Subject: BHA: RE: materialism is not the answer
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 09:16:42 -0500
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>


Hi Phil,

My hope is that materialists, idealists, theists, agostics, and atheists can make common cause in building a more just world order.  I know you disagree with me, but I am convinced that materialism is essentially a theological, rather than philosophical, position.  It is a matter of faith, rather than the conclusion to a philosophical argument whose premises are accepted by all men and women of intelligence and good will.  So I think that any successful movement towards a better world will have to be "ecumenical."  I was once a candidate for the Catholic priesthood, living in Nepal, training to be a missionary.  I tried to turn away from being a missionary, but could not.  I am trying to convert others to ecumenism, just as you are trying to convert others to materialism.  

You appear to be quite tolerant of non-materialists, but also seem to believe that converting a significant number of us to materialism is the essential pre-condition to a better world.  

I am tolerant of some non-ecumenists, but have a very hard time respecting "holy warriors" -- those fanatical adherents to any set of beliefs who cry "death to the unbelievers."

Best regards,

Dick
  
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Walden [mailto:phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2003 4:36 PM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: BHA: Anti-materialist pessimism/optimism is not the answer


Hi Dick,
To me the first step on the long road to a possible new world order is to create/develop a materialist understanding of what is going on in the world system.  You are right to point out that we already have some of that understanding in place, or potentially in place, in terms of analysis of the ownership, policies (insofar as we can surmise them), and actions of the transnational corporations.  More problematic is the ideological problem of how to enthuse people with the vision and belief that a new world order - what I would call socialism - is possible. This problem will not be solved in short order, and requires a determined struggle against dogmatism and scepticism.  Philosophically, I have a problem with the view that materialism is not necessary to this process (I don't know whether you're saying this but Mervyn is and so is RB).  The problem is that if one rejects the need for a materialist philosophical approach to the task of building the new world order one is left only with ethical arguments against the existing system - which is more or less the level at which the oppositional movement is at in this period.  I am not knocking ethical arguments.  However, it is materialist arguments that are overwhelmingly the most important aspect of bringing about qualitative change in the world - ethical arguments are not (nearly) in and of themselves sufficient (if you don't know what sort of a world you're in then ethical arguments don't make sense to you
- viz for example the racist position towards immigrants and asylum seekers that most British people have got).  This anti-materialism or non-materialism seems to be a major weakness in meta-reality and in DCR. Phil  

Hi Phil,

Although the Communist ideal of a new world order was indeed inspiring, as you point out, it failed.  I think the American neo-con ideal of an American Empire with a Pax Americana has already failed -- more pox than pax.  What might very well succeed in replacing the international system of war-like nation states are the multi-national corporations -- international plutocracy.  I don't want that for my children (they aren't likely to be among the plutocrats).  

I'm not saying that a new world order is impossible.  A "global good society," however, does not seem probable.

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Walden [mailto:phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk] 
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2003 11:51 AM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war, Bourne


Hi Dick,
Thanks for the info about Randolph Bourne.  As far as I am aware, the Bolshevik leaders of the Soviet workers' state of 1917-18 did not think in terms of "sovereignty", but in terms of international working class unity as a precondition for human flourishing.  Bukharin correctly tried to develop this unity by advocating revolutionary (guerrilla) war against the advancing German army, in order to offer the German working class the opportunity to side with the Soviet workers' state (and thereby with the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union) rather than with their 'own' German bourgeoisie.  After a confused and militarily-pressured process of debate within the Bolshevik Central Committee, Bukharin's proposal was voted down and a decision was taken to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and make peace with Germany, in the hope that socialism could be consolidated in the single state of the Soviet Union.  It was a case of nationalism winning out over internationalism.  If Bukharin's view had prevailed, humanity would in all likelihood have been spared an immense amount of social pain. Whether lessons have been learnt for the world of 2003 remains to be seen. Best regards,
Phil   


Hi Phil,

Randloph Bourne was an up and coming journalist and intellectual in the period just before and during WWI.  He had been a follow of John Dewey, but broke with him over Dewey's support of the War.  He died in the influenza epidemic, either just before or just after the end of the War.

By "state" I mean what used to be called (incorrectly) the "nation-state."  Many states are "multi-national."  States, whether capitalist or workers' states, define sovereignty in terms of the right to go to war to protect (or advance) their "national interests."  The modern state does not exist in isolation, but can exist only within a system of states, each proclaiming sovereignty as a right to go to war.

For me, "war" and "state" have to be defined together.  Each have to be understood in terms of an international order of sovereign states.  A number of people, including Marx and Bush, have sought to bring about a "new world order."  So far, these attempts do not seem to have succeeded.

Best regards,

Dick

 
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Walden [mailto:phil-AT-pwalden.fsnet.co.uk] 
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 9:00 PM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war, Abraham


Hi Dick,
I would ask you for a couple of bits of clarification.  I was interested by your view that war tends to decrease internal conflicts within a state.  By "state" do you mean capitalist state or states in general (in my view the Soviet Union of November 1917 was not a capitalist state but a workers' state)?  And by "war" do you mean capitalist war or war in general (Marxists generally hold that war can be revolutionary)?  Of course, these questions would not have occurred to Hegel.  (Don't know who Bourne is or when s/he lived). Phil 



Hi James,

One of the advantages of a list is that we are forced to be more explicit about what we mean, and can review exactly what we said before. I think Bourne, and Hegel, are partially right, and partially wrong.  A state can be "healthy" only in a metaphorical sense -- it isn't really an organism.  So they are wrong.  But the metaphor suggests a number of propositions about the state that I think are right.  Such as: war tends to decrease internal conflicts within a state; war tends to empower officials of the state; war increases the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the people; etc.

