Utopians vs. Conformists Instead: Hodgson's Wrong Turnings Book
Book Review: Hodgson, Geoffrey M: Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2018. Print.
The old divisions of "Right" and "Left" are obsolete, but not for the reasons Anthony Giddens imagined in his (1979) volume Beyond Left and Right. Giddens imagined that social democracy was the best we could do and that the politics of the future would be about refinements of that social democracy. Giddens also imagined that the "Left" had become conservative in the sense of wanting to conserve what was good about social democracy.
In actuality the "Left" has become conservative, at least in the US sense, in supporting neoliberal Democrats like Obama and the Clintons. The "Right" supposedly exists, perhaps in a more substantial sense, as a collection of reactionary fools of one sort or another, pseudo-Christians or capitalist libertarians or prison guard's unions or other such cultists who can be employed in support of the usual elite rule. Very little of the politics generated by "Left" or "Right" groups is substantive anymore. Perhaps the Our Revolution people count as a genuine "Left" today, but they seem at this point like a long game in progress -- they get a lot of publicity for the very few candidates they run, and they apparently don't have a coherent idea of foreign policy just yet. Meanwhile the CIA is running candidates in this election cycle too.
In light of this drab political reality, I suggest a new political division, one that does not depend upon the context of the French Revolution in which the terms "Right" and "Left" gained their initial popularity; utopians, on the one hand, who desire a better world, and conformists, who are willing to vote with the political consensus out of their fear of disaster and of anything different than what we've got now.
Now, within these two extremes, and within the spectrum extending from a pure utopianism to a pure conformism, there may exist a Left utopianism and a Right utopianism. Left utopianism is clear -- it believes that we should make everyone happy, restore stability to planet Earth's ecosystems, and allow us all to be both smart and free to do as we please as long as our exercises of freedom do not harm others. Left utopianism is about democracy, human rights, plenty of friends and the good life. Sure, there are lots of tradeoffs and practical questions with Left utopianism, which is really the whole of utopianism because it's the only utopianism worth considering. But there it is. Right utopianism is often in need of elaboration, as the Right partisans do not themselves wish to "go there" when it is they who have created the dreadful "there" in the first instance. An example of Right utopianism will suffice to demonstrate the point. Anti-abortion utopianism, for instance, imagines a happy world in which no fetuses are killed and every mother happily brings her baby to term. The idea of being "pro-life," however, is not to explore the actual scary world which obtained in times and places where abortion was illegal, but rather to promote the ideas of jailing abortion doctors and women who perform coat-hanger abortions upon themselves as if these acts were something innocuous.
I suppose the last Right utopian to actually "go there" in any deep, extensive way was Adolf Hitler, with his imagined thousand-year empire of happiness for Aryans who gleefully exterminate everyone else. (Remember, a utopia doesn't have to be fun for the whole of the human race -- merely for its intended beneficiaries.) With Hitler we could see the real consequences of "going there," as proposed by the bad utopians of the Third Reich.
No particular utopianism is to be considered as an article of faith. Everyone knows by now that utopianism is sometimes dangerous. Instead of utopianism being a faith or a cult, particular utopian dreams are to be considered or rejected in any reckoning of what to do, with the idea in mind that one reads utopian literature in order to learn lessons from fiction. It is this activity, this reading to gain lessons from literature, that makes utopianism worth our time. Conformism, though, is neither Right nor Left; it's only conformism, which is what we've seen in US politics over the past forty years. The conformists think they are pragmatic, and that by cutting details with establish political and economic interests they are protecting the world from disaster. Disaster, however, does not change conformist core doctrines, neoliberalism in economics, Kissingerian realism in politics, even though the conformists provoke more disaster every day through the exercise of these doctrines. The conformists rule; the utopians are insurgents.
But this particular book review is not about that political division, between utopians and conformists. It is about the originalists, the folks who wish to return the world to "Right" and "Left" origins, stubbornly insisting upon the meanings of these terms, and who in so doing have a stake in the terms "Right" and "Left," as their diehard defenders. Who are the originalists? The "Right" originalists are no doubt followers of the politics and judicial opinions of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, famous for his "originalism". "Left" originalism is handled by Geoffrey M. Hodgson, author of "Wrong Turns; How the Left Got Lost." It is his book I review here.
