The mouthpiece of something worse
[quote=Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia]One realizes with horror that earlier, opposing one's parents because they represented the world, one was often secretly the mouthpiece, against a bad world, of one even worse.[/quote]
Because I see myself in this, I can understand exactly what Adorno is saying.
In my teens I had become enamoured of revolutionary Leftist politics, but now I'm politically disillusioned and pessimistic. And more than that: it's not just that I think I was naive to be optimistic about the possibility of communism, it's that I see the damage done by attempts to make it real, and that I question the basic pattern of thinking, lying beneath liberalism and socialism, that leads one intellectually and morally to subsume real suffering in the grand process of History (or Progress). As Adorno simply puts it:
It's not an uncommon trajectory, from wannabe utopian radical to a soft and cautious sort of left-liberal, what I had thought of with contempt as a move from Left to Right occasioned by one's integration into bourgeois society.
Anyway, back then I righteously denounced, castigated, ranted and condemned. It was unfair that my parents should withstand all that abuse --- and what's worse, even when it wasn't vituperative it was self-serious and boring --- but they happened to be there, representing the world that I was beginning to get angry about.
But now I look back and don't see a bold radical, but rather a brat, childishly excited by grand projects and noble causes, to the extent that I was willing to brush aside the suffering that I thought necessary to bring about a great future. (I remain unable to wholeheartedly denounce Lenin and Trotsky (not that anyone these days is asking for my opinion on the matter)).
So we come to the Adorno quotation. What thing, what world, worse than my parents and the world they represented, was I the mouthpiece of? From Adorno's point of view, writing at the end of the Second World War, he probably means the violence, the extremism, and the cold instrumentality manifested not only in fascism but also in the Red Terror, the Cheka, the violent crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion, etc etc. I grew up in a different time, but exactly the same applied to me. I was the mouthpiece of chaos and Hell, almost --- I remember feeling this now --- revelling in the thought of righteous destruction.
I was like Linus:
Well, this is just a personal reflection, but it's part of my ongoing thoughts on progress and optimism, about which I may post more.
Because I see myself in this, I can understand exactly what Adorno is saying.
In my teens I had become enamoured of revolutionary Leftist politics, but now I'm politically disillusioned and pessimistic. And more than that: it's not just that I think I was naive to be optimistic about the possibility of communism, it's that I see the damage done by attempts to make it real, and that I question the basic pattern of thinking, lying beneath liberalism and socialism, that leads one intellectually and morally to subsume real suffering in the grand process of History (or Progress). As Adorno simply puts it:
optimism, amounting to a disregard of death
It's not an uncommon trajectory, from wannabe utopian radical to a soft and cautious sort of left-liberal, what I had thought of with contempt as a move from Left to Right occasioned by one's integration into bourgeois society.
Anyway, back then I righteously denounced, castigated, ranted and condemned. It was unfair that my parents should withstand all that abuse --- and what's worse, even when it wasn't vituperative it was self-serious and boring --- but they happened to be there, representing the world that I was beginning to get angry about.
But now I look back and don't see a bold radical, but rather a brat, childishly excited by grand projects and noble causes, to the extent that I was willing to brush aside the suffering that I thought necessary to bring about a great future. (I remain unable to wholeheartedly denounce Lenin and Trotsky (not that anyone these days is asking for my opinion on the matter)).
So we come to the Adorno quotation. What thing, what world, worse than my parents and the world they represented, was I the mouthpiece of? From Adorno's point of view, writing at the end of the Second World War, he probably means the violence, the extremism, and the cold instrumentality manifested not only in fascism but also in the Red Terror, the Cheka, the violent crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion, etc etc. I grew up in a different time, but exactly the same applied to me. I was the mouthpiece of chaos and Hell, almost --- I remember feeling this now --- revelling in the thought of righteous destruction.
I was like Linus:
Well, this is just a personal reflection, but it's part of my ongoing thoughts on progress and optimism, about which I may post more.
Comments (80)
The horrors which humans are willing to do in the name of are disturbing, scary, and perhaps even unavoidable, given our history. But always worth remembering and reflecting on because once one has taken up the stance of self-righteous indignation one stops listening to others' -- including when they say things like "This is hurting me", and so forth. Reflecting on what it is we can become, even now, helps to keep one humble even while dreaming of something better.
There's something different in our histories that I'm not sure is worth investigating or not -- lots of my indignation came from not just my folks, who certainly didn't help things, but also the political changes that took place due to September 11th, which is when I was in my teens with nascent political thoughts. Things were bad then, in a manner which resembled the books we were assigned to read which warned against [s]totatalitarianism[/s]totalitarianism, like 1984 and Animal Farm, and they have only progressed in that direction.
