil, but it’s for a good purpose.
Florida Cynic
I had to read the Chomsky quote twice, because I have an intense dislike of the man’s work outside linguistics. He has a manner of constructing arguments in a way that is intended to both provoke and allow him the wiggle room to claim he didn’t say what you thought he said at the same time. It is, however, a useful tool for checking one’s own biases.
I understand what DougJ is saying (thanks to my second pass), but I think he would have been better off not using Chomsky as tool to point out what an idiot Brooks is. The thing reveals itself.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
I think the word for that is “overkill.”
Paula
Chomsky should stick to what he knows, ie cognitive linguistics, not generalizations of dead philosophers of whom he’s not a peer-reviewed expert and who can’t defend themselves.
The problem is that this post cited him as some kind of expert in connection to a specific piece of scholarship. DougJ may not have meant to use Chomsky as a Niebuhr expert per se, but the effect is the same when neither he nor Chomsky attempt to disassociate the man’s actual writing from some trite political debate. As a public intellectual for some years, Chomsky should know how people are going to use his statements.
Sentient Puddle
@Jay in Oregon: Argh, so now “Jew” can refer to customs as well as religion? We’re fast approaching the whole “conservative as a noun and an adjective” threshold here. Didn’t these morons who long ago came up with these terms understand the idea of precision in conveying ideas? Separate words for separate ideas!
I bet Chomsky the linguist would be as frustrated as I am.
Mnemosyne
Isn’t that kind of like blaming Charles Darwin for the Holocaust? Anyone can justify doing anything they want if they cherry-pick. I think it’s important to point it out if they’re not accurately reflecting what Niebuhr or Burke actually said.
The Bearded Blogger
@Paula: see my post at 51, great minds and all…
Jeff
There seems to be so much flying around about Niebuhr and what others have been doing with his thought, that no one stops to ask– who was Niebuhr addressing? Much of his thought is a criticism of “quietism”– particularly in American Protestant congregations, that said that the Christian must avoid engagement in the outside world, an that since any attempt to change the world for the better was doomed to failure since human nature is fallen and sinful. Niebuhr’s thought, rooted in Luther and Augustine, was that yes there is no black and white in our
involvement in the world, and every action we take is morally ambiguous,
and tainted by sin,but we still can move ahead.
Svensker
@Sentient Puddle:
Because the early Christians were Jews who believed that Jesus had fulfilled the prophecy of the Messiah. Much of the NT after the Gospels is concerned with the tussle between the Jews who were followers of Jesus, and the gentiles (non-Jews), and how to handle the differences. There were many arguments about whether gentiles needed to become Jews first before they could become Christians — those who thought so were eventually marginalized. The Apostle Paul was the winner of that argument. I THINK the “Jews for Jesus” people go back to the pre-Pauline way of looking at Christ.
Shygetz
@Sentient Puddle: “Jewish” can refer to a culture as well as a religion (some Jews refer to themselves as a race, but I think that is incorrect). I refer you to the hordes of “secular Jews” who have no religious preference, but identify culturally as Jewish.
El Cid
This.
I think it’s indeed very important to not let Niebuhr be painted into any wrong caricature.
But does anyone think that your average pundit or politician who cites Adam Smith to justify whatever cares what Adam Smith’s thought and oeuvre were?
In both the cases of Smith and Niebuhr, one could probably argue that their average citation by leading politicians and pundits are typically not only mangling the views of Smith and Niebuhr, but turning them on their heads.
See if a nimrod like Brooks would be happy with Niebuhr when he says
Shygetz
No, the Jews for Jesus are not pre-Pauline Jews, they are Messianic Jews–they do not think that one must convert to Judaism to be a Christian, but they also think that a Jew does not become a Gentile upon becoming a Christian. Therefore, they maintain many of their Jewish traditions and cultural identity, but they are Christian by creed and faith.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
I have not studied this man’s work enough to know how he would approach the assertion “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
The ideas that “equality is a higher social goal than peace” and “the oppressed … have a higher moral right to challenge their oppressors than these have to maintain their rule by force” sound like sticks of dynamite with fuses hanging out there, so tempting for the insane people, like Dick Cheney. Once Cheney decides that he is the rightful defender of somebody’s equality, then peace is just another thing to be kicked out of his way, isn’t it? Just proving that evil people will hire philosophy to provide cover.
Svensker
@Shygetz:
Thanks.
Mnemosyne
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Funny, you see “ends justify means” in that quote and I see “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
peach flavored shampoo
OT:
MSNBC is reporting that 22 million “lost” Bush emails have been found.
Hooooooooooooooooly shit, this could be interesting, if true.
MattR
@Sentient Puddle: I’m almost afraid to send you to this article from CNN on the “new jews” :)
ellaesther
Look, I am a big ol’ Nobody No-one who has done the odd bit of writing in the print media, and I have had my writing distorted and used against the ideas I support. Once you’ve written it down and sent it out, to a certain extent, people will hear whatever the hell they want to — and if you’re dead, like Niebuhr, there’s really very little you can do about it.
Niebuhr was a very wise man whose thought also informed that of Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel, among a good many others. You’ll note the conservatives also lay claim to Dr. King at least once a year (and we’re coming up on that annual event rather soon-ish!) — it’s important to let people speak for themselves, and not allow those who distort their writings and philosophy determine how they will be seen in perpetuity.
Chuck Butcher
Once the words theologian and philosophy get mixed together I start out taking a dim view. Realistically, theology is the the creation of a structure around something unknowable without direct speech with a god (we tend to call psychiatrists today). That creates a real impulse to appeal to a self-defined absolute authority as a method of construction.
geg6
@aimai:
Chomsky is a great linguist. Simply great and has no peer, IMHO. But to say that I, at least, am hating on him is incorrect. I am simply saying that he has no idea nor does he want to have any idea about Niebuhr’s ideas. His expertise is not in philosophy or in theology, so his weighing in on Niebuhr is about as definitive as my interpretation of quantum mechanics. Unless Chomsky is weighing in on the linguistics in Niebuhr’s writings, I really don’t give a damn what he has to say about it nor should anyone else.
ellaesther
@Paula: I find Chomsky so frustrating. He demands a level of careful precision from those he criticizes that he often doesn’t employ himself — there is a very strong scent of “Look, I’m right, so STFU” to so much of what he says and writes.
Jager
I was running a divison of a company when this financial crisis hit. The owner called me and ordered me to to do an across the board pay cut. I was taken aback since we weren’t struggling financially, we weren’t overpaying by any means. I was projecting increases for the year (I had cut them back from the original numbers) and we were making a nice return. As we argued back and forth about it, I realized he was doing it because he could and the impending recession gave him cover to go ahead have me do the paycuts. I put together a plan, sent it to him, the bastard called me back and said it was fine but why had I cut my own pay? I told him that I couldn’t cut my employees pay and not my own, if they took a hit, I should too. I believe I was on the right side of this, but the pay cut of 22% hurt. I left the company about 4 months later to do a start up with a friend. I had breakfast a couple of weeks ago with my old boss and he praised the hell out of me for standing with my employees, he said it was the right thing for me to do. I countered with but it was wrong for you to cut everyone’s pay based on your assumption that things would go badly. You really hurt some people, especially the those in the lower pay brackets. His response, it’s my company! He has an undergrad degree in Philosophy from Fordham, but I thnk Harvard Business erased whatever he learned about ethics!
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Mnemosyne:
They’re pretty much the same thing IMV.
My position is that EJM politics and EJM government are inherently evil, and not compatible with a liberal and moral democracy.