So what is "Left" originalism? Essentially, it's a felt need to return to the "original meanings" of the "Left," as reflected in the "Left" thinkers of the Enlightenment. Hodgson calls his doctrine "evotopianism," and lays out his ideological bias in the preface:
Do not look here for alternative radical blueprints, or skip to the end in search of utopian visions or detailed policy prescriptions: they are not there. Some of the biggest lessons spring from an understanding of the wrong turnings of the past, and from an appreciation of what must be preserved. I am an evotopian, not a utopian. (x)
So what is an "evotopian"? What Hodgson describes is a Deweyan democracy larded down with some Adam Smith utopianism. The Deweyan democracy is mostly good; the Smith stuff obscures, like a faith or a cult belief. Portions of Dewey might help us in the future; Adam Smith with his obsession with "markets" is not quite what the 21st century needs. Are the victims of natural disaster, such as will occur increasingly in an era of climate change, all to solve their problems by becoming Smith's heroes, the small entrepreneurs? No.
Hodgson also thinks he is being original by rediscovering "original Enlightenment values" such as democracy and human rights. I don't. Conformist politics is in favor of democracy, as long any particular election is the presentation of a fait accompli foisted by an organized elite upon an unwitting public. Utopian politics is about real democracy, not just the show variety. Conformist politics is also in favor of human rights, as long as the human right being promoted is the right of entrepreneurs to cheat the public of basic subsistence. Utopians would like to see human rights extended to rights of subsistence. At least Hodgson agrees with that proposition, which is a good thing.
Hodgson thinks it's important to defend "private property," too. There's nothing wrong with "private property" as long as it's not the ownership of the means of production by a tiny elite. The conformists love private property, so much so that they've created a world in which half the world is owned by the richest 1%. Utopians, on the other hand, would like to explore other arrangements, including public control of the means of production.
In other reviews of this book, much is made of Hodgson's opposition to "socialism and collectivism." By way of explanation, one reason socialist collectivist types such as myself like these terms is because we're looking for a utopian society in which human society is constituted by processes which are open and transparent and which do not happen "behind the backs of the producers." If this phrase "behind the backs of the producers" seems familiar, this is because it comes from chapter 1 of volume 1 of Marx's "Capital." Utopians reading Wrong Turnings are in favor of Dewey -- we just don't think that a well-done Deweyan democracy is compatible with Hodgson's emphasis upon "markets," even the restricted ones he advocates. We're also in favor of democracy and human rights, as long as the democracy is real democracy, with real rule by the public, and as long as the human rights actually protect us against predatory entrepreneurs and predatory states. (A utopian world with no predatory entrepreneurs or predatory states would be preferable, but that's another issue.)
Most of Hodgson's book is filled with glosses on economic and political history. He reviews the radicals of early modern Europe, the intellectuals of the French Revolution, Thomas Paine, and Marxism (which he seems to have conflated with the simplified versions presented by Engels and by the later apologists for "Communism"). If you're trying to find out who these people are, your best bet is to read original sources rather than Hodgson's glosses. If you want to read a Left originalist to find out what Left originalism is, read Hodgson.
Comments
Excellent work, Cass.
Really useful. Sorry I'm rushed at this moment--I've got people coming over in less than an hour. Otherwise I'd have more to say.
At the moment all I can say is "Bravo!"
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Thank you.
I keep trying.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
Original thinking (to me) about left/right becoming meaningless
I need to re-read this a few times, because the framework - originalist vs utopian - was completely new to me.
For decades, I have been hearing how leftism failed because it delivered what it promised (decent jobs, decent wages, decent public services) and became the establishment it had fought. Because it was the new establishment, it caught the blame for everything that went wrong, even when those failures were caused by sabotage from the right (Wall St. looting, MIC warmongering). The left never got control of Wall St or the Pentagon. Those power centers simply blocked the funding (starve the beast) and left the impoverished left governments holding the bag, focused the hatred of 1% looting on a government that never had control of the 1% but claimed it did. (Sort of a slow motion version of what we are doing to Venezuela.)