So while I have no doubt that I have shared your flaws in being attracted to big projects and being caught up in self-righteous anger, there's also always been this reality which has only gotten worse, and which Marxism is capable of explaining better than the liberal theories I was brought up to believe in. So while no one would allow a precocious and vocal young leftist radical to say what I said and not know about the horrors of socialism, which I think are evil, there's also always been a practical element which these reflections could be applied to.
Which in turn is what lead me down various routes and is basically how I've arrived at where I'm at today, which is whatever it is. Some kind of Marxism, but without the rosey viewpoint or utopian zeal.
Oh please. Don't sugarcoat the lowest form of thought as if it was something even possible to dress up as or purport as anything but exactly what it is: childish illusion and ignorance. "Everything isn't perfect so let's destroy everything that stands in our (my little) way until it is." Insolence. Myopia. Nothing more. That should be put down for the good of society as quickly as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_grass_is_always_greener_on_the_other_side
(Ironically you are met with the prompt: "Wikipedia does not have an article on "the grass is always greener on the other side", but its sister project Wiktionary does." Which I refuse to believe is some sort of purposely-laid hint of rationale that the idea is not as sound as most would tend to believe...)
Interesting. So you're probably around ten or fifteen years younger than me. For me, my radicalization was curiously out of time, disconnected from the real world and in fact flying in the face of it, since it was the late eighties and early nineties.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, this whole personal issue is only interesting because I do still believe this too, as Adorno himself did.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, and again, a lot like Adorno. But if we want a good society, and if such a society cannot be born without pain, and if one has lost the willingness to countenance such pain on the way to the good society, then what is the Marxism for except an indulgence in a tragic hope? But that's a lot of ifs.
Looking at this again and forgetting about myself for the moment, it's interesting to flesh out the context. It was around the time of the First World War that Adorno was a teenager (not that teenagers existed back then). The world of his parents was the world he and Horkheimer often in their work refer to as something like the classic era of the European bourgoisie. Not exactly the emancipated society but in terms of violence and oppression nothing compared to what was coming. In criticizing his own youthful opposition to them he is putting himself in the category of twentieth century destruction, in the new generation who would go on to violently remake the world and institute more brutal forms of domination, whether with fascism or communism. So the worse world of the quotation is not only the world of political extremism but also the entire world of the Second Thirty Years' War and everything that went with it: industrialized warfare, genocide and the targeting of civilians, mass mobilization, popular nationalism, and at the end, the development of weapons that could wipe out everyone.
I'm not sure I have much to contribute here. I never really rebelled against my father until I was in my early twenties. And then I didn't really rebel, I just kind of slipped out the back door while he wasn't watching. I don't have the stuff to be a radical - I've always been too much the pragmatic engineer to believe in golden ages or utopias. And lazy.
Still, I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate that you seem to be jumping back into active participation feet first. Turns out you have interesting things to say. Whoda thunkit, or as the Cambridge English Dictionary puts it - Who would have thunk it?
And I've always loved Peanuts. Before the cutesy Snoopy takeover it was pretty sophisticated about human nature. I did especially like Linus. Here's one of my favorites.
Thank you Top Clark.
Quoting T Clark
Yeah it's great. I'm sure I could make it relevant.
Yeah I'm about 10 to fifteen younger than you, as I recall you said you're in your 50's.
I wouldn't say that your views were out of time, though the popular conscious was definitely more optimistic and so would provide an odd sounding board. The reason I wouldn't say that, though, is that there's a historical through-line from Marx to today through the various struggles of the 20th century that took place "at home". The liberals like to claim the latter half of the 20th century as a kind of golden age of liberal capitalism, but as soon as the fascists were defeated we went about recreating the world in our image and then continued to try to dominate it and stay ahead of the USSR and China in terms of world influence, wealth, and military might.
In a way what I've seen is that it doesn't matter what the ideology is -- liberal or communist -- nation-states are only born through committing evil in the name of the good. In a sort of perverse natural selection the societies which valued peace were eaten up by the societies which value domination -- and just like the citizens of the USSR we have our own narratives that hide our evil from ourselves.
So out of time in the sense that the popular imagination wasn't paying attention, sure -- but there were still material reasons to be radical, even if there wasn't as many contradictions being actively expressed and seen by society at large.
I say that because I've heard many people say something along those lines back when doing my union organizing, and all it took was pointing out some facts to show them that their optimism is much like the optimism of my radical youth, when politics is very much a sausage-making process.