“Liberal” here used in the general sense, where “liberal democracy” is one that meets certain tests of appropriate connections between the people and the government, not in the American “liberal vs conservative” sense.
oliver's neck
@Shygetz:
Agreed.
I come here mostly for John, though Tim and Anne are often interesting.
Doug’s writing has tended, especially of late, to fall into the self-congratulatory mode of “anyone who thinks differently than I do must be stupid, whether they use big words or small words to express their stupidity.” It is tiresome rhetoric that doesn’t serve to spark any real thought regarding the very serious problems our polity faces, but merely provides the cheap playground thrills of mocking “the other.” It’s childish and nihilistic.
El Cid
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: Go read the original essay — it’s on Google Books via the link. It’s pretty readable, for the pages included at least, or check it out at a local library.
But remember that one of the problems in the sort of reaction you had to the quote was the underlying reality that even when we don’t mention that inequality is often maintained by actual, violent force — and this was absolutely the case of, say, the segregated South — that force and threat of violent force is still really there.
Niebuhr is simply pointing out that if such violent force is in fact truly there, and is truly being used to maintain a system of inequality, then those on the upside of the inequality have less of a moral claim on the use of violence than those being oppressed.
And there are those who would gladly ignore the part about how violence may not be the best way for the oppressed or those on the downside of inequality to obtain justice, but it doesn’t mean he didn’t say it.
That’s in part why pundits and politicians specialize in a form of dishonesty: depending on their mood or their PR goal, they could gladly read that passage and see it as a blanket endorsement that the oppressed of India under Britain’s colonial rule or 1930s America’s African Americans should raise up in violent struggle against their oppressors, but that’s not what he said.
J. Michael Neal
Doug, the problem stems from a succession of comments you made which seem to have presented a very different argument from the one you seem to have wanted to make. Back in the original post:
You didn’t ask for a summary of how idiot conservatives use Niebuhr. You ask for a summary of him.
From this post:
Combine these, and you are saying that what Niebuhr thought isn’t important. That’s what people are jumping on you for. Had you said that, quite aside from what he really thought, can you give me a succinct explanation of what these idiots mean, you’d have gotten different answers.
As for the Chomsky quote, that very clearly is an attack on Niebuhr directly, and was a terrible choice for looking at the question you apparently wanted to address.
oliver's neck
Oh, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s war justifications are wrongheaded, ethically and theologically. His brother’s work is much better on both fronts.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Yes, I get that, but my point is, I don’t think that the Cheneys of the world get it. I am using Cheney as a placeholder for {your favorite evil shithead with excuses here} in this conversation.
Once you give a Cheney the book, he is going to take things out of context, and take events out of their own contexts, and invent a “moral” imperative for some really evil shit …. and sound like he knows what he is talking about.
Mnemosyne
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Saying, “I can do anything I want as long as I get the results I want” and “Be careful what you do because you may hurt other people without meaning to” are the same thing?
So, in other words, your philosophy is, “I can pretend people said the opposite of what they actually said as long as it serves my greater point.” Which makes your way of thinking different than “ends justify means” … how, again?
toujoursdan
There are numerous Christian sects who observe parts of the Mosaic Law. The Seventh Day Adventists still observe some of the food laws and holidays and (obviously) the 7th Day Sabbath. Many of these Christians call themselves “Old Testament Christians”. They believe Christ is God incarnate but still observe the laws in the OT, which is something most mainstream Christians do not observe.
Bill H
@Svensker:
Point taken, but most (99.85%) of the points that Christianists cite against gays come from the Old Testament. I have heard many of these people refer to themselves as “Old Testament Christians” and, when I attempt to point out the illogic of that phrase, they become angry to the point that I fear they will stroke out.
TD
“He’s saying that certain kinds of moral and scientific thinking get exalted in modern society because they can be used to legitimize social, economic, and political norms. If they can’t be used that way they don’t get heard, picked up, published, and echoed in the academy or in society. This is the point he’s making about “people with NYTimes columns.”
Niebuhr makes a similar argument. The point being that the interests of the individual holding an opinion, and the nature of the opinion itself, have a complex, but definite, relationship with one another. And that that is INEVITABLE.
So when Niebuhr says “the insinuations of the interest of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisioned in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable byproduct of all virtuous endeavors. It is in this sense a tribute to the moral nature of man as well as a final proof of his moral limitations…(for) even a conscious attempt to eliminate dishonest and ambiguous motives is no guarantor against hypocrisy; for their is no miracle by which men can achieve a rationality high enough to give them as vivid an understanding of general interest as of their own” he shouldn’t be ruffling anyone’s feathers; nor is he endorsing hypocrisy as such (he goes on to acknowledge that “the alloy of egoism which corrupts all benevolence can…SOMETIMES be purged by an internal rigorous analysis”).
He is making a (what should be) platitudinous argument denying man’s omnipotence; and by extension he is urging caution when patting ones own back (though continuing to support the necessity of the pursuit of justice, which can only be furthered through imperfect political action).
So the fact that Niebuhr’s thought has been abused is of no surprise. Indeed, the idea that the adoption of certain ideas usually corresponds to the interest of those who wield them is an observation of Niebuhr himself. (and the point that the powerful are in a place to make their opinions known is simply a reflection of power relationships as they are)
This is not necessarily cynical (as I think Brooks interprets Niebuhr in good faith, even if I sometimes disagree with him), but a simple function of our inability to grasp the totality of existence. The reason why both liberals and conservatives like Niebuhr is that his thought is large, even if its mass doesn’t provide too many sign posts on how to construct specific policies. But SPECIFIC policy guidance should never be the goal of philosophy, which always ceases to describe reality when too consistently applied.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Mnemosyne:
Hm, I think you are stuck in a semantic tangle of your own making. I don’t agree with your rewording of the phrases, either.
EJM to me is just evil with frosting. RTHPAWGI is a pretty closely related idea, to me. I don’t see the big distinction you are making.
I am using EJM in a purely perjorative sense. Ergo, EJM leads to Road to Hell.
Does that help? If not, I give up. Parse it as you see fit.
Mnemosyne
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Great, so we stop teaching evolution in science class because evil idiots took the basics and used them to justify their own actions. After all, California was still involuntarily sterilizing people into the early 1970s based on eugenic distortions of evolution, so clearly evolution is much too dangerous an idea to be allowed out into the world where evil idiots can invent a moral imperative using it.
J. Michael Neal
You give HBS far too much credit, here. Your ex-boss is fortunate that it didn’t destroy his capacity to think altogether. I dislike business schools in general (and attending one has done zero to improve my opinion of them), but Harvard combines all of the worst aspects of business schools into one hateful bundle.
El Cid
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: Yeah, but I don’t think you can exactly prevent people from making subtle and complex points.
Not that politicians and pundits can’t make hay from non-subtle points, either, simply re-imagining writers’ writings to mean whatever they want them to mean, or inventing facts whole cloth or hung on the flimsiest of hooks.
I’ve been reflecting in recent days on the revelation that Tony Blair’s ‘Saddam has WMDs which can attack Britain in 45 minutes so’s we got to help Bush Jr. blow ‘im up’ came from, reportedly, an Iraqi cab driver (I hope not one of Friedman’s) who said he overheard some Iraqi officials saying that, or something like it.
And the question I have is, why even claim that you had a source? Why not make it up?
And though the technical answer is obvious — well, at least then you can attribute it to a ‘source’ instead of creating a lie yourself — it’s not really any different than completely making shit up. It has no relation to reality whatsoever, it’s not even close to anything that any sane person or person who gave a shit would consider ‘evidence’. It’s the kind of argument that has the strength of predictions made from tea leaves at the bottom of a cup or someone who believes they saw a shadow out of the corner of their eye telling them to shoot someone.