I agree that L v R is a dead debate. First, the corporate media labels neocon/neoliberal warmonger and looterk HRC as a "leftist". What nonsense. Second, as Bill Maher said, the right has checked into a loonie bin. I think your critique of "right utopianism" is spot on:
I had trobule interpreting what you meant by "go there". I think you mean take the rhetoric into action. IOW, rightist utopias are a fraud, a lie, a Potemkin village. Rightist utopias only work for the 1% and their slave lackeys, like the prison guards' union. For the other 99%, rightist utopias are hell on earth.
All in all, I found this a unique and thought-provoking essay, with a new way of categorizing what is left of non-elite politics in our so-called democracy. Thanks for writing it. And, I will not be wasting my money on Hodgson's book.
This seems like a waste of time
What if I said that I had original ideas? Ideas that could be truly radical and paradigm-shifting?
I keep getting total mixed messages about my value and intelligence - you're not allowed to be a genius anymore, but I find that the only way to avoid such a conclusion about myself is to willingly surrender to the Bed of Procrustes. I've honestly worried about prion diseases, such has been the decay of my mind. People used to enable me and protect me, and I was consequently was able to perform in a manner so consistently impressive that I thought it was normal, but now people only care about my "disabilities" - the more people try to "help me", the more I'm left with nothing but a sub-mediocrity.
But I digress; what if I had better ideas than this? How would I go about...you know, getting them recognized? I used to be able to write, but like I said, my mind has decayed so much (a steady decline since circa 2004) that I...can't. I need structure (of the right sort that doesn't seem to exist anymore, even in people's memories, NOT of the "let me HELP YOU by erasing you and replacing you with pablum" variety) and enablement, and the facilitation of what I can't do to do what I CAN do, and being in the right place at the right time seems like a lot to do with it. I can picture what I'd need, but I don't know how to communicate it (I thought I did, but every time I try, it's like what SHOULD be sufficient - like "pass the salt" if I want the salt - it turns out that not even my parents and therapists have a clue what I'm talking about)...I digress again.
I have ideas. BETTER ideas. I think. How am I to know when the whole world seems to have suddenly become a poppy-cropping hellhole? I feel like that woman from the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who finally sorts out The Answer that [SPOILER ALERT] Earth was constructed to reach, only for it to be destroyed by a Vogon constructor fleet seconds later before she can reach a telephone. I digress again.
How do I...you know...I have ideas, and have for many, many years. How do I get them out there (especially when they're supremely heterodox, likely even by in many of the eyes on this site)?
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
@The Liberal Moonbat EDIT because I misunderstood.
If what you'd like is perhaps a circle of people who could share ideas more privately, in rough draft form, before putting them on prime time, I bet you could find some people who would do that.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
@The Liberal Moonbat That being said, if you
That being said, if you need help articulating the ideas...maybe that's what you meant, and I misread you, in which case, I apologize...ask for help. I'm sure there's people here who would be willing to help you. I would.
Personally, I have no problem with defined spaces where ideas don't get immediately attacked. Ironically, that's where the word "caucus" comes from in the title of this site: my attempt to create a discursive space oriented toward something other than conflict on Markos' site.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
@The Liberal Moonbat That said, I don't think
That said, I don't think this essay is a waste of time at all. It redefined politics quite sensibly. I thought.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
I meant the book she was referring to
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
@The Liberal Moonbat Oh, I get it!
Oh, I get it!
Sorry. Dumb.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Perhaps a professional life coach
...whose job is to help you discover how to accomplish your goals.
Just writing that down made me realize that I would benefit from that kind of arrangement.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Are you okay?
Have you tried having a brain scan?
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
Multiple times
The most recent readout was "normal [i.e. healthy] brain".
You wouldn't believe what a PITA I've found it to be to work with neurologists.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
@The Liberal Moonbat I would believe it.
I would believe it. It's getting to where I feel allergic to all traditional medical systems. The people within them often don't operate in a way that makes me think they're on the patient's side, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. For one thing, people in those systems often seem not to listen much.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Sorry to read that.
One should have been enough.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
yeah, it lost me
around the 4th paragraph.
I'm sure it's useful on some level.
But most of this stuff, right or left, we know when we're 19-ish.
Without opening a book.
