Is not between the left, the right, or the aisle of centrism. These supposed ideological alternatives are options only because minds have been directed, or often misdirected into believing that such a choice can be made. The choice is not, as Joshua proclaimed, to follow God or to not follow God.
I have to tell you I really love this essay and I expect I will be revisiting it from time to time.
A few peripheral thoughts came to my mind while reading it. I have been using Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything as a bathroom book--reading for the throne, so it has been a leisurely reading pace: I just finished Chapter 8, Imaginary Cities. One reason to read this book would be to learn something new about human history, but I have had another motive as well: to learn of other options for communal interaction that were previously discovered but subsequently lost. I was trying to think of which discipline would be focused on such things at an abstract level, and what came to mind immediately was game theory. But this is too broad because many of the "games" are of the zero-sum variety: "I win, so you lose". It occurred to me that the appropriate filter would be to add the adjective "ethical", and I was pleased to discover that "ethical game theory" is a recognized discipline for which books have been written.
Yesterday in my reading I came across the term “Overton window”. I had a vague recollection of having seen it before but forgot its meaning, so I looked it up. There is an informative Wikipedia article which begins as follows:
“The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.[1] It is also known as the window of discourse.
The term is named after the American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who proposed that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences.[2][3] According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.”
The response of the rational politician is to stay within the Overton window so he or she can be effective--said politician must protect his or her reputation for being “serious”: Jerry Brown’s former nickname of “Moonbeam Brown” comes to mind as what can happen from promoting ideas “outside the box”. The intellectual, on the other hand, a term I apply modestly to myself and which certainly applies to you, has the Goal of thinking outside the box, evaluating, and to the best of his or her ability attempting to communicate new perspectives to others. I often regret not having chosen history and political philosophy as my discipline of study when I went to college. My understanding would be deeper and more comprehensive, and I might possibly have gained a public reputation that would facilitate sharing ideas. Water under the bridge.
Your mentioning of the President recalled Joe Biden’s often used expression: “Don’t compare me with the Almighty; compare me with my opponent.” Joseph Biden in my estimation is a good man, while Donald Trump is a criminal sociopath. There is no symmetry between them: for Biden to be as “good” as Trump is “bad” his goodness would have to be Godlike. He faces difficult dilemmas, such as the Gaza conflict. I think we must look at four parties here, not two. The Palestinian people must not be conflated with the Hamas fanatic killers, and the Israeli people must not be conflated with the arguably criminal Netanyahu and his fanatic Settler coalition, determined not to have a two-state solution to the long conflict. I don’t think cutting off all military aid to Israel is a possible option: Hamas did start it with a murderous assault. Biden has no influence over Netanyahu, who would like nothing more than a Trump victory in November. Because of the lack of symmetry I see my prospective vote in November as one-tenth “for” Biden and nine-tenths “against” Trump. If we had RCV in effect for this election, we would not have a “voter’s dilemma” and the consequent spoiler effect. In that case, choosing an alternate to Biden would be morally acceptable if the second choice was for Biden (i.e., an Effective vote Against Trump). Trump learned in his term of office what was impeding his actions. A second term for this moral monstrosity would be an unmitigated catastrophe. I wrote previously that this will be the most “Special” election since at least 1864.
Thanks for the info on James Overton, I have been reading a great deal of contemporary political thought in the last four years which apart from historical writings and Ronald Dahl in the 60's, I had never read too much in the field, much of it has become a blur because I read a couple of hundred books the first two years.
When I was in college the university offered for the first time an advanced seminar on Kierkegaard. I had read some of K. in the past but although it's become somewhat fashionable, K. is really incomprehensible if you read a book here and a book there, You must read him in order and my dabbling in a couple of his books and led me to a great deal of miscomprehension about what he said He really wrote one long book that was more or less serialized and one needs to begin at the beginning and continue to read them in order to comprehend that at the end of on book, he begins the next, more or less refuting the last and going on to the next stage of shall I say his ideology of human understanding. In reading him I was able to begin my own long conflicted struggle with churches. K. and I ended up in different places. He rejected the church but found a relationship with God outside of the church. The problem for me was that his God was still the same God.So I began reading all of the well-known existentialists, secular and religious.
Eventually however I found myself returning to Malinowski and Sahlins and the "political conceptions" they depicted from Melanesian culture. (please don't confuse Mead and Benedict who were more popular and on the best-selling charts in my youth---they wrote about Polynesian culture which had a very different culture) and I also returned to my studies of native American culture and I find a conclusion to the existential dilemma in these cultures. So far from thinking "outside of the box" most conclude I'm trapped in a box of the past and have no contemporary relevance.