It’s fascinating to me, this petty bureaucratization of lying.
Mnemosyne
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
EJM is an excuse for doing whatever you want. RTHPAWGI is a warning not to fall into EJM thinking but to stop and think your entire plan through since your good intentions are no excuse for hurting others. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of EJM thinking. And you don’t see any distinction between the two?
geg6
@Mnemosyne:
Word.
J. Michael Neal
@TD:
Actually, it’s extremely cynical, but most people have no idea what “cynicism” really means, and use it as a synonym for “suspicious.” Being wary of one’s own motives is at the heart of cynicism, though the Cynics weren’t as pessimistic about being able to weed out hypocrisy as Niebuhr was.
It’s also important to remember that Niebuhr’s argument doesn’t really apply to Angus, as he is not a Man of Meat. He’s a *God* of Meat, and so transcends human limitations.
vg
@geg6:
DougJ intellectually shallow and dishonest? geg, my man, where have you been?
This is the whole point of DougJ. Balloon Juice in its current form runs on the life blood poured into it by Markos when he added it to the blog roll and promoted it on dKos a couple years ago. If you just have John Cole and Tim F. being a couple of pretty reasonable guys appalled at the world, sooner or later you start looking like 60 Minutes in this rough and tumble blogosphere.
Enter DougJ: Here’s a guy who doesn’t care what anyone says so much as why, in a just world, no one listen to them say it. He takes the Glenn Greenwald metacritique of everything and strips it of all its substance so that all you have left is a jive answer to every column ever written. People love it! It’s like the dKos diary section. Arguments anyone can understand: “I may not know the ins and outs of bank regulation and I may not be learning anything about them here, but I do know the word ‘sociopath’! And that’s all that matters. Nothing about what’s actually happening matters, except that somewhere people are dying, somewhere else, people are cold, and damn it, I’m against it all — something these sociopaths in the media just can’t seem to grasp!”
Anyway, Balloon Juice was never high brow commentary, but this sort of shit is just too much. Please find a new pet dKos diarist, John.
El Cid
It’s true. Although content varies, I don’t tend to come to Balloon Juice when I’m seeking an in-depth discussion of the outlook of Reinhold Niebuhr and the context of his invocation by previous and contemporary American leaders and commentators. For that I turn to Sadly, No!.
rickstersherpa
It is interesting that Chomsky really slams Niebuhr here, when most of what Niebuhr was writings dealt with why America had to intervene in WWII (the one American war, at least after June 21, 1941 – when Hitler forced Stalin into the war – that I I think he and Howard Zinn approved of. Niebuhr also supported what was called “Cold War Liberalism,” somewhat more reluctantly during the period before Vietnam.
Niebuhr vigorously opposed Vietnam, see comment below, but came to regret not supporting Humphrey in 1968, especially with Nixon’s triumph. Of course Noam Chomsky and Zinn were active in the third parties that help siphon votes away Humphrey and to discredit the Democrats leading to Nixon’s eventual election, and with it 6 more years of years of war and death, and the eventual Republican/Movement Conservative Ascendacy for the last 40 years in America. Worked out really well morally in the end though as both Chomsky and Zinn can feel completely self-righteous and superior to the rest of their fellow Americans and they don’t have to do any of the dying and suffering. I also note that Chomsky never seem particularly concerned about Afghans being slaugthered and other “oppressed people” when the opressor was the Red Army.
“As you talk about Niebuhr’s concern for American involvement in Vietnam, look at his letter to Bishop Will Scarlett, in which he indicated that despite his long friendship with Hubert Humphrey and agreement on many issues, he could not support Humphrey’s 1968 presidential candidacy because of Humphrey’s support for the Vietnam War. (Niebuhr later changed his mind as Humphrey separated himself from Johnson’s policies on Vietnam during the election and supporte Humphrey in the end).
“After Humphrey lost the election, Niebuhr wrote him a letter expressing his condolence, for he did believe Humphrey would have made a better president than Richard Nixon when it came to advancing policies that reflected the principles of Christian realism.”
Niebuhr’s anti-communist liberalism was in sync with Humphrey’s until the Vietnam War, which Niebuhr opposed as “fantastic,” even though he understood the nasty outcome of a communist Southeast Asia. He thought U.S. involvement in Asian land wars unwise and unwinnable, though he had tacitly endorsed the Korean intervention. He speculated that Vietnam’s surrender to communism could be accepted if anti-communist Vietnamese relocated to Thailand and were protected with “massive” U.S. military power, as recounted in Richard Wightman Fox’s biography”
“Commenting on the speech, Niebuhr privately regretted that Humphrey had tried “claiming my anti-Nazi stance of the 1930’s with the present war.” And he lamented that his friend was “in a tragic position of outdoing the Machiavelli of the White House, meanwhile losing all his friends.” Despite the Vietnam disagreement, Niebuhr eventually would support him for president in 1968. When approaching death, Niebuhr once rose from his bed upon seeing President Richard Nixon on the television, exclaiming, “That bastard!” Niebuhr evidently never voted for a Republican, though reportedly he was willing to support Nelson Rockefeller, had he won the Republican nomination.”
MattR
@El Cid:
I’m here to get the definitive word on Niebuhr from Tunch.
HoneyBearKelly
Another America hater.
Redshirt
Anyways, I thought Ayn Rand served this purpose well enough: Imbuing a philosophical construct on one’s desire to be as selfish and as greedy as possible.
Paula
@ aimai
I’ve got to come back to say that I just don’t get the Chomsky hating—I mean, jeezus, the guy is a very well respected and important academic linguist whose contributions are foundational in his field. He also cares a lot about political issues and wars and civil rights from a leftist perspective. He’s not a horrible person. He’s not a liar. Or a hack. He’s not Nader. He’s a very serious, thoughtful, brilliant person.
OK, what I’m saying does not apply at all to his work in linguistics.
His stature as a public intellectual in politics, however, rankles me because:
1) He hasn’t, so far, contributed anything that I didn’t find in many other philosophers, historians, and social theorists who came before him
2) His public statements are often a gross oversimplification of those philosophers, historians and social theorists
3) which makes me angry because part of the practical value of studying abstract thought — eg the study of philosophy — is understanding the nuances of what seem like “inevitable” societal and ideological conditions and finding gray areas, contradiction, sites where a hegemony starts to break down.
4) Other writers have had a better handle on these things. However, that Chomsky continues (on the blogosphere at least) to be widely cited as THE anti-establishment intellectual is, IMO, a sign of limitations to the intellectual maturation of people who consider themselves some kind of vanguard new media “Left” movement.
5) His presence is valuable for the purposes of “spreading” ideas via his name recognition, but if people who consider themselves “movement builders” can’t get beyond what is essentially a “Globalization and Imperialism” intro course, then that knowledge will not be generated into action. It becomes an opinion status symbol in its own right (like the “conventional wisdom” of the Villager media), something that is consumed merely for the purposes of display in the market of political ideas. You want to look “Left”?: keep some Chomsky in you hip pocket and display at will.
geg6
@vg:
Well, although I am quite unhappy with the shallowness of Doug’s discussion of Niebuhr here, I don’t agree that he is as worthless as GOS diaries (which are almost always the very definition of worthless).
What I see in Doug’s posts on this matter is something I often come across among those who don’t much value anything smacking of the liberal arts or humanities, like philosophy or theology. I work at a university that is well-known for its engineering, science, and business programs and this mindset is rife here, with the general view that none of the ideas in those disciplines is inherently very serious because they aren’t provable by math or scientific method. Whereas my bias is often the opposite; that the hard sciences and mathematics aren’t as intellectually challenging because the answers are already out there and all one has to do is find the way to them.
