File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2003/bhaskar.0305, message 75


From: "Tim Murphy" <info-AT-cinox.demon.co.uk>
Subject: RE: BHA: [fyi] Baudrillard: The Violence of the Global
Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 18:52:13 +0100


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


"In science, there are ultimate causes and proximate causes. Insofar as
ultimate causes are concerned, terrorism can be ascribed to purely
biological mechanisms."

Naw I don't like that idea.. it is much deeper than that... if you want to
go down that route why stop at the purely biological mechanism of genes?
What about the genes of the genes?

Surely it is to do with quantum mechanics... the way particles stick
together... if they did not stick together then you could not have violence?

Therefore violence is ultimately caused by quantum chromo dynamics :)

If you think that what I say there is silly it is no more silly and wrong
that what you say.

In the 1880s the greatest physicist of the age Lord Kelvin was asked "What
is there left to discover in Physics"

He replied that it was all pretty much settled and that as of that time the
physical constants were worked out to 4 decimal places. He added that it was
necessary to work them out to 7 decimal places and then "It can all be
wrapped up".

But then in the details of these extra decimal places a host of devils
lurked... as noticed by Maxwell and then Einstein et al.

The above is a well known example of what is called premature closure.

The problem of reductionism in genetics is also one of premature closure.
The way some people think and talk it is as though we have learned nothing
from the last 100 years in the history of science.

Sure a limited number of things can be shown to be specifically genetic but
most human social phenomena are complex and emergent and for every
contribution of genetics to violence there are 99 towards cooperation which
can mostly override violence especially if education and social, economic
and political action is allowed to be employed to assist in removing the
underlying major causes of human conflict (poverty, ignorance, exploitation,
injustice etc.).

Terrorism is nothing more than a political word used to label, to structure
debate, organise perception and garner social and moral justification to
oppose certain types of unethical violence. It can be a very useful word.

Terrorism is a word used to indicate political and moral illegitimacy, the
common definition being "the use or threat of violence against innocent
civilians in furtherance of a political objective". The term can be well
used as in "US state terrorism against Nicaragua" or poorly employed as in
Richard Pearl's use of the phrase "he is just a terrorist" against the
writer Seymour Hersh who had recently exposed Pearl's personal corruption,
forcing his resignation as Chairperson of the infamous (NeoConman) Defence
Policy Board. Some people want to stretch the term to include other
categories such as political opinions they don't agree with or non-violent
ecological protests, economic boycotts etc. They want this because it suits
their own rightwing Nazi/Fascist agenda but most thinking people know what
terrorism means and are not confused by this transparent linguistic
manipulation.

What is interesting about the NeoConman moral indignation against recent
spectacular terrorism against western targets is that it is exactly the same
people who indulge in massive terrorism against others within their own
societies and against other nations who promote the perception that a holy
war against global terrorism is the only available response. These are the
same people who are actually "farming" the terrorist movements to set up
these recent terrorist dupes so that they can consolidate their own power
and weaken any potential for emerging social and economic justice. Read
Machiavelli for more insight here.

Farming in this context is a term used in the 60s by the CIA and FBI whereby
they would secretly setup what appeared to be radical organisations to
attract and then destroy people with progressive social or political
tendencies. For example they may set up a protest group to oppose a defence
contract for biological weapons research at a university campus. They would
then plant firearms in the houses of the duped members, ensuring that when
they organised a police raid the group would be locked up and its objectives
discredited.

In the case of Iraq we have the US state terrorist policy of putting Sadam
into power, arming him with weapons of mass destruction and getting him to
fight proxy war in which millions of inocents die before then destroying
Iraq and lots more Iraqi civilians because Saddams regime had weapons of
mass destruction. The real objective being to steal oil wealth and obtain a
strategic military situation in the region. The fact that Iraq no longer
possessed any serious WMD capacity is a mere technicality. In the next few
months some media events will be fabricated to ensure that enough people are
confused into thinking that there really were significant WMDs after all and
this will save the face of the NeoConmen.

