The primarily aesthetic nature of the first Apollo mission becomes clearer when one considers it from the perspective of both the participants and the spectators. The lunar landing was not a scientific announcement or a political press conference; it was a performance, a literal space opera, a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk that brought together the efforts of more than 400,000 people, performed before an audience of some 650 million. It was a victory, as Armstrong immediately recognized, not of Western democratic capitalism over Soviet tyranny, or of America over the rest of the world, but for humanity. It belongs to the United States no more than Michelangelo does to Italy or Machu Picchu to Peru. “Gladly, like His suns fly / Through the heavens’ grand plan / Go on, brothers, your way, / Joyful, like a hero to victory,” Schiller begged over Beethoven’s trumpets. The entire world saw three men obey.
Love this whole thing. One of NHK’s goofy stage plays, set in Taisho/Showa for no particular reason, so that Yellow Magic Orchestra, one of the greatest electronic bands of the 80s, can do a live jam with good-bad backup dancing.
you ever think about how there’s only 5 more years till ben sisko accidentally travels back in time to san francisco and has to pretend to be gabriel bell in order to make sure that the future retains the social change toward equality kickstarted by the 2024 bell riots
Yes. I thought about this the other day. It will chilling.
I have been thinking for years of making a count down page. I finally made it:
A phantom is haunting the discourse—the phantom of socialism. From Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the Democratic Socialists of America and The Jacobin, socialism is the hot topic of the moment.
But what is “socialism”? This is its most phantasmagoric quality. To its detractors, socialism is the doctrine of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kims Sung-Il through Jong-Un, and possibly even Hitler, the leader of the National Socialists. To its fans, however, socialism is the philosophy responsible for the pleasantness of the Nordic countries, and capitalism itself is responsible for African slavery, the destruction of the Native Americans, and the peril of climate change. Of course, there are more complicated cases that are not discussed because they don’t seem to bring polemical benefit to either side: Should China be seen as socialist or capitalist? Is it a success or a warning?
What interests me, however, is for all its spectral energies, socialism at least has some referents in the real world. In this, it is a sharp contrast to its ideological mirror image: libertarianism. Libertarianism is hugely influential as a political philosophy in the contemporary United States, if not as a distinct political party. And yet, can we point to any libertarian countries, successful or otherwise, with which to ground our debate about it? I asked this on Twitter and was told that America used to be libertarian. When I asked when this was and why it changed, I received no reply. Some might point to Singapore as a libertarian success story, but if you read the autobiography of Lee Kuan Yew, the leader of Singapore for most of its existence, you will clearly see that he self-identified as… a socialist! What does it say about libertarianism that its philosophy has either never been instantiated, or if it was, it quickly came undone as history unfolded and its closest current realization was by its ideological opposite?
What made libertarianism interesting as political philosophy, to me at least, was never its end goal. There never was a possibility that the United States that we live in today was going to become a libertopia any time soon. Instead, libertarianism is interesting because libertarian intellectuals stand outside of the two party system and critic both sides in productive ways. In doing this, they changed the grounds of debate and created that third boogeyman which is everywhere and nowhere: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was an attempt to bring market principles to bear on government and in so doing provide more efficient services and more extensive personal freedom. Years of experimentation have resulted in some successes but also many glaring market failures, and I for one am happy for us to try something else for a while.
So what is socialism? Socialism is the name of our desire: our desire for an end to war, our desire for the conservation of the Earth, our desire for a more humane world for all people. If it’s going to be useful, socialism must be something outside of the two party system that challenges our assumptions. What we need now is not a grand all-encompassing ideological vision, but a picture of what the world could be like if we took some incremental steps, however small, towards the provision of human needs outside of the logic of money and markets. That is what socialism brings and that is why it is resonating today.
It’s a philosophy, my philosophy, and coined into being by Aristotle quite some time ago. It is an ethical philosophy that in order achieve eudaimonia, or the flourishing of who we are as people, hapiness in the sense that we are good and the best versions of ourselves. To do this, we must make a habit of being virtuous. How is one virtuous?
