Adam Kotsko — On civil war

We have a new tag — "civil war." Sadly, it has come to the point that serious people are discussing the issue.

Adam Kotsko is a rising public intellectual.

Incidentally, I follow many blogs and news sources on the RSS feed. The political divide in the US reflects the growing political divide in the world between unipolarism (my way or the highway) and and multipolarism (let a hundred flowers bloom). The right is convinced that the left is "communist," while the left is convinced that the right is "fascist."

This is not headed in a good direction either domestically in the US or internationally.

We the subject of war is occurring more frequently, both internationally and in terms of an actual US civil war.

This is happening mostly in venues that appeal mostly to the silos they represent. Since it hasn't been picked up by the corporate media, most are probably unaware of it.

An un für sich
On civil war
Adam Kotsko, independent scholar

See also

"Mob" again. The new political meme. You can see where this is going.

Zero Hedge
Trump: "Angry Mob" of "Radical Democrats" Has Become "Too Extreme And Too Dangerous To Govern"

Max Diamond — Identitarianism and the Splintering of Democracy

I don't see identarianism or identarian epistemology as problem although it is an issue. It lies at the foundation of postmodern critique. 

identarianism or identarian epistemology are issues that a represetative democracy should be able to handle by ensuring that all identity groups are represented by qualified people. so that all can feel –genuinely – that they have a seat at the table rather than either token representation or no representation.

This is what social and political liberalism are about, after all.

Quilette
Identitarianism and the Splintering of Democracy

Max Diamond

Hannah Arendt was a literary intellectual, defined by Thomas Pynchon as, “people who read and think.” Like Socrates, Hannah Arendt thought and went where thought took her. Arendt’s thinking led her many places, but one of the more interesting topics she thought about was the source of human values. Arendt shared Nietzsche’s and Marx’s belief that moral values are made by humans and not, as the Enlightenment believed, independently existing principles of right and wrong. As Nietzsche and Marx are both earlier in history and more forceful in their language then Arendt (and also, notably, men), Arendt’s own thinking on how values are made gets less attention than it merits.

Arendt devotes much of her most important book, The Human Condition, to elaborating three different categorical distinctions important for how she thinks our experience of existence shapes how we make human values. She calls the first distinction the social/private/political distinction, the second the labor/work/action distinction and the third the earth/world distinction. To understand these three distinctions correctly is to follow Arendt’s thinking on human values, and they are best taken in reverse order....

OUP Blog

Hannah Arendt and the source of human values

Steven Maloney

Nikolai Starikov — Global Politics – a war of meanings

Even those people the very furthest from politics are feeling the need for understanding and explaining to themselves the reasons for the things they encounter even just moving through their own lives. Why have prices in stores started to go up? What’s the reason for the fact that, quietly and nearly unnoticed, belief in a brighter tomorrow is slipping? When and why did talk about a possible war stop being speculative and distant? These and dozens of other questions have driven millions of yesterday-apolitical citizens to seek answers. They feel the need to find those answers and to construct a new worldview in which what-comes-tomorrow is not simply a lottery ticket, but a predictable and logical continuation of today. Predictable and, hopefully, not frightening.

This atmosphere, unfortunately, is a breeding grounds for attempts to brainwash our citizens and to stuff their heads with ideas which will be devastating to them personally. But this devastation will come hidden within banal attempts stubbornly do good. So let’s try to dissect the methods and means of manipulating the people’s conscience which we have already started to encounter. And, which will grow in direct proportion to the problems being encountered by our geopolitical opponents.…

The Vineyard of the Saker
Global Politics – a war of meanings
Nikolai Starikov
Translated by DzhMM, Mikhael, Gideon

"Feeling the need for understanding and explaining to themselves the reasons for the things they encounter even just moving through their own lives" is the foundation of both explanation and the construction of a worldview in terms of which explanation can be pursued and developed. This is a reason that controlling the narrative is so important with respect to power relationships. Human require some structure in terms of which to interpret experience, and because those structure are created historical and socially, they are subject to being controlled rather than arising naturally and spontaneously from free enquiry. Thus, "engineering" or "manufacturing consent."