The main difference between me and them is that I admit my ignorance of math and hard sciences and don’t venture many opinions on them because I know I am not equipped. I see the exact opposite from them, with an extra dollop of condescension and superiority thrown in for good measure.
Sentient Puddle
@MattR: Well to be fair, I suppose a group of people that refers to their preferred beverage as “The Chosen Beer” can’t be all that bad. Just as long as this HE’BREW isn’t some crappy Budweiser knock-off.
General Winfield Stuck
This is all very deep. But my question is, what is it about the American Politics that lends itself to deeper questions that could not be answered by watching The Simpson’s, or if you want to go all in, Bullwinkle reruns?
I await discussion.
Makewi
@Redshirt:
How dare you think of yourself! Be like us and demand that the hard work of others go to benefit those whom we decide it should!
colleeniem
All I can say definitively about this topic is:
If conservatives start touting and recommending Niebuhr at the expense of the “philosophy” of Rand, we all fucking win. And it will be at the expense of Ms. Ayn-the two together do not compute.
She doesn’t really compute by her lonesome, but I think you get my point.
gnomedad
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Agreed. Once you buy in to “no other choice”, the bar tends to get lowered next time around.
TD
“Actually, it’s extremely cynical, but most people have no idea what “cynicism” really means, and use it as a synonym for “suspicious.” Being wary of one’s own motives is at the heart of cynicism, though the Cynics weren’t as pessimistic about being able to weed out hypocrisy as Niebuhr was.”
Point taken. But used as the word typically is, I don’t think cynicism and the phenomenon Niebuhr was describing are the same thing. Though I admit that they do exist within relative proximity to one another (Niebuhr has a great quote about how “political pragmatism always exists one step away from opportunism; and opportunism itself balances on the razors edge of cynicism”)
The very inability to completely transcend one’s own place in history, nature, and society makes it almost impossible to filter out those egoistic tendencies which tint all of our individual perceptions of the world. And, I think, one of Niebuhr’s most important contributions to our understanding of politics is that those egoistic tendencies are even more stubborn in the life of collectivities than in the minds of individuals.
So while the origins of those banal hypocrisies inherent in nearly all political activity (of both individuals, and especially communities) can be better understood; and that that understanding can mitigate those hypocrisies to some extent, ultimately it is important that we accept that those limitations of interpretation are a fact of life. In short, it is not always appropriate to attribute bad faith (cynicism) to people(s) who hold a certain opinion that they clearly benefit from.
aimai
Paula,
Chomsky’s not a philosopher and I don’t think he claims to be one. The fact that the left is so intellectually impoverished in this country, and has such a shallow bench, isn’t *chomsky’s* fault. Its the fault of the rest of the left which has been crashing around unable to throw up real intellectual and moral leaders since forever. Its also a problem that has to do with the inability of people in the academy to pursue real politics–a politics of engagement as well as a politics of teaching. As far as I can see there are very few really impressive academics who are also trying to do anything really of value in the political realm. I don’t know the reason for this–probably its covered in Berube’s new book which I don’t have the emotional energy to read.
But none of this is Chomsky’s fault. The guy’s seventy years old. At the same age plenty of hard scientists and nobel prize winners have gone off the deep end on some topic–vitamin c? the brain (“the sargasso of Nobel prize winners” as my mother put it). Chomsky happens to care a lot about politics, terrorism, globalism, and he was an important voice on a lot of these issues when the establishment/academia refused even to acknowledge them. I really honor him for that early work. I just don’t get the Chomsky hate. If you want to attack the left for being shallow, incoherent, and disorganized be my guest. But Chomsky’s not the left even if college students think that’s all there is to it.
aimai
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, but I am using EJM as a perjorative. A bad thing. I have been saying it is a bad thing on this board for 5 years. I never talk about it any other context. I have said literally dozens of times that it is BAD, and therefore, NOT GOOD. Always BAD. Very very BAD.
Bad, bad, bad. Not good. As in BAD.
Do you see my subtle point?
{ headdesk:repeat }
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@J. Michael Neal:
Moo.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@gnomedad:
There’s agreement!
Trough water and fresh straw for everybody!
AngusTheGodOfMeat
See: Pentagon, and Protection Racket.
scudbucket
@Paula:
Have you read any Chomsky? In the types of work I assume we are discussing here (The New Military Humanism, Culture of Terrorism, The Washington COnnection, etc), he doesn’t present philosophical (or any other kind of) theories. He identifies a thesis widely advanced by the media (e.g., The US went to war in Kosovo to prevent ethnic cleansing) and argues against this view using empirical evidence often found in the very publications advancing the thesis in question.
Given this, your criticism of him is the equivalent of disliking ice cream because it doesn’t come in hi-def.
Mnemosyne
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Uh, yeah, I got that you think EJM is bad the first 300 times you said it. What I’m not getting is why you think that RTHIPWGI, which is a warning against EJM thinking, is equally as bad.
You seem to be trying to convince us that black and white are actually the exact same color and you’re going to bang your head on your desk until you get us to agree.
geg6
@General Winfield Stuck:
Well, I never watched much Rocky and Bullwinkle, so I don’t know about that.
But I do know that The Simpsons often plows right into some of the most thorny philosophical, political, and social issues of our time and place with great understanding and depth but disguised as comedy. You do worse than to learn from The Simpsons. Like, say, any Sunday morning pundit show.
Elie
@General Winfield Stuck:
I both chuckle and think that you have a point …
In the realm of the purely visual critiques of the political process (in this case 15th century Venice), I remember the cunning art depicting the reality and relationships between the Doge of Venice and various and sundry noblepersons. I wonder sometimes how the artists got away with their pointed commentary on the key players and the motives implied in shifty eyes and the like…
I know, I know …way too subtle for our times but still effective in a different way. Of course, the Doge’s Palace also housed a very scary prison equipped with numerous torture devices…much less subtle.
WereBear
Actually, Niebuhr was about not shrugging off the unanticipated poor outcomes, or making excuses for them, because “my heart was pure.”
This was intended as a brake on revolutionary thought and action, lest the rush to revamp would create an unstable structure that was worse in the long run.
In fact, the more radical the change we seek to create, the more it behooves us to move cautiously and consider incremental steps, because the potential for damage is also greater.
At least, that was my take from reading him, in the context of this discussion.
geg6
@WereBear:
You are correct.
Mnemosyne
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Perhaps you will understand the point I’m making better from a fellow quadruped:
“Only Ignorance” — Black Beauty
But now I suppose you’ll come back and tell us that what Sewell really meant was that you should always be able to escape responsibility for your actions by claiming ignorance.
matoko_chan
@WereBear: alas, that is not how he is used.
Note: WEC (white evangelical christian) is a racial-political-religio demographic.
WEC is 20% of the american electorate and 99% of the republican party.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Mnemosyne:
I am saying that EJM leads to the Road To Hell, (which) Is Paved With Good Intentions. Do you see how that can work? EJM is almost always based on good intentions. But when we use the good intentions to justify Bad Results, then we are surely on the Road to Hell.
I am not saying that all Good Intentions are EJM. I am saying that the Good Intentions which create Bad Results are the kinds of Good Intentions which are to be avoided ….. It’s an overlapping context, you see. Two ways of expressing essentially the same idea, that when Good Intentions become EJM then the Road To Hell is right there on your GPS device, turn right and proceed.
It’s because Good Intentions can become an excuse for Bad Things, that one can find oneself on the Road To Hell.
