“Crude Parodies Which No-One Has A Right To Erase:” Camille Paglia

“There are very few instances where speech properly falls under government scrutiny, and those involve either fraudulent representations in business contracts or disturbances of the peace, such as shouting “fire” in a crowded theater or disrupting residential neighborhoods or campuses by noisy late-night reveling. In the latter, if offensive epithets are used, it is not the content of the worlds that is punishable but the fact that anything at all is shouted at that hour. Epithets and stereotypes are not fraudulent in a commercial sense; they are crudely distorted or parodistic versions of a substratum of historical truth or perception, which no-one, however well-meaning, has a right to erase.”

Camille Paglia: Vamps and Tramps (New York: Random House, 1994).

Pp 50-51

CARTESIAN, adj. Ambrose Bierce: THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY

CARTESIAN,  adj. relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum  –whereby  he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am”; as close an approximation to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary (The Peter Pauper Press 1958). pp 14.

Link: Wikipedia Entry for Ambrose Bierce

Link: Powell’s -a Genuine Bookstore: Ambrose Bierce

“A Single Error More Than All The Others…” John Ruskin

“And, as far as I have taken cognizance of the causes of the many failures to which the efforts of intelligent men are liable, more especially in matters political, they seem to me more largely to spring from this single error more than from all the others, that the inquiry into the doubtful, and in some sort inexplicable, relations of capability, chance, resistance, and inconvenience, invariably precedes, even if it do not altogether supersede, the determination of what is absolutely desirable and just. Nor is it any wonder that sometimes the too cold calculation of our powers should reconcile us too easily to our shortcomings, and even lead us into the fatal error of supposing that our conjectural utmost is in itself well, or in other words, that the necessity of offences renders them inoffensive.”

John Ruskin: The Seven Lamps Of Architecture ( Boston: Thomas Crowell and Company, 1880). Pp 3.

Link: Wikipedia entry for John Ruskin Arts and Crafts Figurehead)

“Moderation” may seek to manifest and validate “solid” ground simply by finding a sort of “middle” ground among competing claims and calling it some sort of “common” ground. It is defined and given meaning in the world only by the coordinates of the “grounds” around it, however unfounded and spurious the claims thereto may be. It is “ungrounded,” and unfounded in the way that colonies and settlements may be unfounded.

But is it worse? Does it cosign, endorse, legitimize, in very fact give credence to, radical extremism? By putting all claims on some sort of

“equal ground?” 

Please see our recent Essay entitled WHEN THERE IS NOTHING MODERATE ABOUT THE HORRORS YOU OPPOSE, HOW CAN YOU BE A “MODERATE?” and dated 09 May, 2009 

“The real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon, fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason: Pp 211

“Some Device For Simulating Action Is Indispensable:” John Kenneth Galbraith

“Some device for simulating action, when action is impossible, is indispensable in a sound and functioning democracy.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 (50^th Anniversary Edition: Houghton Mifflin, New York 1979)

Pp 141

For a stunningly succinct analysis of the role of technocrats, experts and bureaucrats in contemporary society, please read John Ralston Saul.

Citation: Seuss, Dr.: Batholomew And The Oobleck. New York: Random House, 1949.

Rationality and Democracy travel as fellows and arrive at a single and harmonious common truth- ideal and uncontroversial. The democracy of the Age of Reason. All truths are discoverable, and all reasonable, rational men will agree on their common and mutual self-interests as they are discovered.

Or… Democracy is continuously, and necessarily, a noisy, fumbling, seeking, turgid and agonistic process of contention. It is endlessly dialectical and conversational. It is a continuous and perpetual commitment to a demanding process and indeterminate practice.

“…. [B]y their positive doctrine the romantics introduced a new set of values, not reconcilable with the old, and … most Europeans are today the heirs of both opposing traditions. We accept both outlooks, and shift from one foot to the other in a fashion that we cannot avoid if we are honest with ourselves, but which is not intellectually coherent.”

Isaiah Berlin: The Sense Of Reality. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

But ah, we have such trouble being honest with ourselves, and with one another.

Somehow, something more than honesty is needed to tolerate and keep in mind multiple perspectives, different ways of understanding and diverse subjectivities. An imaginative courage, or something like it, is needed. But we argue that difficult as it may be, this something is necessary if we are to cling to any kind of real subjective coherence in a world of such contradiction and complexity. We hope to examine more closely this unusual and subtle quality in a future Essay. Meanwhile, thoughts and references about such “ways of knowing” appear in our Essay entitled Hypocrisy is Bad and dated 05 November, 2008.

Very large numbers of us do not have this multi-perspectival “way of knowing.” We carry an archaic belief (–really an episteme so deeply buried as to masquerade as an opaque ontological obstacle-) that no two things can be true and contradict one another. This interesting line of inquiry too is examined in the above-mentioned Essay. We encourage you, our Reader, to read it.

What are we to make of this? We are concerned that for many of us, these two “outlooks” are really so contradictory that neither can (honestly) admit of the other, at all. It seems that each perspective is so challenged and contradicted by the other that their tension within the conception of “democracy” maybe be inherently irresoluble and permanent.

The latter “kind” of democracy –a democracy of contending voices, conflicting interests and mutable, multiple evolving “truths-“ is a logical impossibility for those who adhere passionately to the former kind: the presumably “rational,” progressive and ideal one.

Probably, the “kind” of democracy that is committed to multiple perspectives and many voices is better predisposed to tolerate and embrace the contrary perspective of the single, perfectible human polity.

Nonetheless, a future of perfected political institutions, a static and ideal future state of man, is a theoretical impossibility for True Believers in the latter, rowdy “kind” of democracy. The kinds of thinking and practices that presuppose a trajectory of inevitable “progress” and innate perfectibility may be intolerable for those who are dedicated to the messy practices of the democracy of a passionate, loud and imperfect, and permanent, public dialogue.

Passionate believers devoted each to democracy, locked in perpetual, irresoluble conflict- Insurmountable impasses. (Both ontological and epistemological.)

Each a kind of democracy, with its absolute and implacable champions, that cannot admit, tolerate and endure the other.

Uh-oh.