Quoting Jamal
Interesting way to put it, because I often try to think of an ethics without hope. :D
I think for me it's not much of a choice, exactly -- do I want things to continue being awful? No. Am I a worker in a capitalist society? Yes. I can give in to cynicism, and have wallowed in it from time to time, but what brings me back is reality: it continues to get worse, and no one is there to help me. So I can lay down in defeat and accept death, and in some sense have done so. But the only people who will help the working class is the working class itself. Politics is the sort of thing we ought not want to pursue, because it is more or less the exercise of necessary evil, but which is thrust upon us by the world at hand. I can make peace with this world for myself, but I cannot then truthfully tell people that we live a good life or in a good society.
And, on a personal level, last I visited the question of the ethics of my politics was when I resigned from being a union staffer. What I promised myself was that I'd remember what I learned from my organizing days, and continue to tell the truth that I know from that time. But I know that people around me aren't really ready for it. At most they are ready for is a kind of pseudo-socialism, which is basically just a liberal state with a robust safety net. But they don't actually care about a lot of the things I care about -- if totalitarianism gets them there they'll be content, so I imagine, given how easily it's been to persuade Oossians that it's OK for the government to play morality police and watch our every move.
There's a quote I often think of, and I think it's mostly a kind of secular Marxist prayer but it brings me peace -- Victor Hugo once said "There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come". And Locke set down the philosophical foundations for liberal capitalism against the church-aristocracy in the 1600's, and here we are still living in those values and their responses. Marx was only 150 years ago, and we have learned a lot since those utopian days. The struggle moves on because the oppressed still exist, and they are the ones who either will continue to suffer -- American slaves did the same at times, and rebelled, and were put down, and rebelled, and were put down, and so forth -- or find a way to look past their petty differences so that their children can have a better life than this.
It won't be easy or kind or painless, but it is still possible even in a world where fascism is making a comeback.
We anarchists think we know better than anyone how not to govern, but we're not going to give away our secrets to you lot!
My dad was a communist turned socialist - how was I supposed to rebel against that? Oh, I remember now, "turn on, tune in, drop out".
Although I don't get too involved in political discussions, when my progressive friends ask why I oppose communism, that is just what I tell them. Utopianism ends up justifying too much.
Fdrake's recent thread is closely related to this one, and there I tried to say something similar:
Quoting fdrake
(Proper link to fdrake's post - see bug)
Quoting Leontiskos
I like the moral reflection. I feel empathy for that cuz I do it too.
But I want to provide a bit of caution to the idea that the 20th century was uniquely evil. The USA's extermination of the natives and exploitation of Africans and immigrants were liberal precursors to the evils of the 20th century; only the 20th century is more evil because of our abilities to continue the same with more firepower due to technological progress.
I appreciate the reflection you've given of Adorno, but I also think that maybe it wasn't just a rejection and rebellion leading to bad outcomes -- the bad outcomes are just what politics are in our age of the nation-state.
But a Marxist who likes anarchy would say that.
EDIT: In addition, it's worth noting how Locke himself oversaw exploitation in his later life when he abandoned some of his philosophical principles in the name of practicality. He has good arguments against church and [s]state[/s]kingdom, but doesn't see what he proposes as possibly reinventing the same exploitation he hates by using the new values he puts forward of hard work as a basis of worth.
There is an important, difficult sort of discernment in realizing that something can be wrong, or even terrible, without it necessarily needing to be addressed by some sort of crusade. Cancer, for instance, might sometimes benefit from less aggressive treatments, without us having to forget that it's still cancer, and dangerous. Sometimes the treatment can be worse than the disease. Sometimes significantly worse. And sometimes we can even be misdiagnosed.
To keep the analogy going, I suppose the opposite problem is becoming so scared of the doctor that one starts to deceive oneself about even having cancer, rejecting testing, refusing to accept test results, etc. Of course, this is all the more likely if all the doctors are crusaders who want to start loping limbs off at the first sign of disease. There is a sort of positive feedback loop between radicalism and defense of the status quo.
I think discernment at the intersection of politics and ethics is quite difficult, and it's why I imagine your experience is very common. I can certainly relate. This is why, ideally, I think personal ethics would be taught prior to political issues (whereas we tend to just flip right to the political).
Because, of course it's important to point to problems in prevailing systems, to point out how society is organized immorally, or in ways that thwart the very principles it takes to be most important. But there is a difficulty here where it is very easy to project the systemic onto the personal, without a proper recognition of the limits of personal agency in political contexts. This can lead to simplistic manichean narratives that reduce to "if only the wicked stopped being wicked and the just ruled, all problems would be fixed," or more pernicious, the derivation of personal guilt through mere "complicity" or association with systems that people have no realistic way to escape.