To infer that terrorism has a genetic basis is like saying that word
processing has a genetic basis or that poetry has a genetic basis. What have
you said in saying those things?... Well not much, it is like saying that
making a water fountain has a genetic basis in school boy pissing
competitions.

It is more useful to see that terrorism (including farmed terrorism) is a
variety of socially and politically organised violence and that violence has
a genetic basis in aggression, a trait exhibited in most animals and which
usually has limited or specific expression. In other words terrorism is
highly emergent and it is a social and political phenomena not a genetic
phenomena. Saying otherwise is intellectual equivalent of stabbing your
computer screen with a screwdriver to fix a software problem. This is what
the USA and the UK are doing. All you get is a fucked up computer or fucked
up human population and a fucked up planet/eco system.

The joke is that you are called an appeaser if you oppose this clandestine
manipulation of violence.

Mind you we have to laugh...  I was very amused by Gore Vidal's
characterisation of the US Supreme Court as "The Ouija Board"...

Tim Murphy



  -----Original Message-----
  From: owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
[mailto:owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of shiv kumar
  Sent: 23 May 2003 17:43
  To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
  Subject: Re: BHA: [fyi] Baudrillard: The Violence of the Global


  Terrorism has nothing do with 'society's own judgment and penalty'. There
is no society which can keep each and every one content and least of all the
one which indulges in appeasement.

  The problem with social scientists is that, to paraphrase Bourdieu
himself, they like to study in mutual isolation, mutual ignorance, and
mutual contempt. This then is reflected in their analyses, which are
inadequate. In science, there are ultimate causes and proximate causes.
Insofar as ultimate causes are concerned, terrorism can be ascribed to
purely biological mechanisms. Social science stumbles when it comes to
ultimate causes.

  It is astonishing how some realists (?) rubbish ascription of genetic
reasons on ground of reductionism. This is a specious understanding of
reductionism. The fact of the matter is that reductionism and emergentism go
hand in hand. One has to uncover the first layer to go to the second and so
on. Thus from a realist perspective, there is a strong case for biological
mechanisms playing their powers and properties out. They antecede  the
humans and have autonomous powers and properties. We only need to think of
the hunter gatherer thousands of years ago, with a spear in his hand. In
2003, instead of the spear, there are B-52 bombers, Cruise missiles et al.
The mechanisms are intact. A sagacious realist is one who knows that these
mechanisms can't be altered, nor are they easily accessible; they can only
be deactivated. For instance, capitalism has deactivated, in parts of the
West, mechanisms associated with passions, honour, revenge killings, and so
on.

  The 'subject' has hitherto been taken for granted, whereas it is precisely
this that 'claims being'. Husserl too had taken the subject for granted. But
these philosophers can't be blamed--science in their times had not
progressed as it has now. The future belongs to science and not philosophy.
The last 500 years of development in both the disciplines is a testimony to
that. Whereas a scientist will rarely (only for embellishment) make a
refrain to men of antiquity, philosophers keep parroting the men of
antiquity.

  The biologists can take heart from the fact that Galileo, Newton, Darwin
were ridiculed by many in their times and all were proven correct. The
Martin Horky's (the one who belittled Galileo) are still there when the
issue of genetics comes up, it is just that they do not know, they are one!

  And when a realist denies the powers and properties of genes, he commits
epistemic fallacy in reality as distinct from a text-book. Superficial basis
of incredulity can never be the basis of science. And, if this be
reductionism, so be it. Reductionism is the chief triumph of science. Every
single victory over disease, aetiology, man going to space are all
reductionist. As said, a new interpretation of reductionism and emergentism
is required. We should not be moving with fads, but think about them.

