Back from Thailand - Updates

Hello, all you lovely people in Internet-land. I suppose it has been quite a while since we posted anything here, and we are sorry for neglecting you. You like your updates, yes? Well, here are some updates.

I have been working day and night on my thesis and making a lot of headway, thanks largely to the brilliant editing of Carina and my friend and colleague Donald Sturgeon (who has blessed the world with the super-awesome Chinese Text Project). This has left us all very busy, along with the daily chores that need doing, but please do not think I have forgotten any of you.

In more exciting news, we recently got back from our honeymoon in Thailand (Bangkok, to be precise). It was a blast and we would love to go again some time. The bad news is that I forgot to bring the charger to my digital camera, so we have no pictures to upload at this time. We did pick up a disposable camera while there, so once we develop those photos we can show them off but, yeah, nothing at the moment. The good news is that we did not come back empty handed: I took video of our trip, and I am working on editing together a short film of the trip, including the highlights of the Grand Palace and our awesome food court experience at the Siam Paragon mall (we were there for a mere forty-eight hours, how much did you think we would cover?). I will also provide details from some of our other lovely experiences, and I know Carina has some points to add in.

That video will take some time to put together, though, and I do want to give you something substantial. To that end, I want to give a review of an article that Roger was kind enough to turn me onto: Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand. The article is by an interesting fellow out of Harvard Divinity named Chris Hedges, and it is a pretty well-thought, well-researched piece. Critic that I am, however, I have some points I want to shoot back to Hedges.

(SPOILERS: You really should read the article I am responding to first, otherwise what follows will probably make little to no sense!)

All right, I want to be fair in my response to this. Chris Hedges is clearly fired-up, and rightly so: things have gotten entirely out-of-hand in the US (okay, not like that is news to anyone); he is mad as Hell and he does not want us to take it anymore! But soft, Mr. Hedges. What is truly the source of the things that drive your ire? Let us take a considered look at his opinions.

First of all, I think we can see that what Hedges is most upset over is that he sees our “liberal” government as bending us over and forcing us to take it in the rear from the numerous hateful, criminal, and despicable groups he lists off in his diatribe. I can certainly sympathize with that: In a country where freedom is one of the most-prized values in life, said freedom has also been used as a shield to protect numerous heinous acts.

Yet is this the fault of liberality? Hedges, I think mistakenly, conflates ideals of multi-culturalism and tolerance with the “liberal agenda” which, for the record, neither philosophically nor politically full-on endorses the former ideal and only conditionally accepts the latter. Yet in our country we do have, or are at least supposed to have, protections against certain extreme behaviors (slander, libel, harmful acts, etc), and I do not think it is exactly the fault of liberalism that these things continue to rear their ugly heads. For that matter, it is not the fault of multi-culturalism (again, an entirely different doctrine), and it is only a form of tolerance (protectionism) that allow them to propogate. I am reminded of the US Supreme Court's 8-1 decision to allow the Westboro Church's protests at the funerals of military personnel (which, many including myself would agree, is detestable and flies in the face of protection from harm). The US Supreme Court, by the way, made that decision not on a liberal interpretation of the Constitutional First Amendment right to free speech, but a conservative one (see the opinions here: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-751.pdf).

The fact of the matter is that the liberal does not haphazardly advocate blind tolerance; it is always a tolerance bounded by a protection of freedoms and, perhaps more importantly, a protection from harm. If Hedges wants to call out liberals, fine. He is not, however, calling out proper liberals, who have certainly not forgotten Popper's words, but merely those who lazily sing a doctrine all day without having any understanding of it. The conservatives are no better, for they also stick dogmatically to a doctrine that is pulling our entire culture down the metaphorical tube.

What disturbs me more, however, is that Hedges refers to the following as “toothless pursuits”: inclusiveness, multi-culturalism, identity politics, and tolerance. Somehow, these values are subordinate to justice which, to me, seems to be a concept that must inevitably be founded upon them. Susan Moller Okin has a wonderful critique of John Rawls's first pass at principles of justice (essentially justice as fairness), wherein she critiques the traditionally sexist (and in my opinion classist) institution of the family as being an inalienable factor in determining interests. If true liberalism is to be established, we have to provide a much more in-depth analysis of persons and their identities. For Okin, that included looking at women as individuals, but also as women...which means looking at men as men, children as children, and...wow, that really brings the whole Veil of Ignorance crashing down! It is the flaw of liberalism to assume that all are equal merely in virtue of being human, and that accommodation for inequality can always be made by a purely liberal system. It cannot, it simply cannot.

