The environment is a touchy subject in contemporary political discourse and praxis. Much of it belongs to the domain of sound bites and emotional rhetoric that is conveniently packaged and distributed with a degree of fear-mongering that can make even the most stolid individuals react in a somewhat visceral manner. On the other side, we are faced with wilful denialism — of the growth of a pernicious fad that seeks to find solace not in prudence but in escape. The excesses of the former’s brand of hysteria and the latter’s outright denialism are both the signs of a hyper-charged discourse that bears no relation with the brutal realities of the recent centuries of our existence: the widespread destruction of the environment and creeping urbanism that seeks to transform the world not into the cities of yonder but sprawling and uniform entities without regard for the consequences of the damage that such uniformity and banality can cause, and without thought for the impacts of a burgeoning population, of greed and materialism that has been left unchecked by more conventional mores — whatever their source, it does not matter — that have now evaporated into thin air.
Continue reading “The Distinctiveness of Green Politics”Category: Miscellaneous
Conservatism’s Divorce from Laissez Faire, Laissez Passer
I have refrained for the most part in making comments about the present state of the world, or of things that may have direct application and value to the issues of political practice today. But seeing that today is a Sunday, and that I ought to revel in some mischief of my own making, I will allow myself certain observations today that I will not make in an ordinary course of action, and even then only because of my interest in the relation of forms of economic organisation within broader political movements. The question that we are then faced with, today, is the economic means of conservative politics, in the USA more than anywhere else.
Continue reading “Conservatism’s Divorce from Laissez Faire, Laissez Passer”A Short Note on Reaching 100,000 Words
On May 17 of this year, I wrote my first post for this blog, and precisely eighty days later, on August 4, on this very post, I will have finished writing my first 100,000 words for any single project. At the outset, I must state that the original mission of the blog — to be a running journal for my thoughts — has been modified. It contains few knee-jerk reactions, but more of the passing thoughts of a scholar. My sole digression — the interest in Indic religion and the search for a political ethic and understanding of politics in Indian texts was limited to one, but the blog provided an avenue for the understanding of what it means to be doing political philosophy as a career and vocation and less as an academic burden. The topics it has addressed are wide-ranging; they are extensive only because I cannot keep myself placated with a minor feat of learning but am animated by the desire to continuously learn more. In these eighty days, I have had many crises of faith, some of which have found their way on its blog; I have remembered, forgotten, and then channelled some of my passion into a more regular form of learning and understanding; I have read beyond my wildest dreams, and yet, for some reason, I find the need to know more. It is a compulsive desire to know — but also to remember, to write for friends and fellow travellers on my academic journey — that has guided this blog [and a love for Chicago-style full notes]. Thus, I venture to offer a few thoughts, more supported by the brunt of my experience than by other sources of knowledge.
Continue reading “A Short Note on Reaching 100,000 Words”Changing Ideas and the Unitary Whole
In her essay on John Stuart Mill, Gertrude Himmelfarb writes:
“For almost a century and a half, On Liberty, for liberals and conservatives alike, has been a major text in intellectual history and a source of inspiration in practical affairs. But there is the Other Mill, who wrote essays that were bold and novel in his time and that remain remarkably prescient and pertinent today.”[1]
Hard Facts, Utopic Visions, Sceptical Sights
It is the sign of an overly active imagination and a restless mind that one focuses more on what ought to be than what is, which is the question we face in the present moment: must we prefer hard ‘facts’ to utopic ‘visions’, the present to the future in its entirety, or the past in all its knowingness, to the detriment of the now and henceforth. The question of escapism, of voluntary renunciation, or of blatant ignorance of the world is a question posed to many in the ivory tower, but is of pressing importance to the philosopher of politics, if only because the very birth of political philosophy was in a heedless utopia, and its most ardent expression in perhaps the most common-sense abstractions (of course, it is not always as dichotomous as this, and certainly Aristotle ought not to have acquired a reputation for various forms of pedantry and didacticism, but that is wholly another matter). What separates the enviable political philosopher from the second-rate thinker? Is it wholly in making compromises with reality, or is the same virtue as that which applies to politics itself — neither an excess, nor a dearth — of some value here? Is methodological neutrality as chickenish as neutral positions often sound, the sign of an insecure individual unable to commit to any one side and reserving the most ‘obvious’ position whilst refusing to think in any way that would endanger his ‘common sense’? This subject is of peculiar interest here not because of Schumpeter’s irritable gestures against Aristotle, which are beyond inflammatory. It is because of a more contemporary debate, one that has taken place for all time and will continue to take place. Does a ‘thing’ have an ‘essence’ or an ‘end’, a telos? Is the teleological mode of thought such a wretched mode of analysis, unsophisticated and brutish, or does it appear to bear some sophisticated manner of thinking that ought to have some relation to the manner in which we think of questions in the first place, even before we examine answers?