  Shiv

  Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk> wrote:
    Hi Jan

    Baudrillard and other postmodernists are right to rail against the
    abstract, analytical universality of modernity and its virulent drive to
    elminate 'any form of negativity and singularity', such that 'terrorism
    is our society's own judgment and penalty'. As Marx showed, this drive
    is inscribed in commodity exchange itself, such that with
    ever-increasing commodification 'mere abstraction is loosed upon the
    world' (Chris Arthur, The New Diaelctic and Marx's Capital, Brill 2003,
    p. 107) and we have the scenario portrayed by Baudrillard whereby 'the
    universal has become globalized, and human rights circulate exactly like
    any other global product (oil or capital for example).' (Human rights -
    an abstract universal - have become mere means for assuring the
    reproduction of the system: 'the universal was an Idea. But when it
    became realized in the global, it disappeared as an Idea, it committed
    suicide, and it vanished as an end in itself.')

    However, to react by throwing out all notions of universality and
    celebrating only singularities and difference is surely to throw out the
    baby with the bathwater, issuing in the kind of cynicism and pessimism
    that is all too evident in Baudrillard's piece. We do have things in
    common, powers and potentials and needs as a species which, as Archer
    has shown in Being Human, are not reducible to the social and its
    tendency to universalise everything abstractly, so we can resist it. Our
    interconnection with each other has not been reduced just to 'global
    interactive copulation', 'critical negativity' has not been abolished
    (note the dismissal of the anti-globalisation movement). In a
    dialectical, rather than abstract, understanding of universality and
    universalisation, 'the one is always embedded and differentiated in the
    manifold. This is reality as we know it. This is di! alectica l
    universalisability; which means that every universal is always
    concretely singularised and every being which is a concrete singular can
    only be universalised dialectically. So what is good for you is not
    necessarily good for me. There are no universal rules ... We work
    towards a sensitised solidarity.' (Bhaskar, Reflections on meta-Reality,
    p. 47.) -- Even if you're not into the spiritual turn, I think Bhaskar's
    later works are well worth consulting for a non-dismissive critique of
    the philosophical discourse of modernity etc. -- Dialectical
    universality was recognised as a reality long before the rise of
    abstract universality (e.g., though imperfectly, in the Golden Rule) and
    will yet come into its own.

    Mervyn



    In message , Jan Straathof
    writes
    >
    >http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=385
    >
    >
    >
    >
    > --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



    --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---





----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
  It's Samaritans' Week. Help Samaritans help others.
  Call 08709 000032 to give or donate online now at
  http://www.samaritans.org/support/donations.shtm

HTML VERSION:

"In science, there are ultimate causes and proximate causes. Insofar as ultimate causes are concerned, terrorism can be ascribed to purely biological mechanisms."
 
Naw I don't like that idea.. it is much deeper than that... if you want to go down that route why stop at the purely biological mechanism of genes? What about the genes of the genes?
 
Surely it is to do with quantum mechanics... the way particles stick together... if they did not stick together then you could not have violence?

Therefore violence is ultimately caused by quantum chromo dynamics :)
 
If you think that what I say there is silly it is no more silly and wrong that what you say.
 
In the 1880s the greatest physicist of the age Lord Kelvin was asked "What is there left to discover in Physics"
 
He replied that it was all pretty much settled and that as of that time the physical constants were worked out to 4 decimal places. He added that it was necessary to work them out to 7 decimal places and then "It can all be wrapped up".
 
But then in the details of these extra decimal places a host of devils lurked... as noticed by Maxwell and then Einstein et al.
 
The above is a well known example of what is called premature closure.
 
The problem of reductionism in genetics is also one of premature closure. The way some people think and talk it is as though we have learned nothing from the last 100 years in the history of science.
 
Sure a limited number of things can be shown to be specifically genetic but most human social phenomena are complex and emergent and for every contribution of genetics to violence there are 99 towards cooperation which can mostly override violence especially if education and social, economic and political action is allowed to be employed to assist in removing the underlying major causes of human conflict (poverty, ignorance, exploitation, injustice etc.).
 
Terrorism is nothing more than a political word used to label, to structure debate, organise perception and garner social and moral justification to oppose certain types of unethical violence. It can be a very useful word.
 