Our textbook for poli-sci 101 was Newsweek magazine. And one or two books by David Halberstam. That was about it.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
OK, they're coming an hour later.
You have successfully redefined politics in just the way I was hunting for, so thank you.
I do feel, however, that there is a certain ridiculousness in calling Hillary Clinton "left" or Barack Obama a socialist, or calling the latest installments of the Star Wars saga "feminist." It's not just political stances or groups that are being redefined; it's social justice movements and the injuries they arose to address. Racism and sexism and their opposites have been successfully redefined over the past six to eight years, and that is horrendous. And if anyone who isn't a woman comments on this phenomenon w/regard to sexism or if anyone white comments on it with regard to racism, they are immediately subject to quick and dirty character assassination. I just bet the terms "whitesplaining" and "mansplaining" originated in some DC consulting firm...or maybe at Langley.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Hopefully, only in the "political community"
With community and ordered culture comes conformity, jargon, dialect, a false perception of consensus, parochialism, and of course bigotry. People are going hellbent in ALL THE DIRECT OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS I'd simultaneously been determining we SHOULD be going (i.e. "Groups are all that matter!" when I'd reached the conclusion that group identity itself is the enemy we should at last be evolving beyond). I've seen a lot of other websites, mostly of the putatively-apolitical entertainment type, where this crap is not embraced - or even met with pointed hostility. The people I know who actually DO crap with their lives, rather than re-fighting World War 1 in clicktivist form, also tend to be resistant. They are "ignorant"...and somehow, that keeps them smart.
This feels eerily like the villainous scheme in that sub-par Jackie Chan movie, The Tuxedo: "Water that makes you thirsty..." muses the ill-fated underling as he begins desperately hydrating his way to mummification.
Knowledge that makes you stupid....
Incidentally, what you refer to is all what's better-known as "argumentum ad hominem". Racism/sexism/etc etc are all sub-incarnations of that fallacy.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
I'm very fond of Dewey. Adam Smith's views were always
reliant on the very structures his supporters decry: he admits himself that his system won't work without the government stepping in and regulating capitalism (otherwise capitalism becomes a series of monopolies and cartels that take both customers and small business owners as their prey, entrenching their power in a way that neither customers nor small business owners can challenge). Now it's apparent that even that won't work for very long (and by "work" I mean "provide a reasonable facsimile of a functioning human civilization that doesn't destroy the ground it walks on, at least for about 40-50% of the people involved.")
Nobody can defend capitalism now and remain rational. That's why there's such a massive effort to distract people from that fundamental issue, and even do hatchet jobs on those who continue to focus on it. They have retooled the fights against various forms of bigotry for their own purposes, the primary of which seems to be to sabotage those who point out capitalism's fundamental bankruptcy: one cannot rationally support a system which renders the world far less capable of supporting human life. Unless of course, one is against humanity and wants it to diminish or die so that less destructive forms of life take its place. I've met few capitalists who feel that way.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Right.
I think they're left with "capitalism is the best we can do." That, after all, is what Brit environmentalist Jonathon Porritt is left with in his screeds. Such argumentation is of course conformism at its most honest, for it reveals a fundamental, physiological, inability to conceive of anything better than what we have now.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
@Cassiodorus Fundamental
Fundamental physiological inability to conceive of anything better--yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Sums a lot of things up. Have you noticed how reliant conformism is on inevitability, and how popular arguments based on inevitability are lately?
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Very engaging, for a "drab political reality"
We are seriously in the thickets here until we redefine our labels, and I'd put "Right" and "Left" at the top. However when you pose it as "Utopian" vs "Conformist," I have to agree that's what we've come to. Left and right have definitely passed their use-by dates. We must eschew dumb framing going forward.
Yes. Well, you said it so much better. I have defined the Left as the "keepers of the vision," and there actually was a "vision" that was driving all the genocidal nation-building. The vision grew robust during the Enlightenment and the educated visionaries of the time developed new ways of thinking about civilization and self-determination for both individuals and the nation. Like all visions, it was flawed, but even that they anticipated. They designed a mechanism for evolving the vision across the coming centuries.