Continue reading “Hard Facts, Utopic Visions, Sceptical Sights”
A Few Prescient Sentences
“There are times which are not ordinary, and in such times it is not enough to follow the road. It is necessary to know where it leads, and, if it leads nowhere, to follow another. The search for another involves reflection, which is uncongenial to the bustling of people who describe themselves as practical, because they take things as they are and leave them as they are.”
—R.H Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1920), 2.
How fitting for our times!
The False Altar of Progress
Writing in the midst of this pandemic always brings up this unavoidable question: is there such a thing as progress — progress not commiserate with the material terms in which we qualify, quantify, and evaluate our lives otherwise? We chide the medieval world for being subject to the whims and fancies of nature, of being subject to the arbitrary and capricious diktats of small living and semi-living entities completely invisible to the naked eye, but are we any better?
I would dare venture to say that after the rise of civilisations, progress has been sketchy at best, that economic and commercial growth is mistaken for a change in the human condition, that the times we live in seem to be wholly unrecognisable but are merely the hypostatisation of some cycle of historic occurrence that is outside our control and repeats itself in broad strokes, and that those who study the past well enough can only see the various occurrences and reoccurrences but nothing more, nothing less.
Self-Interest as a Moral Maxim
Economists have moral compasses that are suspect to being overruled by any variety of unrelated concepts: utility, loss, advantage, opportunity cost, maximisation, and so on and so forth. They claim to be disciples of the market, astute learners whose educations piqued in one area, and one area only. It is suprising, then, for an economist — much less a former banker — to be spotted using that dreaded word, ‘moral,’ which has caused many an economist unspeakable terrors. The man responsible for that is Raghuram Rajan, a professor at the University of Chicago, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and popular economist.1
Continue reading “Self-Interest as a Moral Maxim”
- Raghuram Rajan, ‘Pursue Self-Interest by Helping Other Economies Too’, Financial Times, 7 July 2020, July 7, 2020 edition, sec. Opinion, https://www.ft.com/content/cf12c2ad-616f-4c11-936f-d8ac1b0880bb. ↩
The Fall(ibility) of Man
A New York Times interview with the art historian Erin L. Thompson reflects the poverty of thought that has come to breath upon discourse in particular.1 Various examples of defacement and spoliation from the classical world are offered, but Thompson is unable to find a moral ground upon which the removal of statues is permissible insofar as it is intrinsically right. She disdains the moral ground for the historical one, her defence being no different than saying that just because something happened in the past, it ought to happen again, and consequently because something happened in the past, it was right. If one were to turn to the domain of reductio ad absurdums, it would be no different than arguing for genocide based on the historic fact that it is morally right because it happened before. But this is the level to which Dr. Thompson stoops to, in order to justify the tearing down of statues, and it is this that is of grave concern.
Continue reading “The Fall(ibility) of Man”
- Jonah Engel Bromwich, ‘What Does It Mean to Tear Down a Statue?’, The New York Times, 11 June 2020, sec. Style, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/style/confederate-statue-columbus-analysis.html. ↩
A Reaffirmation
Perhaps, ever so often, it becomes essential to one’s readers, however select their ranks may be, and to oneself, to affirm both the importance and the value of the enterprise I have in mind: the studia humanitatis. It is my thought now that one must not assume a priori the importance of such studies and their centrality, but that these values and efforts are in constant need of reaffirmation. This is not a major change of stance from my earlier position, namely that the humanities must not be affirmed in relation to present events, but that the humanities must be valued because they lay bare to the dedicated student the human condition itself; this is as close to thought, thinking itself as one can come without staring precariously into the domain of the otherworldly.