Does formal education restrain our minds and spirits rather than set them free?

Ishaan Jajodia

Another GRE essay …

The Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau once famously declared that “man was born free, but everywhere he was in chains.” For Rousseau, the source of this state of oppression was our political life, part of which included education, a subject he most famously expounded upon in Emile. What was the purpose of education? What must be the focal point of learning? For Rousseau, the answer was simple: the child was the measure of all things, and a good education inculcated the importance of citizenship. But for all his supposedly rebellious proclamations, Rousseau, the arch-Enlightenment figure, could not bring it in himself to stop the humanist mores of the modern and ancient world: a great degree of formal education lingered in the background, even if it was administered by what were then unorthodox methods. But Rousseau only serves to illustrate a larger point: that formal education seeks to free our minds and spirits by training them in the art of intellectual discipline, and in their restraint they provide a foundation. It is when the information it provides becomes and end and not a means to achieve something that it becomes burdensome and tiresome, stifling the creativity of those it is imposed upon.

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Is it impossible to make a significant contribution without first being strongly influenced by past achievements within that field?

Ishaan Jajodia

Another GRE practice essay — please forgive inadvertent errors and personal flourishes.

At the culmination of a survey class that spanned the history of art from its very origins in the Venus of Willendorf to the High Renaissance and through to the postmodern age we live in, I could not but wonder: we stand on the shoulders of giants. While the Academy in Florence would not let me climb onto the shoulders of Michelangelo’s David, the influence of giants –– on the pioneers and the paradigm-setting geniuses of any field –– is visible to those invested in its study. It is this that I hope to argue, with the aid of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Thomas Hobbes and Nicolo Machiavelli, and William Shakespeare: that even those figures we may think to be geniuses in their field actually stand on the shoulders of the giants of their fields.

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A Brief Note on Violence in Society

Ishaan Jajodia

I wrote this as a practice essay for the GRE; please forgive the fleeting references and discussions. Half an hour is not a lot to plan and write.

The extent to which the media, broadly understood, has pervaded our lives is hard to estimate with precision, but there is no denying that in recent years our lives have been increasingly proliferated by all forms of media, from the ubiquitous push notification warning one of an unopened notification to the rising popularity of video games. Fake news and deepfakes pose new thA Shreats to our understanding of the world like few other things have before, and this past summer, in the midst of a viral pandemic, cities in the United States, most prominently Portland, burnt under the brunt of violent protests. Increasing violence has been part of our public discourse for some time now, and it is hard to deny that it is having an outsized influence on today’s youth, who are faced with increased normalisation of violence and exposure to graphic violence at rates never seen before. I seek to argue that while the media consumed by a majority of today’s youth has accepted violence and representations of it as normalised, finding good role models among one’s peers and parental group can assist in alleviating this.

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The Distinctiveness of Green Politics

Ishaan Jajodia

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.

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The Historicist Error Projected Onto Disraeli

Ishaan Jajodia

It has been the hallmark of criticism directed toward a working politician or a man whose principal focus lay outside of the contemplative sphere that some historian has managed to find some basis, more often than not obscure, to sully said man’s reputation with as a thinker, and then to level charges of blatant hypocrisy such that character assassination is brought out in the open, with mud-slinging and shit-throwing part of this cabalistic rite. And this, as you may have guessed, has been the sorrowful position of our hero, Benjamin Disraeli, who has been subject to the torturous examinations of unsympathetic historians more frequently than any other in the tradition of conservative thought. While his predecessor Edmund Burke was indefatigable and found enough time to address to the sympathetic listener a rebuke of those who thought he was acting out of line with his principles,[1] the same privilege was not afforded to Disraeli, for whatever reason one might attribute it to. “The truth,” Lord Blake remarked, “was that Disraeli had never at any time in his life been an easy man to know.”[2] But that difficulty in examination, that pedestal upon which Disraeli stood that set him apart from illustrious peers, many of whom are now extinct in the popular and moral imagination of today, seems so alien to us that we tend to curl and walk to the familiar. The strength of Disraeli’s convictions affects us significantly, and we find ourselves questioning the motive and the effect without understanding the world in which Disraeli operated, or whether his thoughts were mere purple prose and not some extensive and seriously held positions that ought to have been followed in due stead.

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The Moral Economy of Benjamin Disraeli

Ishaan Jajodia

PPainting of Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield by Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt | National Portrait Gallery, London.

