Children and how they learn is a subject much on my mind of late. Play being of the utmost importance. (Piaget looms in the background, inevitably.)
We've received a book by Vivian Gussin Paley called A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. I've only just begun it, but it's got me thinking. The ways in which children use fantasy in order to explore certain issues, in order to become who they are, reminds me of what Chris Knight and his colleagues have said and written about the human revolution. Very loosely, how in a sense the ability to make believe is what makes us human. Language being the ability to use symbols that are not in fact what they refer to. The ability to hold ideas in our minds, which are in a sense, fantasies.
It is in this context, among others, that I've often felt, though I remain an atheist, that the so-called rational drive to ridicule or eradicate religious belief is remarkably misguided.
Which reminds me of something Sarah Blaffer Hrdy wrote towards the end of her book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, about epigenetics, in which she wondered, speculated, at the possibility that those of our genes that have evolved enabling us to understand each other, and cooperate, both being necessary components of our becoming human, might at some point stop being "expressed", given the drastically changed and changing environment in which they have to operate on us, or to emerge. Which makes me double-back and think of our closed-off spaces, the unavailability of room for children to roam; and the current testing mania, teaching to the test, No Child Left Behind. How misguided, short-sighted, unsupportable it all is.
And the emphasis on play further reminds me of Gabriel Josipovici's work, and I think that literature is not a trivial matter, though we treat it like it is, though at the same time we nonetheless take it too seriously, too solemnly, when we take it at all, and that the best of it so often seems to embody a sense of play. The plays within plays of Shakespeare. The playfulness of Beckett and of Kafka (both all too often seen as dour). Kafka's work, and Borges', not unlike fables in their own way, in a sense, not unlike tales told by children, without the self-importance of literariness. . .
And just the other day, Skholiast noted the passing of two philosophers, J.T. Fraser and Matthew Lipman, only the former of which I'd ever heard, which means nothing. Both seem interesting, but Lipman is most pertinent here. "Frustrated by the apparent incapacity of college students to engage in critical thinking", he, among other things, wrote a series of novels aimed at pre-teens, intended, I gather, to explore philosophical topics. I love how Skholiast ends his post: "as a teacher of school-children I can confirm what probably ought to be obvious to anyone who thinks about it: children are born to philosophize, and what's more, ask far more ambitious questions than most grad students."
And I think, not for the first time, with some despair, that all of the elements are available, are accessible, for us to be better, but we seem bound and determined not to attend to what we know. We really don't know what we're doing, do we?
Late Thoughts on Egypt and Democracy
Egypt!
I look on the exhilarating, still unfolding events in Egypt over the last 2+ weeks with astonishment, and something like pride, with not a little hope and fear mixed in for good measure. My blog-silence over the same period is due to combination of factors, not least of which is that nothing else seems worth blogging about if I can't bring myself to blog about that. And yet what could I say? How could I keep up? (I've never been the kind of blogger who keeps up well with events, or who writes quickly.) My own tendency to want to summarize and narrate, if only to myself, to make sense of things, has been happily thwarted at nearly every turn. Almost the only thing I can do is watch and cheer and, I don't know, re-tweet stuff. (I post the above image in particular because it's an enormous gathering and it's from yesterday, more than two weeks in. Amazing. I took the picture from Al-Jazeera's site, though it also appeared at the indispensable Zunguzungu.)
I mention fear, because looming in the background, creepily, is the United States, which is not looking kindly on the prospect that its most important client state not named Israel might soon be unavailable for duty, so to speak. When will the U.S. act decisively? What kind of desperate power will it try to assert? Will the Egyptian people be able to continue to resist the "smooth transition" so much desired by ruling elites?
In a sense this fear is rooted in a tendency to think that the United States is all-powerful, that it can, and will, successfully assert its dominance. But, while the U.S. remains powerful, and is certainly unpredictable and crazy, it is nonetheless a power in decline, a decline that has been ongoing for most of my 40 years. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are indications of weakness, not power, their failures still further indications of that weakness. Regardless, all fantasies about the freedom-loving and Progressive Obama aside, the U.S. is certainly trying to assert its will now. How it will play out, what kinds of deals are attempted or accomplished to continue the client relationship as against any actual desires the Egyptian people might have, still remains to be seen. In the meantime, we are treated to a remarkable series of lessons in democratic action.