This is perhaps most obvious as relates to war, because war always involves extreme consequences. And, through a tendency to state things in the strongest terms possible, every war becomes a "genocide," and anything short of full mobilization to thwart the culpable parties becomes "enabling genocide." And here it becomes very easy to see how it becomes easy to find oneself supporting vile parties, or placing everything in extremely personal, moralistic terms that can also justify "any means."
You can see this in the careers of some leftist crusaders who, rightly outraged by some of the missteps of the Obama years and upset over some of the deficits in the neo-liberal global order, allowed themselves to become virtual cheerleaders for Trump, who seems almost certainly more inimical to their values. And there definitely seems to be this thought process of: "good, let him win. Then things can get so bad that we can destroy the system and start over!" Which tends to miss just how much suffering such a "tearing down" implies, or the fact that a great many revolutions do not produce better situations, and often end up reproducing many of the same problems (e.g. the Soviets were initially even worse on minority rights than the Tsars).
But this is where the "crisis of meaning" steps in and pours gasoline on the fire. Because people want conflagration. They fantasize about it. The shop for it with tactical gear and rifles. They accessorize for it. And I do think this is different. It isn't (just) about opprobrium, it becomes about fulfilling a life narrative, which I think can make it much more potent.
I think you can see something similar in the period before the First World War, a desire for conflict for its own sake.
I'm a child of the South Bronx (NYC) in the post-Civil Rights seventies in a union household with a single mother (nurse) who was too overworked to be political or even talk about politics. Fortunately, I was educated by conservative Dominicans and Jesuits for twelve years that by the end (somehow) made me an avowed atheist and nascent Marxist. But I was too pessimistic / anti-utopian (by nature? by experience even then?) so soon I dropped Marxism and, along with having read F. Douglass, Malcolm X and MLK, Jr, had also found N. Chomsky, M. Bakunin, P. Kropotkin, R. Luxemberg, A. Gramsci, A. Camus (esp. The Rebel), et al ... what became for me an archive of 'the libertarian left' for perpetual rebellion, not revolution. Since those undergraduate days in the early eighties agitating for divestment from South Africa to end of apartheid, protesting US aggression in Nicaragua, El Salvador & Guatamala and (violent) opposition to the official "war on drugs" that disproportionately targeted (& disenfranchised) urban minority and rural poor white populations, the decades the defeats have only radicalized me so that I've grown even more pessimistic and more anarchistic. Until I drop, for me at least, the struggle against all forms of injustice and dehumanization goes on ...
Quoting unenlightened
:victory: :cool:
Quoting Banno
:smirk:
This kind of claim [s]pisses me off[/s] elicits a negative reaction in me, not because I don't recognize the scope and consequences of the actions of the British and Americans in what is now the US starting in 1600 and on till today and not because I don't recognize our, my, ongoing responsibility. What I object to is the misuse of these historic and contemporary actions here to make the case that somehow the past was better than the present. In the list of war casualties in Wikipedia, only one - World War 2 - took place after 1900. A quick look at World War 2 indicates that about 3.5 % of the world population was killed. For the Mongol invasions of Europe and Asia, the comparable number was 10%. Of course the Mongol invasions took place over a period of about 150 years while World War 2 took place over a much shorter period.
If you look at genocides, it's harder to tell. There certainly are a lot of 20th century examples in Wikipedia. One question I can't find an answer to is how many of those are related to colonialism that took place earlier. I would guess most of them, but I don't have evidence to back that up.
So, as I noted, saying that the 20th century is uniquely evil is a misrepresentation. A lot of the increased numbers could probably be attributed to improved weaponry as opposed to a more violent human nature. Empires kill people - it's what they do.
I don't think I've said the past was better than the present. I've said things have gotten worse in various regards, but the idea that the 20'th century is not uniquely evil means that the past was not better than than the present. I agree with you here:
Quoting T Clark
Rather than progress I'd say we're about the same, but with more ability to enact our will.
And humans will both good and evil, for better or worse.
Yes.
My mind implodes thinking through this because "progressive" is not "communism" to my mind. Just to tell you my feelings -- what I want to ask is "What are you thinking about the anti-utopian sentiments expressed which are still, more or less, Marxist?"
They don't consider themselves communists, but they are flirting with the idea. So the question is sincere, "I'm not sure if there is anything wrong with communism after all... What do you have against it?" I don't find it strange that those on the far left are flirting with communism.
OK, that makes sense when you put it like that. Gotcha. Thanks.
"Quoting Jamal
Well. fucking. done. If more could see this, we would be much better off IMO.
The young are more likely to settle on radical sounding politics and moral severity for the same reason they are likely to settle on any other far-out sounding thing -- music, clothing, slang -- whatever. One's youth is embarrassing later in adulthood.
