Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 20:58:23 EDT
Subject: Re: PKF: Walking On


In a message dated 8/10/98 3:00:09 PM Eastern Daylight Time, patters-AT-clnet.cz
writes:

> Just briefly on your lucid remarks below: 
> Remember this Third Way slogan?: 
> "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden." 
>
> This intellectual provincialism has brought us a number of external
> mechanisms of control over behavior which can be labelled under
> an orientation. The only models for such such Third Way slogans
> are force and perhaps gravity, and bear the same assumptions as
> those 'back to the beginning' 'back to the land' 'Year Zero' policies 
> of Pol Pot's citizen morass. You perpicuously exposed what
> I meant by schadenfreude. And the lack of irony on the perpetrators
> (I don't want to sound like an inquisitor, but so what) is
> actually a crucial point. It is a part of the picture which I did not
> consider consciously. For a potentially successful effort of Social
> Democracy, you might want to monitor the happenings in the
> Czech Republic, where the Social Democrats were just recently
> 'victorious'. If you are interested, you might send me an e-mail.
> I also have to agree with your comments regarding Feyerabend
> and others.

I have Czech friends, and very much admire Gustav Havel. He is an honest
and lucid man. If "Third Way" reasoning has befogged the sociopolitical milieu
of
the Czech Republic, I'm sorry for that. One of my Czech friends is a lady
whose middle
name was Lenka Osers, who left Czechoslovakia at age 11, just ahead of the
Soviet tanks
that crushed the Prague Spring. Why ? Well, her father, Jan, had held a
position in the Dubcek government, and it wasn't safe for him to stick around.
Osers was familiar with the strictures of political confinement, being half-
Jewish, he spent part of the war in an SS concentration camp, and bore the
marks of his incarceration. This man ended up teaching
political economy at the University of Mannheim. Although time and change in
the Federal Republic of Germany split this family in unpleasant ways, they
were all good social democrats. The mother eventually returned to
Czechoslovakia, but I believe Dr. Osers continued to stay in Mannheim: I
believe he is now dead.

All this compels me to follow up on this related point:

Michael wrote:

> I'm sure we all reject the
> positivist notion of "science" as something seperate from society and
> agree that whatever "science" is, it is influenced by many factors
> which have nothing to do with theory or experiment. Further though if
> we expand his idea to take into account aspects of reality which would
> traditionally not be classed as "science" say politics for example,
> then we run into a quagmire of difficulty deciding relevancy and
> irrelevancy let alone in predicting results even in an approximate
> way. So you see I have a little bit of difficulty with use of this
> phrase if as it appears it is used in such a way as to construct a
> general model of reality.

This really goes to the heart of what this "third way" stuff is all about.
Irrespective of
Tom Kuhn's idea that sociology affects scientific "structures" (an argument
that seems reasonable enough on the face of it), it does not follow that
theoreticians or experimenters ought somehow to apply some sort of Kentucky
windage to their work to compensate for these things. I doubt very much
whether the conceptual and analytical tools exist to support
this. Even if a "general model of reality" is inaccessible to us, we must try
and do the best we can with the tools that we do have at our disposal. Old
socialists like Jan Osers understood that much. So what if certain truths,
values and facts, eluded them ? It is better, in my view, to maintain a firm
grasp of the obvious, than to grasp nothing at all.

The Classic Greek political theorists, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, adopted a
rough and ready set of axioms that established what they knew about political
society and political man. I agree that we have not advanced very far beyond
that level, and the "relevancy" of "method" in this instance tends to be
problematic. But what of it ? So what if political phenomena are not
"sensitive" to numerical analysis ? If we were competent enough in math, we
might discover analytical methods that did allow for adequate prediction,
given adequate knowledge. I don't buy this old canard that political behavior
changes because someone is observing that behavior (ala Heisenberg). Political
scientists have no right to desire that the results of observation match their
expectations or their wants. If they begin, as Aristotle did, by simply
enquiring "what is", they have a much better chance to see the object of their
inquiry in a clearer light. 

If we don't examine the writings of the past unbiasedly, at least as evidence
of "what was", 
we have no chance of differentiating "what was" from "what is". Hegel and Marx
may have bounded their cosmic world views by segregating time into dialectical
periods, but why do we have to follow suit with that methodology ? If
"anything goes", I certainly do not need to be conceptually bounded by the
assumptions of finance capitalism, although if I do not at least understand
that the world in which I live operates according to certain de facto
assumptions that can be classified as capitalistic, my theories may not be
able to bridge the gap that bars them from being put into practice. Starting
out with "what is" allows me to criticize the status quo normatively, to
establish the difference between "what is" and "what should be". I may then
try, based on what I know of "what is" to establish a strategy to reach the
"what should be". Whether I succeed or I fail, I will have done the best I
could, and no one can ask for more than that.

So let's give the positivists a little respect before condemning all their
works to oblivion.

Bill R.
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