At any rate, our Kierkegaard class attended a Seminar in Chicago and all of the leading Kierkegaarians were there. Among them was Paul Holmer who was the dean of the Divinity School at Yale. I had been planning on going to graduate school somewhere, but had not considered Yale, knowing it was out of my price range. But I had taken a paper I had written on the patristic conflicts from which the Roman and Eastern churches emerged and although it had nothing to do with K's theo-philosophy my advisor recommended I present the paper to the visiting profs.as a good way to introduce myself to prospective grad schools. A week later I received a letter from Dr. Holmer and he asked if I had considered Yale for graduate school and I replied I hadn't because I didn't have the funds. He replied that he had showed my paper to the other profs in the dept. and they had decided Yale needed me and they were ensure me entrance on a scholarship.
In the first week in May I got my letter from Yale. It was a four page letter that said that while I had been highly recommended, "other considerations" prevented them granting me a scholarship but if I was able to attend without the scholarship, I would be welcome.
I assumed the other considerations were my age and that by that time I was over thirty years old. I rushed out other applications but it was too late to get a scholarship anywhere so I never attended graduate school though for a long time I thought I would (someday). But a few weeks after graduation my wife with a four month infant child and I needed to support her and then when my daughter was nearing three my wife returned to court to regain custody and I moved to the D.C. region. where she lived. At first I saw my daughter once a week on Tues. but when she was enrolled into Montessori a few months later I was able to free another from my schedule and I never saw her again until she was in her 30's with two children of her own.
As in all things in life we look back and wonder if our decisions are correct and because my daughter had a very troubled home she had been legally emancipated at fourteen. She won't speak of what happened to lead to that,and I do not know. But after a few years in the white collar world I decided to go back to my labor roots. That was the year my grandfather died but I'm not sure if that played any part in my decision. But the thing is I fee quite secure in believing I would not have made it in academia.
This story is somewhat related to David Graeber. He didn't make it academia and was dismissed from Yale two years before tenure and could not find another job at any u. in America, but finally was hired in England, I don't know where, in a completely unrelated field and became an economics lecturer.
Not comparing myself to Graeber, but my mind, like his, tends to wander into seeing interconnections beyond disciplines which is not really a prime role for an academic lecturer in contemporary society. And I feel free to say what I believe irregardless of whether I it contradicts general ideological perspectives. But as to political ideology, four years ago I probably felt less of an urgent need to transform our political structure. But the approach has failed. Joe Biden would like to undo much of the corporate domination of cont. America but is facing brick wall. Without having read Overton, I believe I would have agreed that Overton was correct and the best governance is centrist, or the not too radical in any direction and capable of working together. But the system you describe as Overton's needs a stronger approach to heal what has become broken. And there is where I become maga in a way to break maga before it breaks any opportunity at reframing the structure. I think Bide has at least become a very decent man, and he has a long habit of "mispeaking" so that doesn't reflect any senility. He's quite sharp on his feet and old people like me don't worry about his age. But Biden doesn't have Lincoln's willingness to sometimes act dictatorially to preserve. My position is we should not let the Maga candidates even run for office or give them a chance to upend the nation. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past is not the past because it isn't past," and the past that isn't the past today is not just the past examples of democracies falling, but the American past that has never fulfilled its proclamations at any moment in our present and it has grown beyond doing that if we allow the disrupters free reign to continue to disrupt. Before any voting reform, economic restructuring or whatever someone simply has to prevent the disruptors from their goal. We will see, and maybe I am wrong, but even reelecting Biden in a close election with a contentious divided congress will achieve nothing. No voting reform and no economic reform and eventually the "democracy", or at least the opportunity for anything resembling a democracy. It is not the voting box that will determine its survival without a strong hand before the future spirals beyond the opportunity to reform, and maybe there my damnable independence streak is too far outside the box of where most non-Trumpists stand.
But of course we can't extend ourselves too far, but I see a variety of legal avenues to restore some semblance of order. But suggesting anything that smacks of even the possibility that one might need to use extraordinary strength to deny anything is going too far for most who perceive themselves anti-Trump today.
Ultimately I am a romanticist who is seeing the dying days of the romance playing out; an eternal optimist seeing all hope fading because the lover doesn't yet recognize his beloved is about to sue for divorce.
The democrats appear to me to be in the position of denial and I guess I find myself in the position that Jeremiah found himself in loving his nation but telling them they were about to lose it and no one really thinking it could possibly happen.