Then too, as much as young people won't/don't/can't admit it, the young tend to be kind of stupid (this opinion based on my experience). It's unavoidable. Why, after so few years, would they be otherwise?
For my part it took many years, several decades really, to become the sensible person I now wish I had been at 18.
That's a deep can of worms. If I wanted to get into it I'd want to reference Dialectic of Enlightenment, J.G. Ballard's novel Crash (sceptical towards the dichotomy of humans variously using or misusing technology; it's more like technology is an expression of us and also remakes us), and possibly Straw Dogs by John Gray, but I'm not sure I do right now. It's a good point to bring up though.
I mean I take your point, and certainly the Frankfurt School were fixated on Europe and traumatized by what happened there to the exclusion of everything else, and I should be careful to correct their Eurocentrism. But still, I'm still inclined to say there is something importantly unique in the evil of the twentieth century, and that this wasn't just a technical issue --- I just don't have any arguments as yet.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, I don't want to give the impression that I think, or that Adorno thought, that the worst disasters were brought on by angry youths and revolutionaries. I'm not making the conservative argument here, not exactly. Certainly I agree it's the case that the disasters of the twentieth century were generated by the capitalist and imperialist order, by nationalism, the reaction against the workers' movement leading to fascism, etc., and on a deeper level the inherent movement of Enlightened Europe towards domination, over peope and nature.
I'm just digging down through the layers of Adorno's deep pessimism and shame on behalf of Europe.
Thank you, glad you liked it :smile:
Quoting Leontiskos
Having for years appealed to the mismatch between ideals and reality in an effort to protect the ideals, I think I see what you mean (I was radicalized by Trotskyists who were able to casually wash their hands of Stalinism since he represented "the revolution betrayed").
So I guess what you're saying is that the problem is in the very pursuit or promotion of an ideal? And for a couple of reasons: it tends to devalue everything about how things are, the status quo (which is bad because a lot of what exists is valuable); and it's difficult to distinguish bad ideals. Makes sense.
The answer might be something boring like finding a middle way. On one end you have Marinetti and the futurists positively rejoicing in war and the destruction of existing society --- an attitude that can characterize not only fascism but left-wing movements too --- and on the other you have conservatives and traditional reactionaries (as opposed to radical ones like the Nazis).
And maybe that middle way necessitates the relinquishing of the ideal --- or perhaps the shelving of the ideal to the secret Utopian corner of one's mental library.
:cool:
Quoting 180 Proof
:up:
Yes, and I guess there's always a risk that my kind of reflections are effectively conservative.
This is a great point. I haven't thought about it like that. Maybe it's an argument not only to teach ethics early on, but to teach political philosophy before or during the teenage years of radicalization --- for me, I first learned about politics in this personalized way and found it difficult to recover from that.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I certainly recognize the appeal of this viewpoint and I was attracted to accelerationism for a while. Its central point seems to be to face up to that suffering and embrace it, since it is unavoidable and might lead to a better world. What makes this interestingly different from earlier versions of that familiar ends-justify-the-means attitude (both left and right) is that it positions itself counter-culturally against a "soft" mainstream (again, both left and right), thus posing as a radical advancement beyond the various liberalisms and leftisms feebly surviving in the remains of the post-war consensus.
(Incidentally, this could be the Trotskyist in me talking again but I thought it was mainly under Stalin that the minorities suffered, having enjoyed more rights and autonomy from 1917 to 1923, when non-Russian languages were encouraged and ethnic cultural traditions were combined with, rather than replaced by, new socialist ones.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Ah, the tragic heart of your post. What do you mean by "And I do think this is different"? Different from the past?
It's a great quote, and I have it at the back of my mind in all this. But it's such a familiar thought that it's become a cliché. Adorno has a way of taking a cliché and making it fresh and thus more serious (or, as some would say, pretentiously rewording it). Another example from Minima Moralia I was thinking of last night was...
When I read that I thought, this is "time flies when you're having fun" but without the fun (since the "experience" could be any kind of experience); and, as if underlining that, at the end of the section he concludes with a single sentence: "Time flies."
Anyway, yeah, you might say that the OP is an attempt to, egotistically, dignify a really common experience and dress it up as something more than it is. However, as I've been saying to Moliere, I haven't really become a conservative (or "capitalist"), so the trajectory is not quite the same.
Quoting BC
Yes. However, I had an interesting experience recently. I'm accustomed now to thinking I was an idiot in my youth, but I found an old diary in which I was going on about politics and philosophy, and it was actually quite good, more subtle and sophisticated than I thought I was back then.
On reflection, I realized that this was not good news at all, because what it meant was that I had forgotten most of what I knew, and I have not in fact been getting more wise but just unknowingly treading water, learning the same things over and over again while becoming slightly less angry. That was a yikes moment.