David Fields — A Short Note on Social Theory and Enquiry

Brief summary of the epistemological conditions that influence methodological options is the social sciences. Fields know how to pack a paragraph. Very nice.

Short translation: Everyone has a POV and that POV introduces epistemological presuppositions as methodological assumptions into all theoretical enquiry. Methodological assumptions function as norms in selecting and organizing data, for example, through prioritizing.

Naked Keynesianism
A Short Note on Social Theory and Enquiry
David Fields

Cognitive Dissonance — The Science Delusion – Reexamining our Worldview Mindset

About construction of worldviews. Highly recommended.

Finishes strong with Rupert Sheldrake's Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery.

Zero Hedge
The Science Delusion – Reexamining our Worldview Mindset
Cognitive Dissonance

Ethan Watters — There's Such a Thing as "Human Nature," Right?

Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way human behavior and culture is understood.

AlterNet
There's Such a Thing as "Human Nature," Right?
Ethan Watters | Pacific Standard

Here's a comment I made at FB on a similar matter.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to elucidate in his later philosophical works on on the logic of ordinary language, in particular Philosophical Investigations, language use is embedded in context. Human beings are part of that context and therefore cannot stand outside it and observe it. We have to observe it from inside and attempt to see to the best our ability now language operates in expression.

When we look at ordinary language use, we find a lot of things going on at once, which technical uses seek to simplify, in that while rich, ordinary language is not always precise. But technical languages are not rich enough to convey emotion, either. So there is a trade off between "matter and manner," logic and rhetoric, reason and emotion, for instance.

One of the most striking aspects of investigating language is that logic analysis reveals many things that are not usually noticed but which are extremely relevant. E.g., the way one uses ordinary language reveals that certain expressions that appear to be descriptive are actually playing a foundational role as norms, such as basic criteria, often ontological, epistemological, ethical and even esthetic.

In this way, one's use of language reveals a "worldview" or "world picture (Weltbild) that characterizes a "form of life" (Lebensform) as shared context. Thus, we could say that ordinary language has hidden assumptions embedded in it and just because they are shared even by large numbers doesn't guarantee their ontological or epistemological status.

Historically, many of these norms and criteria have been disproved or replaced for other reasons. Very often the scientific understanding of the time contributes significantly to a world view that later changes, as when the earth-centric view was switched for a heliocentric view, and the predominantly religious world view gave way to the chiefly scientific one. Historically the popular world view of a large number of fairly well educated members of a group also lags the state of the art scientific opinion, although there there may be significant disagreement among experts, e.g., the interpretation of QM is hardly a settled matter because it is not scientific but metaphysical.

Wittgenstein regarded the proper role of philosophy to be logical critique. Thus, philosophy becomes properly a logical exercise in determining the assumptions underlying a world view by examining the type of role they play in the "language games" in which they figure as rules. One could compare this to the institutional approach in economics and the cultural approach in sociology v. the "natural" approach that assumes.

In this sense Phil is correct about being wary of the use of science, e.g., in the case of evolutionary theory to justify eugenics, or social Darwinism in political economy. But that is a different issue from a theory as an explanatory and predictive instrument.

What Phil is really more concerned with is how the scientific community functions as a social and political institution and on what basis. To presume it is just science may not be true to the facts. The ability to use knowledge yields power, and there are many ways to use knowledge. Neoclassical economics is used to justify neoliberalism in political economy, for instance, but neoclassical economics is based on neoliberal assumptions that economics as a "science" does not justify, modeling assumptions not being treated as theoretical hypotheses. So the reasoning is circular.

MIT Technology Review — Poll Reveals Quantum Physicists’ Disagreement About the Nature of Reality

A survey of leading thinkers shows that they are as far as ever from agreeing on the nature of reality

MIT Technology Review | The Physics arXiv Blog
Poll Reveals Quantum Physicists’ Disagreement About the Nature of Reality

Here is the study.