The fact of the matter is that we need the aforementioned “toothless pursuits” to even be able to instantiate a conception of justice. I do not mean that justice is subordinate to these ideals, as they are all subordinate to our needs as human beings and the natural laws that govern existence. What I mean to suggest is that, if we must break-apart and analyze the picture, we must still pursue this project holistically, else we will be unable to fit the pieces back together in the end.

Now, there are also a number of points in this article where I am totally with Hedges, especially where he calls out the abuse suffered by the worker from the higher-ups in big business. The businessman's seemingly inevitable hunger for profit drives corporate greed, and it is our government's unwillingness to intervene on behalf of the worker that allows this tapeworm to grow ever larger. Of course, it has been the Republican party, the conservatively-minded folk, that has been the biggest source of benefit to these blue-blooded parasites. The big contribution the liberal side has offered was: nothing. By nothing, of course, we mean that no aid has been offered to either the mice or the fat cats. Whether this is out of “tolerance” or out of a total inability to act is unknown to me. When I was a younger lad, I always viewed myself as a liberal, but not as a Democrat. The Democrats, I decided, were too disorganized to get anything done. Even if their numbers matched those of Republicans, they would certainly fall from lack of unity. To this day I still hold the same belief, and I find it wholly unsurprising that nothing has been done to stem the wave of unemployment, poverty, and abuses of Constitutional rights launched by conservative policies and unchecked by liberal practices. This, of course, is the problem with liberalism: It is to protect against significant harm, but when is the harm significant? We need some standards; we need some culture.

Also, we cannot deny that Hedges hits the nail on the head when he points out the rigging of US politics. After all, how many in Congress are genuinely middle-class or lower? How much say can a man who makes roughly $400 a week have in our national legislature? The answer is not much more than one thousand men who make the same wages. The fact of the matter is that the government can, does, and will continue to cater to the interests only of those in its monkey-sphere: Only those who “representatives” think of first will be considered and, since that is largely limited to an elite few, the rest of us are left out to dry.

Mind you, I am uncertain and skeptical of the purely democratic alternative view, wherein each man votes his own mind. Certainly there are a good number whose brashness would endanger us all (such as stocking up on KI pills to prevent radiation poisoning from Japan), and we do want to have those most-capable in charge. Certainly it would be impractical to take a vote from everyone on everything that the US sets out to do. Most certainly there are some who need to be shouted down because their beliefs and actions pose a danger to all of humanity. What is to be done is to find a way to tear-down the class elitism, the factioning, and the foolishness without tearing down the whole system. We also need to find a way to dispel the illusions perpetuated by the cattle-drivers in politics, endlessly pushing their bovine constituents through the polls and into the slaughterhouses. This country is in need of revolution, but not of the bloody sort. I would suggest education and civilization.

When we speak of things like tolerance, what do we speak of? Do we simply accept what some might call “fate” and allow ourselves to be dragged down with the ship? MLK Jr may not have spoken of tolerance (or he may have, Hedges's sources are unclear), but ancient Asian philosophies certainly do, and when they do they speak of it in terms of being a wholly physical act, not just a mental one. Nin is a concept from bushido, and it can be glossed as tolerance, endurance, and serenity. Specifically, it seems to refer to the idea of enduring pain with grace. Confucianism also speaks of such endurance; so does daoism. As we know, though, Confucians and adherents to the code of bushido did not have wholly tolerant views of the world: they allowed that there were institutions and values that could and should be upheld; they had a cultural backbone. Whether the exact points of culture they picked out, and how they adhered to them, are things we might disagree with, but the framework is one worth considering. We can and should tolerate some things: slow traffic, an annoying sibling, the construction outside the apartment. There are some things, however, that are not matters of toleration, but matters of rightness: hate, violence, suffering, etc. When we are confronted with such matters, our cultural values spur us to act against them. When confronted with a starving man, we tend to be moved by compassion (even when we do not offer him anything), and philosophers like Mengzi took this to be a sign of how the human passions could be drawn upon to develop a harmonious society. Xunzi elaborated on this, drawing upon cultural concepts and standards to help us learn how to channel these feelings and develop a refined sense of right and wrong. Were these people liberals? Probably not, but there is no reason their notions of tolerance are incompatible with the core elements of liberalism.

Hedges: Your words are loud and clear, but your target is incorrect. Your ire is not at tolerance, but at apathy. Do not call people away from tolerance, but call them toward action; call them toward humaneness.