Naturally, we have also been treated to standard-issue Western ruling class and intellectual rhetoric about how Egyptians are not ready for or capable of democracy. As if they were incapable of making important decisions or using political judgment. Of course, it's true that this is in part blowing smoke, a distraction meant to ease that desired transition to a favored successor inclined to maintain the status quo. On the other hand, it is typically assumed by such elites, not to mention many policy-wonk liberals, that ordinary people in general cannot be trusted with politics (in any event, they cannot be trusted to do what elites would have them do, which amounts to the same thing). The contempt for democracy, and by extension for people, is never far from the surface.
Luckily for me, since there's not much, if anything, of value I can say about actual events in Egypt, this gives me the opportunity to do what I do best: quote from a book apparently unrelated to the question at hand. It happens that I am currently reading Ellen Meiksins Wood's Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought From Antiquity to the Middle Ages. I'm halfway through, and it's fascinating reading. What Wood seeks to do is to situate the political thought of such figures as Plato and Aristotle in the social and political conditions of their times, to find the problems they were trying to solve, the questions that necessitated their answers. Plato and Aristotle were, of course, of the aristocracy, and on balance hostile towards the democracy, though their work was informed by it. As such, they, Plato in particular, originate the Western elite posture towards democracy and ordinary people. His opponent, usually implicit, is the sophist Protagoras. Here is Wood:
Epistemological and moral relativism, as Protagoras formulates it, has, and is intended to have, democratic implications. Plato responds to this political challenge by opposing Protagoras's relativism with a new kind of universalism. In the democracy, in the atmosphere of public deliberation and debate, there could be no ruling ideas, no individual or social group whose unchallenged dominance allowed it to claim universality for its own values and impose them on others. The only effective way of challenging the conventional wisdom of shoemakers and blacksmiths, and their ability to participate in public speech and deliberation, was to trump conventional wisdom altogether with some higher form of knowledge, a knowledge not of mundane empirical realities but of absolute and universal truths.I have previously sought to define democracy as a situation in which ordinary people have non-trivial say in decisions affecting their everyday lives. I like Protagoras's idea, as glossed by Wood, that "men are in general capable of making political judgments, and that their well-being depends on participation in a civic order, but also that they are entitled to the benefits of civic life". It's not just that we can make such decisions, that we are capable of making such judgments, but that, in fact, we must. Our well-being depends on it, and we are entitled to it. And so we watch an unlikely revolution unfold in Egypt, with hope and longing, as if, perhaps, it were our own. . .
Platonic universalism is of a very special kind, and it is perhaps only in relation to this philosophical universalism that Protagoras's ideas can be called morally relativist at all. He certainly did reject the notion that there are higher moral truths accessible only to philosophic knowledge, but he put in its place what might be called a practical universalism, rooted in a conception of human nature and the conditions of human well-being. His argument presupposes a conviction not only that men are in general capable of making political judgments, and that their well-being depends on participation in a civic order, but also that they are entitled to the benefits of civic life. It is true that, in his view, the specific requirements of well-being will vary in the infinite diversity of the human condition in different places and times, and social values will vary accordingly. But the underlying human substratum remains the same, and the well-being of humanity does provide a kind of universal moral standard by which to judge social and political arrangements or to assess the relative value of opposing opinions, not on the grounds that some are truer than others but that they are better . . .
Both Protagoras and Plato . . . place the cultural values of techné, the practical arts of the labouring citizen, at the heart of their political arguments, though to antithetical purposes. Much of what follows in the whole tradition of Western philosophy proceeds from this starting point. It is not only Western political philosophy that owes its origins to this conflict over the political role of shoemakers and smiths. For Plato the division between those who rule and those who labour, between those who work with their minds and those who work with their bodies, between those who rule and are fed and those who produce food and are ruled, is not simply the basic principle of politics. The division of labour between rulers and producers, which is the essence of justice in the Republic, is also the essence of Plato's theory of knowledge. The radical and hierarchical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible worlds, and between their corresponding forms of cognition, is grounded by Plato in an analogy with the social division of labour which excludes the producer from politics.
Noted: Ezra Pound
From his preface to his book, The Spirit of Romance:
Art or an art is not unlike a river, in that it is perturbed at times by the quality of the river bed, but is in a way independent of that bed. The color of the water depends upon the substance of the bed and banks immediate and preceding. Stationary objects are reflected, but the quality of motion is of the river. The scientist is concerned with all of these things, the artist with that which flows.
Crazy
Not surprisingly, Stan Goff had an interesting take on the recent shootings in Tucson, as well as the kinds of responses they elicited:
Let’s start with the premise that Jared Loughner is crazy, not coherently political. [...]