Much has been written about Benjamin Disraeli, but more so about his life and his actual conduct in the political arena than his work. Those who tend to study his work congregate in departments of literature, not of political philosophy, and thus the social and political thought of Benjamin Disraeli, distinct from his actions, is left to be condemned to appropriation and recasting by politicians of all veins, whether it be Ed Miliband or David Cameron. Disraeli the thinker had much in common semantically with Edmund Burke the pamphleteer, but they share important differences, despite the former’s attempt to fashion himself in the style of the latter in his Vindication of the English Constitution, a work that takes aim at the utilitarian creed of Bentham and other rationalists of his time. Although both thinkers, one more prominent in the conservative tradition than the other, were products of the romantic imagination, they came to be its bookends in the manner in which they represented its political thought: if Burke represented the commercial interest and tolerance and a respect for hierarchy, Disraeli turned that around to subvert the expectations of the commercial by tearing it away from the desire to profit without duty.[1]

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Marginal Notes toward a Politics of Space

Ishaan Jajodia

Socrates, awaiting his execution in a prison cell in Athens, tells his protégé this nugget of wisdom: “the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same” (Crito, 48b). The just, the beautiful, and the true are intrinsically linked together, for they take their ideal form in the wholly abstract world of forms. In this essay, I do not seek to argue for the nature of beauty, or for aesthetic characteristics of an objective standard of beauty, but only that the current manner in which aesthetic degradation has permeated into life is subversive to the ends of the polis — namely, it actively works to subvert human flourishing, broadly understood — and must be dealt with in the strongest possible terms. The importance that is attached to this subject arises from a strong sense of architectural exceptionalism and the moral character inherent in architecture and in any sort of grand design.

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A Commodity Fetish: Marx and the Moral Economy

Ishaan Jajodia

J.G.A. Pocock writes in Virtue, Commerce, and History:

“It was hard to condemn the destruction of rural society without engaging in some degree of nostalgia, and a wholesale condemnation of modernity necessarily entailed some degree of neomedievalism. there was a neomedievalism among romantic gentry who liked to imagine the days when they had been Tory protectors of the poor, Whig defenders of their ancient liberties, and Burkean-Coleridgean upholders of a code of chivalric manners. … Even today, it might not be impossible to classify English Marxist thinkers as either progressive radical Whigs for whom socialism is the rebellious but natural son of liberalism, or alienated Tory radicals who denounce liberal capitalism, instead of praising it for its revolutionary role, as the destroyer of popular community and moral economy.”[1]

Pocock was writing in the middle of the 1980s, and in any case my general unfamiliarity with the discourse of the times renders his judgement the one I admit as prima facie true. But behind this sentiment is the coming together of two disparate lines of thought that are pervasive in most analyses of economic thought, especially when concerned with questions of a moral character. Why is it that questions of the moral economy are wholly dominated by the Germanic ghost of Karl Marx? For someone who eschewed the market en masse, surely, he would find himself surprised to be the progenitor and monopolistic owner of ostensibly an entire field of academic inquiry, which has been abandoned to his dialectical and historical materialism and to the supposition that surely, moral relations in economic forms cannot exist in any scheme of action apart from his. It is this that is my complaint with William James Booth’s otherwise first-rate analysis of the role of households in the moral economy: it is too deferential to Marx; it refuses to see beyond the Marxist paradigm even though it readily and openly admits to the practical and theoretical failures of the doctrine.[2] That the question of moral economy was breached with sufficient detail by Aristotle and Xenophon, Locke and Rousseau, is important — but is the discussion of Marx always the feather in the cap?

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Conservatism’s Divorce from Laissez Faire, Laissez Passer

Ishaan Jajodia

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.

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Lockenomics

Ishaan Jajodia

John Locke’s career as a political economist, and more commonly as a philosopher of politics, seems to have been distilled down to the now famous Second Treatise on Government, but in light of recent criticism over his involvement with the slave trade, it seems that there is more illiberality to this man of ostensibly liberal disposition even if one does not engage the ad hominems and concentrates solely on the substance of Mr. Locke’s published works. The items in question are a small tract entitled ‘Venditio’ and a series of recommendations for the revival of Elizabethan Poor Laws.[1] The matter is substantially put into motion by Geraint Parry, who notes that: “Locke’s draconian proposals for the treatment of the poor and the unemployed are of a piece with his position on individuality and paternalism. Charity was inappropriate to adult men with the capacity to be industrious.”[2] We are faced with an inconsistent philosopher — though that is the domain of most human philosophers — one whose claims for the treatment of the poor are irreconcilable with the claims he makes, in my opinion, in his famed Second Treatise. I do not intend to be unfair to Locke, which is why I will omit discussion of the infamous constitution he drew up for South Carolina, for it is my understanding that the aforementioned document was merely written and executed by Locke as part of his responsibilities as a public servant. It is the crux of my contention that Locke’s philosophy, wholly excluding his more practical pursuits, is decidedly illiberal in tone and scope, for it does not commit to all men as having some sort of dignity by virtue of existence, but rather only in accordance with the dignity accorded to men by virtue of the possession of some degree of physical property that is distinct from the labour and enterprise that each possesses. In the introduction to his recommendations on the problem of poor relief, Locke writes:

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