Therefore I assert that EJM=Bad and Road To Hell Paved With Good Intentions are delivering essentially the same message. They are both, as you say, “warnings.”
Please, just shoot me. I pray for sweet death.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Mnemosyne:
Believe me, I have no intention of trying to tell you anything, I see that such an endeavor would be futile.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Mnemosyne:
Perhaps you can understand this:
Ends do not justify means, despite the temptation to believe that they do. Such ill considered good intentions can lead to the road to hell, which is said to be paved with them.
Surely even you can wrap your noodle around that?
Never mind.
Ruckus
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Just proving that evil people will hire philosophy to provide cover
This is the meat of the post. I believe that DougJ is saying that conservatives are using philosophy to sound smart, when in fact they are idiots. And it does not matter the philosophy or the philosopher because they are misusing the philosophy. The conservatives are hoping that their audience is at least as ignorant as they are so no one will understand the philosophy that they are misusing. It is about cover, about misdirection, about abducting rational thought, because they are shallow, irrational and selfish and don’t want anyone to know that.
OK no pun was intended for Angus in my first line.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Ruckus:
I totally agree with you.
You’ve braised a good point.
Notorious P.A.T.
This thread picks up one of my many problems with religion: it can be used to justify good things or horrible things. There are, believe it or not, beliefs out there that can lead to good but have to be bent, folded, and spindled to give even an appearance of lending credence to horror.
Darwin and evolution is a prime example. Some people like to claim (years after the fact) that Darwin’s thinking led to the rise of Hitler. Unfortunately for them, there is simply no evidence to support that. There is nothing in Darwin to suggest that change leads to improvement, or that its outcome can even be guess, and anyway he was talking about what has already happend, etc etc etc. I once came across a white supremacist website that used a distorted rendering of Darwinism to claim that white people are more advanced than African people. Again, this claim does not stand up to scrutiny.
Another example is Hume. You really, really have to torture what he wrote to lend even a shred of credence to modern conservative thought. The man who wrote that people have an inborn–and commendable–hatred of injustice would hardly stand up for torture or economic inequality.
Now, look at religion. Does the Bible say bad things about gays/women/slavery/etc? It sure does. You can do backflips and contortions to try and nullify this (“it’s the Old Testament! no one cares about that!”) but the fact is that throughout the history of religion, the beliefs of religion have led directly to atrocities.
Which leads to Niebuhr. He said some good things, and some not-so-good things. What he said led to good and bad. But what else can we expect from a theologian?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Mnemosyne:
Sorry, I don’t associate much with horses. They are all about showing off and prancing in parades.
I just chew my alfalfa and put one hoof in front of the other, in front of the other, and in front of the other.
Notorious P.A.T.
I think we can all agree on that )
Notorious P.A.T.
What do bad intentions pave?
matoko_chan
@Notorious P.A.T.:
it isn’t religion that is evil…..the Amish and the Quakers are fundamentalists….it is evangelism that is pure evil.
The idea that one religion owns the truth, and its congregants have the right…no….the duty to impose it on others for their “own good” out of “love”.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Dick Cheney’s driveway?
MNPundit
@geg6: Making you marginally more annoying.
matoko_chan
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:I
well….you can do that…..you have four stomachs.
Alfalfa is death for horses.
If we could eat alfalfa we wouldn’t need to prance.
matoko_chan
Good intentions.
Being WEC means never having to say you’re sorry, ‘cuz you did it out of “love”.
Notorious P.A.T.
Which one am I?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@matoko_chan:
That prancing … is that just a constipation thing, or what?
matoko_chan
@AngusTheGodOfMeat: lol.
its gas, otherwise know as “colic”.
Mnemosyne
@Notorious P.A.T.:
You don’t need to use a road for bad intentions — you get to fly non-stop instead of driving the long way around. So I guess it would be runways.
Notorious P.A.T.
@matoko_chan:
I hear ya. Those nice Amish never hurt anyone, and make fine furniture. And some of my best friends are Shakers.
But as I said, there is a bad side to religion, too. Religion gives you the nice Amish and it gives you the evangelicals. It gives you Catholic hospitals and child-abuser-protecting Catholic churches.
We need systems of thought that minimize the potential for harm. Take democracy, for an example. There’s not a real downside to that, especially compared to the alternatives.
We take it as a given that downsides need to be minimized in everything. . . except the belief structures that drive us. And here we are.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@matoko_chan:
Oh that’s right, colic. I heard about that on a MASH episode, when Colonel Potter’s horse got it.
Scary.
Svensker
@Makewi:
Oh, go soak your head in the Ayn Rand puke bag. Please.
matoko_chan
@Notorious P.A.T.: it isnt religion. The Jews believe they are the chosen people too……but they don’t evangelize.
Religion is very beneficial to homo sapiens sapiens…..evangelism kills.
Mnemosyne
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Well, let’s go back to what you actually said. You claimed that when Niebuhr said that you had to constantly examine your intentions and actions, he was saying that the ends justify the means. I pointed out that Niebuhr was actually saying the opposite, that the ends do not justify the means and that constantly examining your intentions and actions is supposed to prevent you from deciding that the ends justify the means. That’s what he meant when he said, “‘We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it,” not “Do whatever the hell you want and justify it later.”
I’m really not sure how you managed to grab the wrong end of the stick when it comes to Niebuhr and decide that he’s an EJM guy when he was exactly the opposite, but you seem pretty well decided on it at this point.
Mnemosyne
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Uh, you might want to talk to some of the gay couples here in California who were deprived of their right to get married by direct democracy before you decide there are no real downsides to it. Pure democracy is mob rule. I agree with Churchill that democracy is the worst possible system of government, except for all of the alternatives.
El Cid
Well, now you’ve done it, you’ve done inspired a bunch of modern conservatives to break out their S&M gear and take several Hume volumes to the cellar.
Svensker
@Notorious P.A.T.:
Not with the version of humans that has populated the planet for the last couple hundred thousand years. Maybe when we get to HS3.0 we’ll be able to talk. You may not like godly “religions” but you can’t blame godly religion for Mao, Stalin, or Pol Pot.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
No, I was trying to point out that he was saying the kinds of things that the Cheneys of the world would use to excuse their choices, would turn into slogans like “World Better Off Without Saddam” to cover up for the rotten things they wanted to do, or had already done.
They take the ambiguity in a situation and try to figure out how to leverage it into whatever they want it to mean.
To some Republican Moron, the idea that “Extremism in the defense of liberty” could seem to spring from an attempt to describe a subtle idea, such as the relative moral levels in the relationship between an oppressed person and an oppressor.
So a Cheney will come along and say, “Saddam = Oppressor!” and then justify war with Saddam. I doubt that Niebuhr would go along with that, but I have friends at work who did.
The key to my post, which may have been not clear, was
If you take a careless or dishonest cut at it, Republican style, then you can parse out a Good Thing, use that as an excuse for whatever goes wrong (to an audience that isn’t carefully tracking the ideas), and then claim that anyone who challenges you doesn’t support the Good Intention you had.
Whaddya mean the Iraq war was bad? We got rid of Saddam, didn’t we?
That sort of thing.
Right. That’s what he meant. But the bad people will abuse that idea and turn it into an Ends Justify Means justification. That’s what bad people do, they abuse the ideas and demagogue them. I am not counting Niebuhr as one of the bad people. I am saying that complex ideas such as these are fodder for the manipulators.
Ruckus
@Notorious P.A.T.:
What do bad intentions pave?
Usually the back sides of the middle class. At least mine feels like it.
Angus beat me with Cheney’s driveway. And I feel like that as well.