I used to scoff at this idea, thinking it reactionary, not to mention facile and simplistic. It's galling to find myself now gravitating towards it.
And look how that turned out!
:up:
And you and I both know that one is true: there is meaning in food.
Tonight:
4 egg
125 g chopped mushrooms
1/2 cup self-raising flour
150g fetta chopped
1 1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup zucchini grated
1/2 cup corn cob kernels to taste
Mix ingredients together and pour into a greased quiche or pie dish.
Bake at 180C for approximately 40 minutes
A variation from here: Quick Quiche.
That's a great-looking quiche.
And you can read your old posts! We've been having the same discussions for a decade.
Yeah but I like to think this is a different angle. I'm telling myself that.
Don't get me wrong, but didn't you have more than one angle on issues in your head back then too? And it's less the landscape of thought that's different, just the distribution of beliefs through it.
Sure, but this angle is a new one. Putting it differently, I'm more interested in Adorno than I am in myself. So, I'm reading Adorno via my perennial personal concerns, but I'm more interested in the reading than I am in coming up with an answer as to what I should do myself.
Early days yet, lad. In the sense of being a rejection of war and violence, of materialism and consumerism, and the accompanying environmental degradation, and the turn away from political power towards communitarian values, it looks pretty good still to me.
[quote=Hilaire Belloc]And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.[/quote]
Thus the instincts of conservatism. But times change, and if one is nursed by a lion, all bets are off.
So when a democracy votes to become a tyranny, one has to admit defeat as a democrat, no? And in that sense a democrat at the extreme necessarily becomes an anarchist. And an anarchist has to allow everyman to be his own tyrant. So the political world is truly a globe such that maximal order and maximal freedom, the other dimension of political thought also become the same at their extreme.
I went back and reread your post I originally reacted to negatively. Reading it again I saw you said almost exactly the same thing I did. I just jumped on it because of some of the phrasing you used. Mea culpa.
Did you ever read the Power Broker?
I would say rather that, at whatever age over 20, if you dont recognize and acknowledge what John Donne said, you have no soul.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Weve been having the same discussions for 4000 years years.
Yes, although, like I said, you can see something in the period before WWI, a lot of discussion about how a war was needed to restore honor, glory, vigor, and to wash away modern malaise and hedonism. I don't think it's any coincidence that Jünger's "Storm of Steel," in many ways a positive account of the First World Warthe brothership, heroism, meaning, and purpose service on the front providedhas become a best seller again (even warranting mentions by folks like Musk).
Such malaise exists in every era, or at least throughout modernity. We have the Beatniks, the Lost Generation, the Hippies, Gen X angst, etc. But we must not make the mistake of thinking that just because a problem is perennial it cannot be more or less extreme.
I think you can see this phenomena in the extremely high demand for apocalyptic media these days. Naomi Kline and Astra Taylor have a new piece on this for the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk) although as one might expect it is a partisan polemic. I do think this sort of thing might be more active on the right, but it definitely exists on the left.
And I think there are key differences in range in intensity. People have always been attracted to politics as a replacement for religion, or revolution as an identity. But today we see desire for a revolution that simply tears everything down, where anarchy, not utopia, is the point, because people can only see meaning and heroism arising in such contexts, not in an improved political situation. I think this probably has something to do with the inevitably globalized, liberal capitalism projects for itself. People see no real escape from it outside collapse. As Mark Fisher says: "it is easier to imagine the world ending than capitalism."
Second, styling oneself a revolutionary and chomping at the bit for conflagration was previously largely a young man's game. The sentiment is stronger and wider now. Look at pictures of armed protests and you see more men with gray beards than teens. That's important, because we have societies where adolescence is long extended and young adults aren't taken seriously or given much power (a sea change from the Baby Boomers, who took control of the White House and Congress at Millennials' age, and held it for the next four decades, into their 80s, whereas representation under 55 remains absolutely tiny at the federal level*).
I cannot help but think this has something to do with the atomized, voluntarist conception of humanity that underpins the global system, but also its inability to sustain the "progress" it previously used to justify itself. That most people think coming generations will live shorter, poorer, less secure lives is a quite big shift in polling data, maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy.
*That's a US example, but gerontocracy is a phenomena across the West.
Yes. As an Aristotelian I think that's right. :smile:
Quoting Jamal
I don't think it requires a relinquishing of the ideal. I was just pushing back against what I saw as @fdrake's excessive promotion of the ideal, which seemed tantamount to justifying "monstrosities."
But it is hard to understand how to navigate the middle way. It's hard to understand how to hold the principle of conservatism and the principle of progress in tension.