Terrorism is a word used to indicate political and moral illegitimacy, the common definition being "the use or threat of violence against innocent civilians in furtherance of a political objective". The term can be well used as in "US state terrorism against Nicaragua" or poorly employed as in Richard Pearl's use of the phrase "he is just a terrorist" against the writer Seymour Hersh who had recently exposed Pearl's personal corruption, forcing his resignation as Chairperson of the infamous (NeoConman) Defence Policy Board. Some people want to stretch the term to include other categories such as political opinions they don't agree with or non-violent ecological protests, economic boycotts etc. They want this because it suits their own rightwing Nazi/Fascist agenda but most thinking people know what terrorism means and are not confused by this transparent linguistic manipulation.
 
What is interesting about the NeoConman moral indignation against recent spectacular terrorism against western targets is that it is exactly the same people who indulge in massive terrorism against others within their own societies and against other nations who promote the perception that a holy war against global terrorism is the only available response. These are the same people who are actually "farming" the terrorist movements to set up these recent terrorist dupes so that they can consolidate their own power and weaken any potential for emerging social and economic justice. Read Machiavelli for more insight here.
 
Farming in this context is a term used in the 60s by the CIA and FBI whereby they would secretly setup what appeared to be radical organisations to attract and then destroy people with progressive social or political tendencies. For example they may set up a protest group to oppose a defence contract for biological weapons research at a university campus. They would then plant firearms in the houses of the duped members, ensuring that when they organised a police raid the group would be locked up and its objectives discredited. 
 
In the case of Iraq we have the US state terrorist policy of putting Sadam into power, arming him with weapons of mass destruction and getting him to fight proxy war in which millions of inocents die before then destroying Iraq and lots more Iraqi civilians because Saddams regime had weapons of mass destruction. The real objective being to steal oil wealth and obtain a strategic military situation in the region. The fact that Iraq no longer possessed any serious WMD capacity is a mere technicality. In the next few months some media events will be fabricated to ensure that enough people are confused into thinking that there really were significant WMDs after all and this will save the face of the NeoConmen.
 
To infer that terrorism has a genetic basis is like saying that word processing has a genetic basis or that poetry has a genetic basis. What have you said in saying those things?... Well not much, it is like saying that making a water fountain has a genetic basis in school boy pissing competitions.
 
It is more useful to see that terrorism (including farmed terrorism) is a variety of socially and politically organised violence and that violence has a genetic basis in aggression, a trait exhibited in most animals and which usually has limited or specific expression. In other words terrorism is highly emergent and it is a social and political phenomena not a genetic phenomena. Saying otherwise is intellectual equivalent of stabbing your computer screen with a screwdriver to fix a software problem. This is what the USA and the UK are doing. All you get is a fucked up computer or fucked up human population and a fucked up planet/eco system.
 
The joke is that you are called an appeaser if you oppose this clandestine manipulation of violence.
 
Mind you we have to laugh...  I was very amused by Gore Vidal's characterisation of the US Supreme Court as "The Ouija Board"...
 
Tim Murphy
 
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu [mailto:owner-bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu]On Behalf Of shiv kumar
Sent: 23 May 2003 17:43
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: BHA: [fyi] Baudrillard: The Violence of the Global

Terrorism has nothing do with 'society's own judgment and penalty'. There is no society which can keep each and every one content and least of all the one which indulges in appeasement.
 
The problem with social scientists is that, to paraphrase Bourdieu himself, they like to study in mutual isolation, mutual ignorance, and mutual contempt. This then is reflected in their analyses, which are inadequate. In science, there are ultimate causes and proximate causes. Insofar as ultimate causes are concerned, terrorism can be ascribed to purely biological mechanisms. Social science stumbles when it comes to ultimate causes.
 