Mnemosyne
@AngusTheGodOfMeat:
Which then gets to the question, “So?” Are people supposed to stop presenting complex ideas because evil asshats will distort them? Again with my evolution example — should we stop teaching the complex theory of evolution because evil asshats distort what Darwin said? Or should we point out that evil asshats are distorting Darwin and that Darwin’s ideas don’t even vaguely resemble what the evil asshats claim they do?
Of course bad people are going to take complex ideas and simplify them for their own purposes. That’s what makes them bad people. That doesn’t mean that we should insist that everyone think in the simplest terms possible to reduce the chances of their ideas being distorted. Life is complicated and can’t be reduced down to slogans, much as conservatives love to try and do so.
wobbly
Chomsky was so wrong about Pol Pot’s Kampuchea.
I’ve never trusted him since.
His continued popularity amazes me.
Kampuchea
AngusTheGodOfMeat
No.
It never occurred to me that anyone would take my blurb and interpret it as saying what you suggest here.
Maybe I didn’t say it clearly then. I think by now, I have.
Sorry for any confusion.
Agreed, I have said as much many times here. Not only is life complicated, but the ethical and moral issues are fiendishly complicated at times. It takes some effort to think them through and see clearly through the fog of politics, war, and whatever else is on the windshield.
EJM, just to put a wrapper on this, is a way of trying to gloss over those complications and construct an attractive, but false, justification for rotten plans that abuses the real issues.
I don’t blame Niebuhr for any of this. I subscribe to the Good Niebuhr policy.
Heh.
DougJ
The main difference between me and them is that I admit my ignorance of math and hard sciences and don’t venture many opinions on them because I know I am not equipped. I see the exact opposite from them, with an extra dollop of condescension and superiority thrown in for good measure.
With all due respect, when you (“you” meaning “all humanists”) allow the likes of David Brooks to use philosophy to justify war, torture, and so on, you deserve condescension.
When these idiots write about how global warming isn’t real, they are savaged by scientists.
Maybe I’m being grossly unfair here. Maybe.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
If you read the entire New Testament you know that Jesus explicitly endorsed everything in the Old Testament.
And yes, I’m well aware that there are also passages that seem to supercede dogmas in the Old Testament. The Bible is nothing if not comically contradictory. It’s the Joe Lieberman of books.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Leaving aside whether one thinks Chomsky is correct about this or that issue, I’m always deeply amused to read statements such as this.
El Cid
This sort of multiple interpretation of Niebuhr and the dangers of complexity to those who would quote him isn’t new.
A lot of those backing U.S. military and counter-insurgency intervention in the 3rd world during the Cold War cited his views on the importance of stopping Stalinist Communism, and Niebuhr’s formal anti-Imperialism was actually helpful to such arguments since U.S. intervention is nearly always justified (with or without good reason) as being in support of ‘democracy’.
Therefore as well a lot of people in the 1960s (probably Chomsky as well) saw him as yet another U.S. liberal who so fled Marxism given Stalinist horrors that he seemed to be yet another flack for rampaging U.S. intervention in the 3rd world.
Niebuhr wasn’t too happy with this either, and, for example, came to oppose the U.S. war against the independence of Vietnam.
But this doesn’t prevent modern figures from pulling out what they want from Niebuhr and leaving the rest.
Among elites, however, evidence suggests that interest in Niebuhr has begun to revive. When historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who knew Niebuhr well and admired him greatly, published an essay in 2005 lamenting that his friend had vanished from public consciousness, the first indications of this resurgent interest had already begun to appear.
Today politicians like John McCain and Barack Obama cite Niebuhr as a major influence. Pundits like neoconservative David Brooks and neoliberal Peter Beinart embellish their writings with references to Niebuhr. A new edition of Niebuhr’s classic 1952 meditation on U.S. foreign policy, The Irony of American History, long out of print, is in the works. The political theorist William Galston has recently gone so far as to describe Niebuhr as “the man of the hour.”
Many of those who are reincorporating Niebuhr into American public discourse are doing so at Niebuhr’s expense. Cribbing from Niebuhr’s works to bolster their own preconceived convictions, they mangle his meaning and distort his intentions.
In his book The Good Fight, Peter Beinart transforms Niebuhr into a dues-paying neoliberal and enlists him in the cause of “making America great again.” For Beinart, Niebuhr’s “core insight” is that “America should not fall in love with the supposed purity of its intentions.” Niebuhr “knew that it was not just other countries that should fear the corruption of American power; we ourselves should fear it most of all.” Yet once aware of its imperfections, the United States becomes an unstoppable force. In Beinart’s words, “only when America recognizes that it is not inherently good can it become great.” By running Niebuhr through his own literary blender, Beinart contrives a rationale for American Exceptionalism and a justification for the global war on terrorism.
In The Mighty and the Almighty, Madeleine Albright throws in the occasional dollop of Niebuhr to lend weight to an otherwise insipid work. Sagely quoting Niebuhr with regard to the persistence of conflict in human history, the former secretary of state briskly skirts around the implications of that insight. For Albright, Niebuhr simply teaches that “the pursuit of peace will always be uphill.” In no time at all, she is back to reciting clichés about “what the right kind of leadership” can do “to prevent wars, rebuild devastated societies, expand freedom, and assist the poor.” The Albright who cheerfully glimpses the emergence of “a globe on which might and right are close companions and where dignity and freedom are shared by all” nods respectfully in Niebuhr’s direction, but embodies the very antithesis of Niebuhr’s own perspective.
John McCain also holds Niebuhr in high regard. In Hard Call, his latest bestseller, McCain expounds at length on Niebuhr writings, which, he says, teach that “there are worse things than war, and human beings have a moral responsibility to oppose those worse things.” Soon enough, however, it becomes clear that McCain is less interested in learning from Niebuhr than in appropriating him to support his own views. Thus, McCain broadly hints that were Niebuhr alive today, he would surely share the senator’s own hawkish stance on Iraq.
Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Paul Elie observes that with his rediscovery, Niebuhr is fast becoming the “man for all reasons,” his posthumous support insistently claimed by various interpreters who resemble one another in one respect only: they all profess to have divined the authentic Niebuhr. Yet pressing Niebuhr into service on behalf of any and all causes will make him irrelevant even as it makes him once again familiar. The predicaments in which the United States finds itself enmeshed today—particularly in the realm of foreign policy—demand that we let Niebuhr speak for himself. We need to let Niebuhr be Niebuhr. In particular, we need to heed his warning that “our dreams of managing history pose a large and potentially mortal threat to the United States.”
Mnemosyne
@DougJ:
You may have noticed that Brooks et al deliberately use long-dead philosophers discussing historical events to defend themselves. It’s kind of hard to get David Hume to do a Marshall McLuhan. Climate scientists tend to be alive and have current information at their fingertips, which makes it easier for them to defend their work.
aimai
Mnemosyne! This is a great point, and one that I was struggling to make upthread when I asked whether we could have an analysis focused on when/how conservative hacks choose to quote dead philosophers vs. live taxi drivers (or scientists).
Also, I want to thank El Cid for putting Neo-Niebuhr in context.
aimai
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
It reminds me of a reference I saw in a film text to Samuel Fuller being a “reactionary” director because he was anti-Communist. Sure, he was anti-war, anti-patriarchy, anti-racist, and anti-sexist, but if he wasn’t a Marxist, too, then clearly he was a conservative reactionary just like John Ford.
I really hate Marxists. They’re the original purity trolls.