To my mind an illustration of that navigation is when the father and mother of a large household decide to make a substantial change in the way the household is run. As Lent is now coming to an end, an example of that might be, "We are no longer going to eat candy in this household." In order for this rule to be implemented properly, there must be a respect for the children's habits and desires alongside the parents' desire for a more healthy environment. The parents must have patience with their plan, move slowly, and be open to the possibility that their proposed change might not work at all. A parallel here would be a government that wants to prohibit, say, alcohol. Or the recent Australian case of prohibiting social media for youth. These simplistic cases can help illustrate more general principles.
To be fair to myself, I wasn't promoting any ideals, I was complaining that ideal havers are full of crap and that people who forsake unrealistic ideals are evil.
Fair enough. I saw you as trying to pose a dilemma between evil and monstrosity, but I thought the tenor of your posts favored the monstrosity route over the evil route.
Maybe part of the problem has to do with the way we've come to view the world? The Baconian view of "nature" (and so, the entire cosmos, and literally everything per materialism) is that it is something to master. We make it serve us. We remake it in our image. You figure out how it works and then build it how you want.
When this is the default approach to being, and understanding being, then it makes sense that political issues might involve "scrapping one project and starting over." The political system, culture, and even human nature become our invention, and if they are preforming poorly we can radically rebuild them, or build something totally new.
Whereas if one starts from a more organic view of nature, the analogy is less something like the design of a new car engine (very much the model for contemporary political science and economics), and much more like tending a garden. When you tend a garden, you don't want to go around lopping of limbs unless you really have to. You work with the plants, with their natural form. A garden is something to be nurtured, and having to tear things up by the roots and starting over is a sign of failure. It's not what a good gardener does. They cultivate rather than design, heal rather than repair. Gardeners, from my experience, are particularly proud when they have extremely long-lived plants that have made it through all sorts of crises.
Yes, and I love those images, particularly project/invention vs. garden.
Another image here is Martin Buber's I and Thou. A Baconian mindset tends to treat as "it" what should be treated as "thou," i.e. persons. This is most evident in politics.
(It also bears on Orthodox vs. Catholic ecclesiology, but I doubt too many here care about that! :smile:)
Why do you ask? (I was) a New Yorker, I'd lived in their ruins ...
Quoting Jamal
I think it's primarily our actions, practices, commitments & habits which 'define' us politically. My own pessimism can seem "conservative" in isolation from my other overt concerns and agitations.
I read "The Power Broker" last year. Robert Moses had an enormous effect on the quality of life in the area where and in the period when you grew up. I wondered how aware of that you were as a child and how much it influenced your philosophical and political outlook.
No worries. I'm not exactly addressing your concern, but sort of just thinking out loud because the topic appeals to me and is something I've thought about
Quoting Jamal
If you think of something then by all means share it, but also, it's sort of something that's not fun to think about. Do we really want to weigh the suffering of different peoples to determine which time period is really more evil? Does it matter that much?
I think fascism is scary enough without having to designate it as a special evil.
But, thinking back to Adorno's perspective I can see how he'd feel a certain connection and responsibility for those atrocities than another time periods, too. In a sense it's a unique evil because this is what concerns Adorno since it's a part of his life.
So in that sense it is unique -- I just meant to really drive home my pessimism ;) -- or something. Thinking out loud.
Quoting Jamal
Gotcha. (FWIW, you got me starting Minima Moralia today by peaking at the Marxist.org version and reading a bit of the intro. No promises of course as I am easily sidetracked)
S'all good. I'm not exactly talking about a calming subject, or dressing up my opinion but stating it bluntly.
Quoting fdrake
And more!
I don't mind revisiting old topics. I often find that I've forgotten things when I do so and my impressions are, while understandable, also not as locktight as I was thinking they were -- I usually find another reading upon rereading, or in rereading my posts I'll rethink a position I've stated before because a new argument will come to mind.
I tried reading Robert Caro's book in the 90s but I didn't get very far I skipped around a lot and lost interest (even though, I had noticed (and just checked again), the book was published on my eleventh birthday). I'm sure the mega-engineering (& machinations) fascinates you, T Clark I had been a mechanical engineering student for three years before I dropped out of university the first time but I grew up playing in and making my way out of non-Bronxite Robert Moses' ruins.
I recommend The Bronx by Evelyn Gonzalez (scholarship) or Before The Fires by Mark Naison & Bob Gumbs (oral history) to give some much needed social context to Caro's biography.
Its true, he was an amazing person. A genius. That doesnt mean he was a good person. He did a lot of damage and hurt a lot of people.
Quoting 180 Proof
Thanks.
As someone else's savior once said:
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
The point being, no apologies for having been a child. That's what you were supposed to be doing.