It is astonishing how some realists (?) rubbish ascription of genetic reasons on ground of reductionism. This is a specious understanding of reductionism. The fact of the matter is that reductionism and emergentism go hand in hand. One has to uncover the first layer to go to the second and so on. Thus from a realist perspective, there is a strong case for biological mechanisms playing their powers and properties out. They antecede  the humans and have autonomous powers and properties. We only need to think of the hunter gatherer thousands of years ago, with a spear in his hand. In 2003, instead of the spear, there are B-52 bombers, Cruise missiles et al. The mechanisms are intact. A sagacious realist is one who knows that these mechanisms can't be altered, nor are they easily accessible; they can only be deactivated. For instance, capitalism has deactivated, in parts of the West, mechanisms associated with passions, honour, revenge killings, and so on.
 
The 'subject' has hitherto been taken for granted, whereas it is precisely this that 'claims being'. Husserl too had taken the subject for granted. But these philosophers can't be blamed--science in their times had not progressed as it has now. The future belongs to science and not philosophy. The last 500 years of development in both the disciplines is a testimony to that. Whereas a scientist will rarely (only for embellishment) make a refrain to men of antiquity, philosophers keep parroting the men of antiquity.
 
The biologists can take heart from the fact that Galileo, Newton, Darwin were ridiculed by many in their times and all were proven correct. The Martin Horky's (the one who belittled Galileo) are still there when the issue of genetics comes up, it is just that they do not know, they are one!
 
And when a realist denies the powers and properties of genes, he commits epistemic fallacy in reality as distinct from a text-book. Superficial basis of incredulity can never be the basis of science. And, if this be reductionism, so be it. Reductionism is the chief triumph of science. Every single victory over disease, aetiology, man going to space are all reductionist. As said, a new interpretation of reductionism and emergentism is required. We should not be moving with fads, but think about them.
 
Shiv

Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk> wrote:
Hi Jan

Baudrillard and other postmodernists are right to rail against the
abstract, analytical universality of modernity and its virulent drive to
elminate 'any form of negativity and singularity', such that 'terrorism
is our society's own judgment and penalty'. As Marx showed, this drive
is inscribed in commodity exchange itself, such that with
ever-increasing commodification 'mere abstraction is loosed upon the
world' (Chris Arthur, The New Diaelctic and Marx's Capital, Brill 2003,
p. 107) and we have the scenario portrayed by Baudrillard whereby 'the
universal has become globalized, and human rights circulate exactly like
any other global product (oil or capital for example).' (Human rights -
an abstract universal - have become mere means for assuring the
reproduction of the system: 'the universal was an Idea. But when it
became realized in the global, it disappeared as an Idea, it committed
suicide, and it vanished as an end in itself.')

However, to react by throwing out all notions of universality and
celebrating only singularities and difference is surely to throw out the
baby with the bathwater, issuing in the kind of cynicism and pessimism
that is all too evident in Baudrillard's piece. We do have things in
common, powers and potentials and needs as a species which, as Archer
has shown in Being Human, are not reducible to the social and its
tendency to universalise everything abstractly, so we can resist it. Our
interconnection with each other has not been reduced just to 'global
interactive copulation', 'critical negativity' has not been abolished
(note the dismissal of the anti-globalisation movement). In a
dialectical, rather than abstract, understanding of universality and
universalisation, 'the one is always embedded and differentiated in the
manifold. This is reality as we know it. This is di! alectica l
universalisability; which means that every universal is always
concretely singularised and every being which is a concrete singular can
only be universalised dialectically. So what is good for you is not
necessarily good for me. There are no universal rules ... We work
towards a sensitised solidarity.' (Bhaskar, Reflections on meta-Reality,
p. 47.) -- Even if you're not into the spiritual turn, I think Bhaskar's
later works are well worth consulting for a non-dismissive critique of
the philosophical discourse of modernity etc. -- Dialectical
universality was recognised as a reality long before the rise of
abstract universality (e.g., though imperfectly, in the Golden Rule) and
will yet come into its own.

Mervyn



In message , Jan Straathof
writes
>
>http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=385
>
>
>
>
> --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



--- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---



It's Samaritans' Week. Help Samaritans help others.
Call 08709 000032 to give or donate online now at
http://www.samaritans.org/support/donations.shtm
--- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005