Unfortunately, I think they misjudged the caliber of the people being exiled in America. They were unsophisticated and arrived without a cohesive culture; they were in alien surroundings among complete strangers and had no indigenous wisdom connected to the land. In short, they were incapable of self-government, and that became their culture. So, the flaws were permanently baked in and the conformist mindset soon replaced the visionary mindset of the Founders.
Well, if course people want to return to the original vision. They want American to be great again, with opportunities for everyone. The Founder class had envisioned the wealth and power of international trade that could be extracted from the stolen land of plenty. The resources were boundless and awaiting exploitation. There was plenty to share with all the new arrivals.
The peasant-class colonists would farm their plots or ply their trades in the port cities and beyond. Some would become merchants and entrepreneurs. The monied elite, who were invested and well-connected, would gather as high society while the slaves sang their African songs and labored agreeably in the cash crop agriculture of the plantations. Or so they thought.
It was the intellectuals among them who would use their privileged leisure time to envision their utopia. They fantasized about democracy taking place in the formal style and manner of the monarchies. They debated commerce and property rights and personal rights and the laws that were to come. Plato could have told them their vision was doomed: capitalism and democracy cannot coexist, they degrade into totalitarian dictatorships. Keynes had it right: "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
Exactly. Although I see conformism beginning to bloom when the People missed the first 20-year mark after the signing of the Constitution. They were supposed to modernize their constitution for each generation — once every 20 years. It is really a very short and sketchy document, as constitutions go. It was unfinished, and by ignoring their duty the people lost their opportunity to self-determination. It was all over before it even got started. We would eventually run out the clock on all those baked-in flaws that turned this nation into a typical Monopoly board game.
I don't think there are many visionaries left in America anymore, not anywhere on the political compass. Do you?
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Pluto I'm glad you agree with me --
on the left-right thing.
It appears that there aren't many visionaries left in America, maybe because American mainstream culture is so un-visionary. Wouldn't a sane, rational mainstream culture be about the climate change future, and about how we're going to survive it, if we indeed can do so at this late date? It's also amazing that it's taken so long to legalize weed for personal use, and then only on the West Coast, in Colorado, and in three states in New England. Why? America so desperately needs to smoke a joint w/o fear of cops.
As for American utopian culture, there was a lot of it, though most of that was too long ago to matter now. There were a lot of communes in early America, before the Civil War -- people looking for utopia, inspired by Fourier or Owen or Cabet. Chris Jennings wrote about them in his book Paradise Now. That went away when the Civil War began. There was another later period of utopianism that centered around fiction-writing, in the 1880s and 1890s, probably inspired by Edison's invention of the large-scale power plant in 1882. Novels came out proclaiming that electrification would solve all of humanity's ills.
The hippies of the Sixties and the science-fiction writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction (loosely, from the publication of Isaac Asimov's Foundation in 1951 to the publication of John Varley's Barbie Murders collection in 1980) were also utopians. Star Trek is a utopia of that time, with instantaneous travel and food and drink and exciting adventures in outer space. Imagine what we'd have if the US government could get over its fantasies of weapons systems and devoted even a portion of that "defense" money to the exploration of medicine -- we'd have the utopia of John Varley's Eight Worlds universe, another relic of the Golden Age of Science Fiction ("Picnic on Nearside" was written in 1974) in which one walks into a "body shop" and orders the body one is going to inhabit, sex and age being matters of choice, after the procedures are over. None of the debilitating diseases which take our loved ones from us today would be any problem at all. Our currently-thriving hippie communes and our dreams of ecotopia and of functioning anarchist society (e.g. Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed") originate in that period.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
Yep. We had those pockets of utopia.
But I agreed with your dichotomy of conformists and utopians. To make that dynamic really meaningful I imagined that a virtual space was opened in our social psyche, expecting enlightened utopians or lateral thinkers to emerge and balance out all the conformist energy. During the Enlightenment, it must have seemed that way. But few heard the call, and those that did made everybody very nervous. Ironic that the inspired crucible that gave birth to the American experiment became criminalized in the end. As you say, the utopians are insurgents. That's probably what the drug wars are about and why we won't leave Afghanistan. Never have the people had such a pressing need for visionaries and for a vision of the future that they can share. Foreigners seem more in touch with their national vision.