That's actually from Paul. :razz:
In my opinion what is so admirable about @Jamal's post is the courage it takes to admit a deep mistake. Namely, to reconsider a foundational presupposition that has shaped your life for a very long time, and on which you took strong stands. It is incredibly difficult to do that. So yes, it's a lot like Paul, namely his conversion in which he turned around in an entirely different direction and joined the group he had long been laboring to eradicate.
Quoting Jamal
Quoting Moliere
Quoting Moliere
I realize now that this is pretty much where I unconsciously wanted to go with the discussion, and merely used my own story to look at it --- but the moment I realize that's where I wanted to go, I don't want to.
There's probably something to the idea of uniqueness when I think of relativizing accounts of suffering to the speaker -- in that sense it makes sense to feel my relationship to the aftermath of September 11th is unique because it is mine, and Adorno's relationship to the horrors of the 30 years war is unique because it is his.
This avoids the nasty business of weighing sufferings on some kind of scale as if it could be measured.
At one point in 1984, Winston is confessing some horrible thing he did as a child that's always bothered him and Julia says: 'I expect you were a beastly little swine in those days. All children are swine.'
It's true, they are. I've worked with kids for almost 30 years. I look back in horror at what I believed and did as a teenager, but I was a stupid teenager. What can you do? Instead of being horrified, be glad you've grown up.
I'm now thinking of all this is in terms of a link between the dispositional dimension of arrogance vs. humility and the epistemological dimension of identity vs. nonidentity.
From Adorno's point of view, there is a dangerous arrogance in philosophy's attempt to corral the object within the bounds of a concept (whatever that concept might be, e.g., the Forms, the synthetic unity of apperception, the general will, etc.). Youthful rebellion has this arrogance too: the messiness of reality is brushed aside and swept under the carpet in favour of an ideal, since that ideal is based on a certain conception of what exists that might lead, for example, to regarding human beings as nothing more than counter-revolutionaries, or invaders, etc. This is a kind of identity-thinking.
In contrast, humility would lead one to an appreciation of the nonidentical, that which exceeds our concepts; the thisness of this and that. Thus, one opens up to the world in all its inconvenient multifariousness.
Thanks; I'm glad I'm not crazy. But again I want to say that it's not conservatism: Adorno castigates capitalism at every opportunity. So it's something like knowing that humans suffer domination because of capitalism but also refusing easy categories like those of (official) dialectical materialism.
I agree it's not conservativism. It's an expression of alienation, is what I've gathered so far from the first 20 aphorisms. There are expressions in there that I'm uncomfortable with when he's talking about marriage and gender and Freud, and there's part of me that thinks that's very much an era thing.
It's interesting how he laments -- most of it, thus far, feels like an expression of alienation. A sort of bewildered wondering that does not want the status quo, refuses to accept the world as it is, while refusing to accept easy palliatives.
I liked your conclusion the most:
Quoting Jamal
That resonates with how I think about things.
Yeah, me too, and that's pretty much what his Negative Dialectics is about so that's what I'm aiming for at the moment.
So the mouthpeice of something maybe better, with all the caveats of caution?
:pray:
EDIT: Until then -- I can think of worse things to do with my time than reading and talking.
I'd be up for a TPF reading group. But I reckon nobody else would be interested.
It'd force me more, and it looks like the text is more readable than the other ones I bring up. lol
I'm down. Especially without a schedule, I'm thinking -- I powerhouse texts when I'm "in the mood" and not elsewise. What do you think?
I'm up for it and I'm in the mood.
Start a thread. Minima Moralia? Or one of the others you mentioned?
Yeah I will/would start a thread. I'm thinking Negative Dialectics, specifically the non-official but apparently only decent English translation by Dennis Redmond.
Minima Moralia is too aphoristic for a reading group, IMO
I found a pdf in the wild world of the net.
Useful as preparation or we could even start with it is Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966. His lectures are relatively a breeze.
Starting there is ok with me.
BTW I haven't studied Hegel, and some might think it's mad to tackle this without doing Hegel first, but I'm not massively concerned I'm working back to Hegel via Adorno, like I did with Kant, via Schopenhauer (though some might say there's a huge difference, namely that Adorno actually understood Hegel).
So a real Hegel scholar would school us. And perhaps @Count Timothy von Icarus or @Tobias could provide some guardrails in interpretation, since my reading isn't broad and largely motivated by understanding Marx.
This is related to what Trotsky says in his history of the Russian revolution, that the global proletariat uprising was supposed to happen all by itself. There was no need to make it happen, yet the revolutionary government acted with bloody ruthlessness to clear the way for the new era of human history. Trotsky doesn't really explain why.