Paula
@ scudbucket
No, we’re talking about his various interviews and lectures that I’ve seen within the last few years, because this are what gets linked and is presented as “Noam Chomsky”, public intellectual. I haven’t actually had interest inreading his work further (other than Manufacturing Consent) because most of his political statements are so frustratingly one-dimensional. (And you seem to confirm that suspicion: “He identifies a thesis widely advanced by the media (e.g., The US went to war in Kosovo to prevent ethnic cleansing) and argues against this view using empirical evidence often found in the very publications advancing the thesis in question”). And keep in mind that these aren’t statements as interpreted by other people, it’s Chomsky presenting his own ideas.
People seem to like to use the defense that Chomsky has never presented himself as some kind of “political philosopher”. I agree. So why the heck do people continue to quote him like he has some kind of authority on political ideas?
The problem is that these ideas aren’t just “ice-cream” and they really do need to be in hi-def or else people are mostly practicing shouting slogans they don’t know how to advance in the practice of politics. Because Chomsky, like your “Villagers”, has access to a big audience that can be easily swayed.
There are academics in the humanities and social sciences who practice in forms of historical and theoretical knowledge. They make attempts to explain why certain kinds of social narratives dominate and people’s interest in adhering to them; not only that, but they make conceptual allowances for people to diverge from widely diffused assumptions, creating the possibility of agency. They attempt to explain human thought in relation to the larger social body.
Chomsky is frustrating because people don’t seem to cite anyone other than him when talking about “great narratives” and “the media” and how “the people” are lied to. No Gramsci, no Foucault, no Barthes, no Fanon, no Arendt, no Butler, no Thompson, no Said — people who I was given to understand were the “starting line-up” of intellectuals on ideological narratives and social institutions because they presented very complex pictures of society. Because of that, shallow interpretations of “good” and “evil” social actors dominate political debate even among people who should know better.
DougJ
I really hate Marxists. They’re the original purity trolls.
Damn straight.
Despite the brilliance of Marx’s actual writing (wrong as it was in certain ways).
El Cid
@Mnemosyne: Well, a lot of Marxists were annoying purity trolls, but on the other hand, many of them were right in dismissing U.S. claims that it was intervening in most of the 3rd world in support of ‘democracy’ and self determination. They might have sounded rude or used stilted rhetoric and been largely ineffective at getting anyone to listen, but I’ll take old boring Marxists any day over what passes for most liberal intellectuals when it comes to the moments when the big excitement for a war or foreign counter-insurgency or hired ‘freedom fighters’ game.
I mean, look at the context: people at the time really were using the rhetoric of democracy to justify all kinds of shitty, malevolent inverventions. For god’s sake, the U.S. and its crusading ‘anti-communist’ types said we were backing Mobutu Sese Seko as the multi-generational kleptocrat of “Zaire” to fight communism. Chinese communism.
I read the actual s*cialists of Monthly Review and they made better sense describing the U.S. economic and financial system than nearly the entirety of the mainstream establishment.
I’d rather read an actual, serious Marxist analysis than some ‘libertarian’ pile of shit any day. Given that I wouldn’t have to choose to limit myself to either every day.
It’s also personally funny to me, because, back in the 1990s, the only forum I had to experience and explore the kinds of foreign policy and economic dissent that ordinary liberals now get from blogs every day were hard line and radical leftist bookstores, magazines, and radio stations.
BruceFromOhio
@aimai:
Mine is similar: in general, whatever David Brooks writes is wrong, and we should do the opposite of whatever he suggests. “Blind squirrel finds occasional nut” applies, but it’s one hungry squirrel.
See also: Broder, David.
kth
@wobbly: Lots of people were wrong about the Khmer Rouge when Chomsky was (circa 1978), including the Carter administration, which viewed Cambodia as a bulwark against Vietnamese expansionism.
So Chomsky has plenty of company on that score. But on the thing that Chomsky got right about the killing fields–that they absolutely and positively would not have happened if the United States had not widened the Vietnam War into Cambodia, and installed the puppet Lon Nol–you won’t hear it from anyone but him (or other personae non grata among foreign policy establishment intellectuals).
Paris
I read Niebuhr’s ‘Moral Man and Immoral Society’ last year and really enjoyed it. His thoughts are much more complicated than what he is being used to defend.
There is evil in the world, called Al-Queda, and WE FUCKING CREATED IT ALONG WITH PAKISTAN. That’s the f*ing point. What do we do with the Frankenstein monster? Let it run wild on impoverished people living in a shit hole pre-modern country?
What is just justice? First, protect the innocents.
We should be arguing about how to do that not if we should. I don’t agree with the strictly military approach. We should be inundating Afghanistan with non-military aid not more death and destruction.
El Cid
@kth: You also generally don’t typically hear that the CIA’s own estimates at the time warned that the escalation of LBJ’s scattered bombing of the Cambodian peasantry to Nixon’s carpet bombing of the Cambodian peasantry would lead directly to the successful recruitment of peasants as forces for the formerly marginal and thoroughly lunatic Khmer Rouge, as well as to nationwide utter starvation, and both happened.
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
Do we really need to get into the history of American Marxists excusing the actions of Stalin and Mao? There’s plenty of blindness on both sides and American Marxists ignored a whole lot of really, really bad shit in the name of the “revolution.” Plus you have the fact that the modern Republican Party was built by former Marxists who just changed the name of their god from “Marx” to “Hayek” without changing their methods.
BruceFromOhio
@El Cid:
Helluva cite – and his (Bacevich) last ‘graf is pretty Gaia-damned compelling:
In the meantime, we should recall the warning with which Niebuhr concludes The Irony of American History. Should the United States perish, the prophet writes,
Change each “would be” to “was,” and you have an inscription well suited for the memorial that will no doubt be erected one day in Washington honoring those who sacrificed their lives in Iraq.
El Cid
@Mnemosyne: No, nor do we need to get into the history of American leftists who condemned the actions of Stalin and Mao.
What point would you imagine yourself to be proven if you had? How would the histories of 1930s or 1940s American Marxists or the Maoist International Movement or the Revolutionary Communist Party weirdos have in any way — in any way whatsoever — affected or delegitimized the perspectives of those writers and intellectuals who considered themselves Marxists or Soci@lists, as long as they were making important arguments which stood worthy in and of themselves?
How would the existence of Stalinists or Maoists affect at all an argument about the origins of U.S. policies in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and their effects of the civilian populations within?
I completely do not understand the point. The enthusiasm of certain liberal intellectuals for literally defrauding the U.S. population into entering World War 1 — i.e., the Creel Commission, and Walter Lippmann — might certainly affect someone’s view of those intellectuals if they were to later write about their grand respect for democracy and free thought. But this in no way affects other independent intellectuals if they had crafted good, stand alone arguments with respect to U.S. policies toward the Great War.
My favorite leftist international tradition stems from anarchist and libertarian soci@list thinkers. It doesn’t affect me in the least that some a**holes thought the ‘anarchist’ way forward was to assassinate political leaders, other than to generally understand that they were, to that extent, morons who did severe and lasting damage to their cause; and I’m pretty aware that any time there was a takeover by Communists or other authoritarian Marxists, there tended to follow an isolation if not killing of the sorts of people I tended to agree with.
And this “Marxist” straw man today — I’m no “Marxist” myself, and I get kind of disgusted by the entire Name-ist approach — does anyone not seeking out such perspectives ever encounter them?
It’s a weird topic, given that a lot of people just throw labels at themselves and wear phrases meant to describe their orientations on their sleeves, so you get all sorts of academics pursuing any number of weird topics proclaiming themselves ‘Marxist’ or ‘Gramscian’ or whatever, but, likewise, this is a country in which we pretty much have no regular and systematic study of how the economic upper classes dominate U.S. policymaking. Usually that gets dismissed as weirdo conspiracy theory when it’s the kind of thing any anthropologist visiting from the 19th century would ask about.