John Varley altered my taste in sci-fi with Titan [the Gaean Trilogy]. It sent me off into a niche sub-genre: space sagas about utopian worlds built inside of hollow monoliths that roamed through space and evolved, picking up new species along the way. Varley fashioned detailed worlds when he wrote. This has all reminded me of one of my favorite books of that era, Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.
Building a utopia is probably one of those things that could save us. It's out of our hands in any event. I'm betting on China. They set ambitious goals and have the money, talent, and focus to accomplish them. They met their Paris Accord goals 12 years early, and may try to pick up the slack for the US.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
China seems authoritarian, capitalist,
and quite smoggy in the big cities, which is the main reason I dare not visit. The peripheral Chinese ruling class wants to leave the country for the West Coast of the Americas so their kids can breathe clean air in Vancouver, and there are plenty of Chinese-speakers in San Francisco in case they get tired of the Vancouver weather.
Back in 2015 I think there was this Whitehead conference in Claremont, not as memorable as the World-Ecology conference that year near the East Coast, but still interesting. Anyway, there was this Chinese woman who presented on one of the evenings. I don't remember her name -- she talked about Chinese eco-villages. At any rate, about a quarter of the way into her presentation it became clear what the unifying element was in the Chinese eco-villages she presented. These people were devout Confucians! Were you thinking of converting to Confucianism Pluto? Maybe you'd fit right in.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
I am practicing Taoist
...the radical Left of Eastern philosophy.
Conservatism and conformity was perfected in China 2500 years ago by Confucius, and it's been going strong since. It made a epigenetic leap to the Chinese DNA. Structurally, it's great, but it was that hippy poet, Lao Tzu, who taught the Emperors how to lead effortlessly.
China is interesting, in a high IQ sort of way.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Utopian vs. Conformism
The problem I have with these labels is that Utopian and Conformism can be bad or good depending on the underlying values of either group. If I lived in a society that valued the welfare, health and freedom of all to pursue their interests (without harming others) and that was the dominant ethos, I suppose I would be called a Conformist. In that case, I can imagine a Utopian espousing that we should all be free to exploit each other and pursue our individual self interest and not have to share with anyone else -- like Libertarianism or Anarchism.
In other words, I prefer terms that convey the values, such as Individualism vs. Allism (I want to say "Community-ism," but it is too close to a term that has already been demonized). It seems to me that for a short period of time in the 1950's and 1960's it was socially frowned upon to be greedy and overly aggressive in pursuing one's self interest, particularly material interests. Civics was taught in the public schools, the top marginal tax rates were 90% at $1M, executive compensation was only a moderate multiplier of the average worker, and team and teamwork was valued over individual greatness. Now, after years of propaganda to change that ethos, it has become almost an article of faith that individualism, greed, and self-interest (and resultant narcissism) are the dominant features of human nature around which any legitimate institution should be built.
When is the last time you heard anyone in the MSM say, "There is no I in TEAM?"
huh?
If you lived in such a society you would already have arrived in utopia, and there would be no point in the sort of politics that was the topic of this essay.
I won't say anything here about libertarianism here but most anarchism is not like this at all. Please read some Peter Kropotkin.
Actually, institutions are still based on cooperation and trust, just as before -- what has changed is that, after decades of promoting individualism, greed, and self-interest to gild the images of the entrepreneurs, institutions now feel increasingly free to abandon and/or rip off the rest of us, and we've been told that if we're a missed paycheck or two away from destitution, this is because we're not individualistic, greedy, or self-interested enough.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
@Cassiodorus My initial point (to
My initial point (to which you replied "Huh?") is that one man's utopia may be another man's hell. Why not use terms that reflect the underlying values of the labels being used?
gotta say that
i've been treated to your Huh? subset line in the past, and it sure seemed like academic hubris to me, whether it was your interpretation of what i'd said, or that i hadn't expressed myself clearly (kinda par for the course on which i reside).
in my post-psycho-spiritual revolution, academics and intellectuals wouldn't be honored unless they showed wisdom as well, which are horses of two different colors, imo.
I don't think intellectual analysis
and conventional oppositions: socialism vs capitalism; right vs left utopianism; etc actually matter. What we suffer -- not just in the US, but the world over -- is that every single rational system that can be imagined and even applied can be, has been, and will be made subordinate to the most ruthless psychopaths.