I’ll leave the DSM-IV acolytes to put labels on what kind of crazy Loughner is. The fact is he wasn’t crazy on Mars or in a time warp.
He was crazy in Tucson, Arizona, United States of America, in January 2011. Jared Loughner could read and write in English. He watched television, listened to the radio, saw movies, and read newspapers. He knew how to buy a gun and call a cab. When he couldn’t get his ammo at one Wal-Mart, he had the wherewithal to head to the next one and try again.
Jared Loughner may have some problems with dissociation, however that is being defined, but he didn’t learn to load and fire a Glock 19 via some synaptic disruption in his cerebral cortex; he learned it from a culture. Last I checked, there is no evidence of a Glock 19 gene, though I expect the DSM-IV people to come up with a Glock 19 Disorder soon enough, and Searle will invent a drug to control it.
This may sound like I’m trying to make the US case against him, given the narrow legal definition of insanity; but I’m not. The legal definition of anything is always inadequate, because law can never anticipate the complexity of context.
The case I’m making is that Loughner – in his own mentally fractured way – was behaving exactly the way his culture demonstrated he was supposed to behave.
Indypendent Reader
I've been remiss in not posting about Aimée's involvement in the semi-moribund but now revitalized Baltimore Indypendent Reader. This is taken from their site:
Also, check out Aimée's interesting interview with David Swanson, author of the book War is a Lie.
The Indypendent Reader is a progressive quarterly newspaper that aims to serve Baltimore’s more than 200 neighborhoods through research, communication, and organizing. We encourage people to “become the media” by providing democratic access to available technologies and information. We seek to bring to light Baltimore’s rich tradition of social and political activism.The website will cover ongoing social justice stories, with a responsiveness to current local politics, while the semi-annual print version is more, shall we say, essay-ish. Though still media, let's call it a form of working-class propaganda. Anyway, it's worth a look.
The primary goal of the Indypendent Reader is not merely to produce a newspaper, but to start a collaborative project in which people dedicated to social justice in Baltimore can participate in the production of local media, tell their own stories and continue to organize forums, workshops, and other events. These events disseminate ideas, build solidarity, and help promote and increase the reach of the paper itself. The Indypendent Reader Editorial Collective is autonomous.
Also, check out Aimée's interesting interview with David Swanson, author of the book War is a Lie.
"Little else is worth thinking about"
The cheerful posts come fast and furious. Robert Jensen's words, excerpted in the last post, reminded me of Philip Goodchild's preface to his difficult and fascinating (and as yet unfinished by me) book, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety. He describes the book's origins:
This book emerged from the tension between four powerful insights—insights bringing problems, not solutions. The last insight to arrive was the contemporary truth of suffering: a growing awareness that current trends in globalization, trade and the spread of technology are not only leading towards a condition where the human habitat is unsustainable, but the urgency and responsibility announced by this preventable catastrophe mean that little else is worth thinking about. Prior to that, research for this present work was initiated by the realization that the encompassing framework delimiting the production of thought and values in modern life, and exerting increasing influence, was simply the impersonal and self-positing structure of money as the measure of values. As a whole, however, my work is grounded in an 'idea'—or perhaps I should say an 'experience'—of what I will call 'God'. This 'idea' was so overwhelming and so distinct from our customary ways of thinking that, while intelligible in itself, it remains incommunicable until it has called into question and reformulated all existing categories of philosophy and theology. Finally, the work of the revaluation of values which may lead to the cessation of suffering was developed in the form of the 'murder of God'—the actual work of calling into question the fundamental concepts and values of the European tradition.
Each of these insights fractured my self-consciousness, exposing an abyss beneath all my thoughts and relations to myself, to others and to the world. I became a stranger to those closest to me as well as to myself. Each issue imposed itself as a dynamic force on thought, a problem of unlimited importance that I feel barely equipped to begin to address. Moreover, these are not personal but universal and global problems, imposing the responsibility on each person to find an appropriate way of addressing them. In the case of each problem, however, there is only a minority who feel the impact of its force, and those who are concerned with two or more of these problems are much fewer. The public consensus is engaged in a vast enterprise of evasion, sheltering in a wicked and lethal complacency. Yet each of these problems calls to and awakens the others. Anyone who carefully attends to the significance of these issues—and this book is an attempt to communicate their significance—may risk having their world shattered. Thinking is nearly as dangerous as complacency.
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