Oh well long winded and possibly pointless because I denied myself the opportunity to be listened to.
Ken,
I have to tell you I really love this essay and I expect I will be revisiting it from time to time.
A few peripheral thoughts came to my mind while reading it. I have been using Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything as a bathroom book--reading for the throne, so it has been a leisurely reading pace: I just finished Chapter 8, Imaginary Cities. One reason to read this book would be to learn something new about human history, but I have had another motive as well: to learn of other options for communal interaction that were previously discovered but subsequently lost. I was trying to think of which discipline would be focused on such things at an abstract level, and what came to mind immediately was game theory. But this is too broad because many of the "games" are of the zero-sum variety: "I win, so you lose". It occurred to me that the appropriate filter would be to add the adjective "ethical", and I was pleased to discover that "ethical game theory" is a recognized discipline for which books have been written.
Yesterday in my reading I came across the term “Overton window”. I had a vague recollection of having seen it before but forgot its meaning, so I looked it up. There is an informative Wikipedia article which begins as follows:
“The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.[1] It is also known as the window of discourse.
The term is named after the American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who proposed that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences.[2][3] According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.”
The response of the rational politician is to stay within the Overton window so he or she can be effective--said politician must protect his or her reputation for being “serious”: Jerry Brown’s former nickname of “Moonbeam Brown” comes to mind as what can happen from promoting ideas “outside the box”. The intellectual, on the other hand, a term I apply modestly to myself and which certainly applies to you, has the Goal of thinking outside the box, evaluating, and to the best of his or her ability attempting to communicate new perspectives to others. I often regret not having chosen history and political philosophy as my discipline of study when I went to college. My understanding would be deeper and more comprehensive, and I might possibly have gained a public reputation that would facilitate sharing ideas. Water under the bridge.
Your mentioning of the President recalled Joe Biden’s often used expression: “Don’t compare me with the Almighty; compare me with my opponent.” Joseph Biden in my estimation is a good man, while Donald Trump is a criminal sociopath. There is no symmetry between them: for Biden to be as “good” as Trump is “bad” his goodness would have to be Godlike. He faces difficult dilemmas, such as the Gaza conflict. I think we must look at four parties here, not two. The Palestinian people must not be conflated with the Hamas fanatic killers, and the Israeli people must not be conflated with the arguably criminal Netanyahu and his fanatic Settler coalition, determined not to have a two-state solution to the long conflict. I don’t think cutting off all military aid to Israel is a possible option: Hamas did start it with a murderous assault. Biden has no influence over Netanyahu, who would like nothing more than a Trump victory in November. Because of the lack of symmetry I see my prospective vote in November as one-tenth “for” Biden and nine-tenths “against” Trump. If we had RCV in effect for this election, we would not have a “voter’s dilemma” and the consequent spoiler effect. In that case, choosing an alternate to Biden would be morally acceptable if the second choice was for Biden (i.e., an Effective vote Against Trump). Trump learned in his term of office what was impeding his actions. A second term for this moral monstrosity would be an unmitigated catastrophe. I wrote previously that this will be the most “Special” election since at least 1864.
Thanks for the info on James Overton, I have been reading a great deal of contemporary political thought in the last four years which apart from historical writings and Ronald Dahl in the 60's, I had never read too much in the field, much of it has become a blur because I read a couple of hundred books the first two years.
When I was in college the university offered for the first time an advanced seminar on Kierkegaard. I had read some of K. in the past but although it's become somewhat fashionable, K. is really incomprehensible if you read a book here and a book there, You must read him in order and my dabbling in a couple of his books and led me to a great deal of miscomprehension about what he said He really wrote one long book that was more or less serialized and one needs to begin at the beginning and continue to read them in order to comprehend that at the end of on book, he begins the next, more or less refuting the last and going on to the next stage of shall I say his ideology of human understanding. In reading him I was able to begin my own long conflicted struggle with churches. K. and I ended up in different places. He rejected the church but found a relationship with God outside of the church. The problem for me was that his God was still the same God.So I began reading all of the well-known existentialists, secular and religious.
Eventually however I found myself returning to Malinowski and Sahlins and the "political conceptions" they depicted from Melanesian culture. (please don't confuse Mead and Benedict who were more popular and on the best-selling charts in my youth---they wrote about Polynesian culture which had a very different culture) and I also returned to my studies of native American culture and I find a conclusion to the existential dilemma in these cultures. So far from thinking "outside of the box" most conclude I'm trapped in a box of the past and have no contemporary relevance.