>From my persective, the good effects of war upon the state are
outweighed by the evil effects, not just in terms of injury, death, and destruction, but also in some of the very things that constitute the metaphorical "health" of the state.  Truth might be the first casualty of war, but genuine democracy is not far behind, even in wars that are honestly fought to "save" democracy.

Some further comments after your comments about Kierkegaard.

-----Original Message-----
From: James Daly [mailto:james.irldaly-AT-ntlworld.com] 
Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 8:59 AM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war


Hi Dick, and all in the "nature good/bad" thread,

One of the drawbacks of a list exchange is that unlike in a face-to-face conversation ambiguities are not quickly resolved. For instance, Dick, you write "I take very seriously Randolph Bourne's aphorism, 'War is the health of the state.' " Of course it has to be taken seriously -- Hegel also said words to that effect. But is it right? And is a healthy state a good thing? If one accepts the Hobbesian view of permanent nature -- not changed, only organised for maximum utility by the state -- it is.


I think Kierkegaard saw the particularity of Benthamite hedonism as the first "stage on life's way", and the *Hegelian* universality of state-conformist "ethics" (Sittlichkeit) as the second. Despair, conscious or not -- Kierkegaard compared it to sickness, of which one can be a carrier without knowing it -- is failure to reach the third stage, that of faith, for Kierkegaard the Christian religious.

For this I would substitute, despite Kierkegaard's protests, the more over-arching secular term "ontological", seen as the existential, the particular human being facing one's finitude -- death -- and trying to reconcile it with the infinitude we are capable of imagining and even thinking, which goes beyond even the immensities of astronomical space and time. "Immortal longings" are a possible *possessive* (having) response. "Progress" has been both a bourgeois and a Marx*ist* secular response. I agree with Walter Benjamin's critique of that, and his substitution for it of the more spiritual concept of "redemption" (a phrase found in *Marx*).

MY COMMENTS:

Although I see Kierkegaard as one of the good guys, his writing has never "grabbed" me the way it does others.  I see the "aesthetic," the "ethical," and the "religious" as different aspects of a full human life, rather than as stages of human development.  Nor am I wholly comfortable with your substitution of the "ontological" for the "religious."  I can see myself praying to God, even to Krisha, but not to "being."

Nor do I see "progress" and "redemption" in either/or terms.  Why not both?

YOU WROTE:

Faith for Kierkegaard meant something like "trust" -- Abraham is his model. Faith is akin to hope, but not hope for something finite. It is more like what is expressed in the phrase "Everything has a reason". Reason after all is the highest and defining human faculty. It is a trust that the universe of being is responsive to human values, and that human goodness is not ultimately wasted, as it was for the Sophists, for whom Gyges was a model: having a magic ring which gave him invisibility and hence impunity, he murdered the King and married the Queen (as a real life Greek general named Gyges in fact did).


PS -- "Gaines" was part of an elaborate joke based on someone's repeated misspellings of Mervyn's name, to which Mervyn replied by signing himself "Marvell", without anyone except Tobin and me seeming to notice.

I REPLY:

I thought it was kinda funny, but kept quiet out of fear of giving offense -- not sure just where.  As a non-Bhaskarian critical realist, I always feel like something of an outsider on this list, even though I have always been given warm reassurances whenever I have expressed this.

Anyway, back to SK.  His admiration for Abraham has always been a source of my dislike for him.  I have read many sophisticated theological and philosophical apologies for Abraham's behavior, but I don't buy them. He's a jerk.  (Sorry, I probably have given offense by this, but I am being quite restrained in using the term "jerk.")

Best regards,

Dick



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu>
To: <bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 2:10 PM
Subject: RE: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war


> Hi Mervyn,
>
> To say that love triumphs over evil sounds to me much more like an
expression of hope than a statement of accomplished fact.  That is my hope, but I don't believe that love has already triumphed, or that it will do inevitably.  To say that it will necessarily triumph sounds so much like a "force of history" argument, something like the belief that a global communist society is inevitable.
>
> Perhaps my reading of the historical record is different from yours,
but it seems to me that one of the major contributors to fellow-feeling, or love, within a collectivity, is their common need to protect themselves from external enemies.  It is a commonplace that a major task of the political representatives of a collectivity is to organize it for protection against other, similarly organized, collectivities -- "tribes," "city-states," "nation-states," "alliances," "empires."  I take very seriously Randolph Bourne's aphorism, "War is the health of the state."
>
> Best regards,
>
> Dick
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mervyn Hartwig [mailto:mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 1:18 PM
> To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, etc.
>
>
> Hi Dick,
>
> But it hasn't, i.e. notwithstanding inter-(and intra-)specific
aggression, species have proliferated and flourished. If aggression dominated both inter- and intra- the whole show would come to a halt (as of course it might yet owing to contingent aggression within a contingently powerful species, i.e. ours; it would remain the case that there could be no process of biological evolution if love did not triumph over evil, Eros over Thanatos).
>
> Mervyn
>
>
>
>
>  "Moodey, Richard W" <MOODEY001-AT-gannon.edu> writes
> >Hi Mervyn,
> >
> >You wrote:
> >
> >"One can argue that, given that biological evolution proceeds, it
must
> >be the case that co-operation, care etc prevails over
> >self-preservation, aggression etc within species."
> >
> >But isn't it possible that conflict among (between)different
> >communities may prevail over co-operation among (between)them, even
as
> >this conflict requires high degrees of co-operation within each of
> >these communities?
> >
> >I don't write this out of any basic disagreement with the other
> >arguments for the either the existence or the fundamental goodness
of
> >something (not yet fully specified, perhaps) that we can point to
with
> >the heuristic concept, "human nature."
> >
> >Regards,
> >
>
>
>
>      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
>
>      --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>




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


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




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


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



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


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




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


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