By striking a balance between the excess and deficiency of vice, finding what’s called the golden mean. Once you consistently discover and make a habit of living via the golden mean, it gets easier and easier to be a virtuous person. The trick is to not think of doing the right thing as a black and white issue, but by taking even the smallest of ethical conundrums and judging them by their own merits. That is virtue ethics, and that is how I do my best to live my life.
This is basically correct, but as always with philosophy, there is more to it.
Aristotle and many other ancient philosophers (especially Confucius but more-or-less everyone to a certain extent) focused on virtues in their description of how to be a good person. In the last few centuries though, two other ways of thinking about ethics came to dominate thinking in the English speaking academy. One is utilitarianism, which is the idea that we should maximize “utility” or happiness by acting with an eye towards consequences that will make the most people happy. Another is “Kantian deontology,” which says that we have certain duties we need to follow no matter what the consequences are, such as the duty to tell the truth or treat other people as ends in themselves.
Utilitarianism and Kantism have a fundamental disagreement about what ethics is even about. You could think about ethics as being about actions: maybe God allows some actions and forbids others arbitrarily, and that’s what makes actions good or bad. That’s called Divine Command theory and it’s not a very popular view in the academy, but it’s pretty popular among lay religious people. Another popular action-oriented theory is existentialism, which is the idea that an action is good or bad based on whether it is an authentic expression of who you are.
Utilitarians are “consequentialists”. They say what makes an action good or bad is not the action itself, which is neutral, but the consequence of the action. A good action just is an action with good consequences.
Kantians on the other hand, think that consequences are unpredictable and morally irrelevant. What matters for ethics are your intentions. If you honestly and truly intend good for everyone, you’re a moral person, even if through no fault of your own, it turns out that your actions have bad effects.
You can think of it like this diagram:
Intentions → Action → Consequences
Philosophers kept debating whether the heart of ethics really is: in the intention or in the consequence?
In the late twentieth century, a new school of though emerged that asked the question, if this debate between intentions and consequences is so central to ethics, why don’t the ancients seem to care about it? The answer that was worked out by Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Alasdair MacIntyre and slowly popularized came to be known as “virtue ethics”, but I argue a better name for it is “character ethics”.
Where do your intentions come from? They emerge from your character. Where does your character come from? It’s a consequence of your earlier actions. The diagram I put up before is actually a circle with character as the missing link. So, when we read Aristotle, the ethical question he is trying to answer with his theory of virtues is not “what are good intentions?” or “what are good consequences?” but “how do I become a good person?” and for him, to be a good person is to have a good character with a virtuous (moderate) disposition.
The reason the debate between the utilitarians and the Kantians couldn’t be resolved was that they were both only seeing a small part of ethics and trying to take it for the whole. The virtue ethicists helped us break out of this circular argument by getting us to look at other perspectives. Once we start looking at ethics from this broader perspective, the central question becomes what kind of person do I want to be? Should I be a political man of action, as Aristotle suggests? Should I be saintly lover of God and man, as in Catholic social teaching? Should I be a humane bureaucrat, as in the Confucian tradition? Should I try to be a caring mother, as in feminist care ethics? These questions aren’t easy to answer, but their more tractable than the interminable academic circle that dominated discourse before the reemergence of virtue ethics.
Who are the police? Robert Peel (the “Bobby” behind British bobbies) said, “The police are the public and the public are the police.”
Liberals think the police rightly have a monopoly on using force in the interests of the state, which they believe represents society’s general will. To retain this monopoly, the police must maintain their public legitimacy by acting in a way the public respects and within the rule of law, what is often referred to as procedural justice. For liberals, police reform is always a question of helping police sustain that legitimacy. The alternative would be to allow predators to run amok in society.
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The reality is that the police have always been at the root of a system for managing and producing inequality. This is accomplished by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people in ways that benefit those already in positions of economic and political power. Police have always functioned as a force for controlling those on the losing end of these economic and political arrangements, quelling social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal, and informal processes.
I don’t disagree that the police have been used to suppress lower class and enforce racial hierarchy, but I think the Peelean ideal is our only possible escape. A state just is the monopoly on legitimate violence. We can’t imagine a state without some level of violence, and as long as inequality exists, those with the smallest voices will always be the biggest victims of violence.