At any rate, our Kierkegaard class attended a Seminar in Chicago and all of the leading Kierkegaarians were there. Among them was Paul Holmer who was the dean of the Divinity School at Yale. I had been planning on going to graduate school somewhere, but had not considered Yale, knowing it was out of my price range. But I had taken a paper I had written on the patristic conflicts from which the Roman and Eastern churches emerged and although it had nothing to do with K's theo-philosophy my advisor recommended I present the paper to the visiting profs.as a good way to introduce myself to prospective grad schools. A week later I received a letter from Dr. Holmer and he asked if I had considered Yale for graduate school and I replied I hadn't because I didn't have the funds. He replied that he had showed my paper to the other profs in the dept. and they had decided Yale needed me and they were ensure me entrance on a scholarship.
In the first week in May I got my letter from Yale. It was a four page letter that said that while I had been highly recommended, "other considerations" prevented them granting me a scholarship but if I was able to attend without the scholarship, I would be welcome.
I assumed the other considerations were my age and that by that time I was over thirty years old. I rushed out other applications but it was too late to get a scholarship anywhere so I never attended graduate school though for a long time I thought I would (someday). But a few weeks after graduation my wife with a four month infant child and I needed to support her and then when my daughter was nearing three my wife returned to court to regain custody and I moved to the D.C. region. where she lived. At first I saw my daughter once a week on Tues. but when she was enrolled into Montessori a few months later I was able to free another from my schedule and I never saw her again until she was in her 30's with two children of her own.
As in all things in life we look back and wonder if our decisions are correct and because my daughter had a very troubled home she had been legally emancipated at fourteen. She won't speak of what happened to lead to that,and I do not know. But after a few years in the white collar world I decided to go back to my labor roots. That was the year my grandfather died but I'm not sure if that played any part in my decision. But the thing is I fee quite secure in believing I would not have made it in academia.
This story is somewhat related to David Graeber. He didn't make it academia and was dismissed from Yale two years before tenure and could not find another job at any u. in America, but finally was hired in England, I don't know where, in a completely unrelated field and became an economics lecturer.
Not comparing myself to Graeber, but my mind, like his, tends to wander into seeing interconnections beyond disciplines which is not really a prime role for an academic lecturer in contemporary society. And I feel free to say what I believe irregardless of whether I it contradicts general ideological perspectives. But as to political ideology, four years ago I probably felt less of an urgent need to transform our political structure. But the approach has failed. Joe Biden would like to undo much of the corporate domination of cont. America but is facing brick wall. Without having read Overton, I believe I would have agreed that Overton was correct and the best governance is centrist, or the not too radical in any direction and capable of working together. But the system you describe as Overton's needs a stronger approach to heal what has become broken. And there is where I become maga in a way to break maga before it breaks any opportunity at reframing the structure. I think Bide has at least become a very decent man, and he has a long habit of "mispeaking" so that doesn't reflect any senility. He's quite sharp on his feet and old people like me don't worry about his age. But Biden doesn't have Lincoln's willingness to sometimes act dictatorially to preserve. My position is we should not let the Maga candidates even run for office or give them a chance to upend the nation. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past is not the past because it isn't past," and the past that isn't the past today is not just the past examples of democracies falling, but the American past that has never fulfilled its proclamations at any moment in our present and it has grown beyond doing that if we allow the disrupters free reign to continue to disrupt. Before any voting reform, economic restructuring or whatever someone simply has to prevent the disruptors from their goal. We will see, and maybe I am wrong, but even reelecting Biden in a close election with a contentious divided congress will achieve nothing. No voting reform and no economic reform and eventually the "democracy", or at least the opportunity for anything resembling a democracy. It is not the voting box that will determine its survival without a strong hand before the future spirals beyond the opportunity to reform, and maybe there my damnable independence streak is too far outside the box of where most non-Trumpists stand.
But of course we can't extend ourselves too far, but I see a variety of legal avenues to restore some semblance of order. But suggesting anything that smacks of even the possibility that one might need to use extraordinary strength to deny anything is going too far for most who perceive themselves anti-Trump today.
Ultimately I am a romanticist who is seeing the dying days of the romance playing out; an eternal optimist seeing all hope fading because the lover doesn't yet recognize his beloved is about to sue for divorce.
The democrats appear to me to be in the position of denial and I guess I find myself in the position that Jeremiah found himself in loving his nation but telling them they were about to lose it and no one really thinking it could possibly happen.
Oh well long winded and possibly pointless because I denied myself the opportunity to be listened to.