I don't see a way that this changes. Science has some clues on psychopath detection, for instance imaging of the brain indicating low or no emphatic ability. But even that is not determinative of behavior. Some psychopaths are aware of their deficiencies and contribute "as if" normal.
Even if tests could be administered that would weed out sickos, who would be among the first to authorize them and release determinations?
Really the only hope I see is a spontaneous embracing of Conscience by enough people to risk standing together to force media to acknowledge that our Parties, foreign, and financial policies are in the hands of corrupt self-serving lunatics.
And I mean "lunatics" as a precise description.
Orwell: Where's the omelette?
@jim p I agree with you, jim,
I agree with you, jim, except in the sense that I feel strongly that we should push back against propaganda and perception management/control.
"Left" and "right" are being used for propaganda and perception control purposes. That's why I find this essay useful.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
I agree this essay is useful
and that the propaganda needs to be countered. We've got the proximate problems of plunderism and war/mongering keeping people off-balance and scattered, and that's an urgent problem. The highest urgency in my opinion.
You might remember the Yippies "prairie fire" notion. Rebellion in to many locations to be put out. But the CIA had studied and mastered Mao's technique and the radical left's decades ago. Now the media starts the prairie fires and here we go running around fighting on a hundred different fronts, and never getting ahead.
We need a laser focus of every part of the 99% on one thing, and just for a period, imo. And that would be forcing media to acknowledge both parties are corrupt and a liability to America.
As to the underlying cause -- ruthless psychopaths rise to control -- that's what we really need to come to grips with, and to solve.
Orwell: Where's the omelette?
BTW, I really do value
the essay for its introduction of new perspectives. Anything that enlivens thought and reframes assumptions is valuable in itself.
Orwell: Where's the omelette?
Limited madness, counteracting full out programed crazy
To keep within you a slippery definition of how best to advance our cause (making a better world), without reducing your self esteem can be a challenge. Fight fire with fire. You know others that want to help with change. Join together. Express free flowing thoughts. The solution is loosening expectations of what sanity appears to be, accepting non-linear problem solving as valid, believing in good with self and others, finding a role in that script. Most best ideas come thru communication of shared visions.
This is garbage:
"I suppose the last Right utopian to actually "go there" in any deep, extensive way was Adolf Hitler with his imagined thousand-year empire of happiness for Aryans who gleefully exterminate everyone else."
dfarrah
Why?
People who say sh#t without explaining themselves are basically no fun.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill
Are you comparing the
right in this country to Hitler?
(and when I say the right, I'm including conservatives and not referring to the small groups of Nazis that exist in the US).
If you are, who do you include in your definition of 'right?'
dfarrah
Since I'm uninterested in generalizing about the "Right"
or even the "Left," for that matter, I don't have a big stake in my definition of "Right." I am suggesting that, when it comes to utopianism, American thinkers who call themselves "Right" are typically reticent in imagining perfect worlds. This is an argument about utopianism and its absence. In fact, if you look at the self-proclaimed American Right position on climate change, which is climate change denial, you have an intentional failure to imagine any future world at all. The deniers have famously decided that climate change mitigation is bad for the economy, and so climate change must not exist.
Anyway, the point of being a utopian is to imagine a future in which human problems have all been solved, which is something a self-proclaimed member of the "Right" usually doesn't do. Usually self-proclaimed "conservative" thinkers renounce the idea of utopia because in their heads all striving for fundamental human improvement results in the evil Soviet Union. And nobody thinks seriously about pronouncements that everyone would magically become self-reliant if the government abolished welfare. Maybe American neo-Confederates still harbor some sort of utopian nostalgia for the antebellum South, but this is usually kept a secret. In short, there isn't much there.
Hitler's dream of a thousand-year empire was the great exception to all this. Not only did he proclaim it, he tried to achieve it, standing an unfortunate chance of making it happen, and thus Hitler's utopia was extensive in a way you don't usually see today among the self-proclaimed "Right." Self-proclaimed conservatives today are usually into political conformism.
'French theory is a product of US cultural imperialism." -- Gabriel Rockhill