Jack
Niebuhr was the American originator of modern Just War theory. He may not have predicted the position every fruit of that tree would take, on each branch, or where each would fall.
But, he planted the tree. And with forethought.
Niebuhr’s argument is, and this sort of discussion forum obligates the truncation, how Chomsky described it.
It is and was called “Christian Realism” for a reason, with a heavy emphasis on the so-called “realism.”
And it does show in Obama’s trenchant commitment to making Bush World work more efficiently.
Obama doesn’t challenge the order of the American Imperium. He proposes to make it run better.
In keeping with “Christian realism.”
Jack
@Mnemosyne:
“Marxists” are in fact “Engelists” or “Leninists.” Karl Marx was far too ambiguous and far too unconcerned with purity to initiate a school.
Even his use of the term “communist party” is now misunderstood. At the time of the writing of the Manifesto, “party” meant “faction, tendency” – not “Political Apparatus.”
slashdotcom
@59…
No. It’s pointing out the obvious. We don’t blame Charles Darwin for the Holocaust. That would be retarded. We do, however, recognize that “social Darwinism” is a system of thought derived from a (mis)reading of his ideas, and a contributing factor to the Holocaust (in the sense that it helped justify, to ordinary people, mass murder). Ditto with “Jebus hates abortions and teh ghey” being both a misreading of Scripture and a contributing factor to the oppression of women and the LGBT community. I don’t get what’s so hard to understand. Or why you’re deliberately feigning incredulity.
To the concern troll @ 57, give me a fucking break. You’re telling me I should trust David Fucking Brooks’ philosophical interpretation over Chomsky’s? Look Chomsky up. Find the wiki. Then search the word “philosophy” in that wiki. See what you find.
As a fucking person with a fucking BA in fucking philosophy (and a thesis to prove it), I must point out: I took a class called “Chomsky” as an undergrad. It was in the philosophy department. The fact that one has philosophy classes devoted to oneself in major universities entitles one to speak on other philosophers’ beliefs without being accused of ignorance.
Also. I’m getting long-winded. And I’m late to this thread.
Also.
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
You seem to be arguing that if people are right about an aspect of a problem (ie American imperialism), I can’t point out that they were completely wrong about their proposed solutions to the problem.
Correctly identifying a problem =/= solving that problem, and yet I’ve heard people in Marxist/soci@list/etc circles argue that the fact that they successfully identified the problem means that their solution is the only possible one, and that’s when the purity purges begin.
El Cid
No, I’m not suggesting that at all. If some particular person who calls themselves a Marxist or Soci@list proposes a solution to a problem which is completely wrong then you would of course point that out.
Likewise, if someone who titles themselves a liberal intellectual is completely wrong regarding a proposed solution, then you would also point that out.
There are all sorts of people — several of them leading Latin American nations right now — who would be confused at the suggestion that anyone who believes themselves to be Soci@list, in some sort of tradition affiliated with some degree of those who thought Karl Marx had at least quite a few good insights into the nature of capitalism, had entirely the wrong solution. Likewise, there were some hard-ass old style capital-M “Marxists” who would probably have called Hugo Chavez ‘bourgeois’.
There are also a number of European political parties who still call themselves “Soci@list” and who still certainly think that a lot of writers, Marx included, and many interacting with his work, have had quite insightful things to say about capitalism. Had Karl Marx never existed, there still were soci@lists and there were investigators of the types of subjects that ‘Marxists’ and non-Marxist soci@lists found interesting. My own opinion is that Marx himself might have approved of Lenin’s USSR, albeit probably with a lot of bitter criticism, but been horrified by Stalin’s USSR, and probably would have, in my view wrongly, denied any intellectual responsibility for either.
True things are true if they were said by Karl Marx, and they were wrong if he said them too. True things were true if said by Thomas Jefferson, and wrong if he said wrong things. Now, we all have our own internal standards of determining when we find someone no longer worth listening to, and I think it’s entirely fine that part of that be subjective.
You couldn’t much study the 20th century history of Africa if you ignored the work and thoughts and views of colonialist historians and social scientists, but you’d also have a badly maldeveloped view if you likewise ignored every scholar coming from a ‘Marxist’ or soci@list perspective.
Things in reality are pretty complicated, but the crude Marxist who saw the U.S. as backing a brutal, murderous tyrant ally in order to keep Congo-Zaire within a zone of exploitation for international investors was really a lot closer to the truth than the writers filling up U.S. newspapers about how we were keeping out the Chi-Coms. Those that likewise tried to apply such a perspective so easily and crudely to Rwanda or Burundi, two nations next door, would have very little luck.
U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills often wrote about the “Plain Marxists”, i.e., those who were willing and motivated to use what tools of class analysis were useful but without all the weirdo pseudo-religious gobbledy-gook. C. Wright Mills’ and his protege G. William Domhoff consider(ed) themselves not to be “Marxists” in any literal sense, and had fiery disagreements with many more literalist and formal ‘Marxists’, but they didn’t dismiss a good argument coming from such sources any more than they did good arguments coming from U.S. conservatives.
I’m actually not a person who thinks that we’ve arrived at the pinnacle of human development, and that this is pretty much the way human politics and economics will be organized forever, may be correct or incorrect, but that’s certainly an empirical question, and not a teleological one. I think the big questions of how to organize human society and economy haven’t yet been answered, at least not in some medium to long run.
If I had to regularly and every day plow through dogmatic capital-M Marxist or Communist works on today’s politics and policy, I’d probably shoot myself, or the computer, but since the reality is that today in this society you have to actively seek out intellectuals and scholars operating with any sort of Marxist or class analysis type of paradigm (not counting the Bizarro-world version one finds in Tea Party, producerist, or libertarian rages), I don’t think that’s any sort of problem anyone is actually facing in the real world.
scudbucket
@Paula:
The value of CHomsky, contra your criticism that the left won’t frame political problems in the terminology of big thinkers, is that his position is devoid of ideology: it relies (to the extent he is successful) on facts and arguments. So, consider an example: The Reaganite Freedom Fighters were trying to liberate Nicaragua from totalitarian communism. That was the view put forward by the WH, by the press, by academics. That Ortega was democratically elected was not widely known in the US – because we were all being lied to. Chomsky helped expose that fact. Or another example: in 1975 the Indonesians slaughtered some 200,000 East Timorese with the (indirect) military support and blessing of the Carter Admin, a fact scrubbed from history, but which happened nonetheless. This is the stuff CHomsky writes about.
Now, it may be hard to fit evidence that Carter sanctioned such a huge slaughter into one of the frameworks of an important social theorist, but why do we need to? Why would we want to? Or if you do, why not try other big thinkers who don’t get the attention of those you mentioned, perhaps Mancur Olson, who wrote that the economic winners on the global playing field are those who exhibit the highest capacity for violence.
Jack
@El Cid:
This.
+500
brantl
The problem with any argument about politics that involves religion is that sooner or later it turns into “God wants it so.” and all intelligent argument goes out the window. Call it Lamb’s Law. I’ll take credit for it.
brantl
It’s like when you see that car, parked like a blind guy parked it in a war zone, and the bumper sticker says, “God is my co-pilot”.
sheiler
It always does and probably always will surprise me – the heightened level of animus, almost violence, against Chomsky, a man who tirelessly champions people who suffer from state actions that violate the state’s own laws, and laws the state has signed on to via international treaties and agreements.
I’m well aware that since I don’t hold a degree in international policy, I’m sure my comment will be null and void by some of the armchair Nobel prize winners frequenting this blog.