If this is so, then the reform which police need is not greater professionalization but greater democraticization. Professionalization just means that a group has internal bureacratic procedures which they follow in exclusion to personal preferences. Making the police more professional just creates a greater gap between the people and the police. What our goal should be is the acheivement of the true purpose of the Second Amendment: the right of the people to participate in maintanence of social order as individuals.
Great post about “psycho-conservatism” from Otium.
Otium in general is a very good blog to dig through the archives of. It seems to be “Rationalist adjancent” but not techno-singularity messianic. I think it helps that the author is an actually employed data scientist, as opposed to an avid reader of science fiction.
I won’t rank religions, but I will rank ethical systems.
This is a post written by one of the maintainers of Go after the election. It has proven to be correct in some of its predictions already. What about the others?
Trump himself is likely to be a terrible president. I say this not because of how he won, and not because he is a racist megalomaniac–many presidents have been that–but because he appears to be profoundly uninterested in the world outside himself. Trump aspires to be a tin-pot dictator, and he would probably be a good one: entertaining and, as dictators go, among the less evil. As the U.S. president many are rightly concerned about his authoritarian aspirations, but those very concerns, and his lack of broad-based support, make his wishes unlikely to be realized. We are forewarned and will resist.
Trump can’t take over the country, but he can destroy it. As a candidate he encouraged divisions: against immigrants, against Muslims, against people who voted for other candidates. All our presidents in living memory have sought to unite the country, to speak to all the people. Trump has shown no signs of that. He is likely to accelerate the process, already well under way, of destroying the shared vision of the country.
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The U.S. military has a very strong tradition of civilian control, but the same was true in Rome and Tang China: Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, An Lushan defied the Mandate of Heaven. In the U.S., the military will reject civilian control if they have a strong leader and if enough of the military perceive the government as no longer representing the ideals and traditions of the U.S. Since those ideals and traditions are what I am claiming are falling into disagreement, we are now closer than ever to a military coup.
The most likely scenario would be a demagogic leader with ties to the military who wins a closely contested election with strong military support. Overreaching by the new president causes strong opposition from the professional intermediaries, leading to lawsuits and eventually to impeachment and conviction. The president rejects the conviction and refuses to vacate the office, arguing that the opposition is un-American and that the country can not change leadership while facing significant external threats from the enemy du jour. The military, whose members have lived through many years of severe disagreement about what the country really means, supports him. Chaos ensures, ending in a military dictatorship and the dissolution of the country.
Trump is not that leader, but he is giving us a template for our future collapse. He is increasing the problems that make it more likely.
The ancients believed, superstitiously, that elipses, comets, and natural disasters were signs and portents that heaven disapproved of the king. What I’m proposing is, what if they were right?
At the State House in Columbia, a group of witches were doing a ritual during the eclipse which they hoped would cause capitalism to end. What if it is working?
2017/7/26
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
“Keep and bear arms” refers to service in a militia. You maintain a weapon when it’s not in use and bear it in service to your state when called upon. There’s plenty of textual evidence that this is the case. It’s not worth going through that here, but Waldman’s The Second Amendment: A Biography is a good primer on the background of the amendment’s passage. In England, Protestants had asked for an exclusive right to bear arms because Catholic militias were harassing them. In the US, the right to participate in the military was extended to all citizens.
This being so, I think the proposal to keep trans people out of the military is unconstitutional. Their right to participate in the military cannot be infringed under the Second Amendment. You can kick individual trans people out of the military for violating specific regulations or being unfit, but to exclude a class of people for merely ideological reasons is clearly prohibited by the amendment.
Rightly understood, the Second Amendment is very radical. It has nothing to do with militiamen fantasizing about using their assault rifles to shoot at the government. It has everything to do with who is in military and how the military interacts with society. Whenever we see a dictatorship fall somewhere in the world, it is always because the army has decided it would rather side with the people than the leaders. The Second Amendment ensures that this is so by giving all Americans the right to participate in military service.
