Category Archives: Rationalism

Not in a negative sense, Vienna-based mad scientist/producer Florian Hecker seems to make some of the most inaccessible music out there right now. So it wasnt surprising to hear that he was collaborating with Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani for 2012s Chimerization project, which combined an experimental libretto with the abstract synthesis on which Heckers a veritable expert. (I can think of no better way to attract the margins of artistic consumers than to bring on a guy whos written and spoken extensively about Rationalism and related subjects so prodigiously it makes my out-of-school braincry.)

Now, Hecker has re-recruited Reza for the third chapter in the trilogy of text-sound pieces (in case you lost count, the first was the just-mentioned Chimerization and the second was 2014s Articulao). The newest installment is called A Script For Machine Synthesis. Its out February 24 on Editions Mego and is said to present a complex simplicity that spirals in an unending manner as an audio image of the uncanny valley. (Something tells me this uncanny valley should be limited to children 10 andup.)

Heckers anti-hit-parade dont stop there, though; because in addition to A Script For Machine Synthesis, Hecker has also just released Articulao Sintetico, a limited-edition cassette that, as the title suggests, purports to be a complete resynthesis of Articulao which therefore pretty much makes it a resynthesis of the voice of artist Joan LaBarbarba.

Buy Articulao Sintetico here, and pre-order Script right over here.

Articulao Sinteticotracklisting:

01. Synthetic Hinge 02. Modulator (Scattering Transform) 03. SyntheticHinge

A Script For Machine Synthesistracklisting:

01. Prologue 02. A Script For Machine Synthesis 03.Credits

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Hecker reemerges with more text-based synthesis on two new releases on Editions Mego - Tiny Mix Tapes

A surgeon who views patients not as people, but as timed puzzles to be solved, offers a raw and moving memoir, says Oliver Moody

The marketing bumf that arrived in the post with Fragile Lives, a memoir by Stephen Westaby, a distinguished cardiac surgeon, declared it to be a book in the tradition of Henry Marsh and Paul Kalanithi.

Strewth. When did we hand over the keys of our souls to physicians? Why is the publishing industry so stuck on this strange, but luminous sub-genre of religious writing in which doctors draw up schematics of the human condition under portentous titles like When Breath Becomes Mortal Harm?

In 1933 the literary critic FR Leavis identified scientific rationalism as the worlds present sickness. Now, in an age that is minutely obsessed with bodies, yet blankly terrified of their ceasing to be, hospitals are increasingly charged with the care of the

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Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon's Stories of Life and Death on the ... - The Times (subscription)

Were now 363 days until the opening ceremonies of the Pyeongchang Olympics and the National Hockey League and International Olympic Committee are as far apart today as they were a year ago. The writing has been on the wall since Sochi: the NHL doesnt want to go to the Olympics, much the same way it didnt want to go to Russia.

If youll allow me to put on my speculation hat, the only reason the negotiations have lasted this long is because the NHL desperately wants to go to Beijing, a market it covets. The IOC knows this as well as the rest of the world and if the NHL wants to keep its players home next year, the committee is comfortable allowing the league to do it for years to come.

Okay, Ill take my speculation hat off now. Heres the deal: the NHL doesnt want to send its players to the Olympics for one very simple reason ($ $ $ $ $ $ $). Taking weeks off the season hurts the NHL financially, or so they claim, and the owners dont feel taking the show on the road helps grow the sport.

The league could very well take some blame for the sport not growing further than the Etobicoke city limits, but Gary Bettman isnt likely to see it that way. Heres what we do know: the players want to go, the league executives dont want the players to go and the fans (generally) want the players to go. Sound familiar? It should. This is just about the same position we find ourselves in when rumblings of a work stoppage roll around, albeit with far less serious consequences.

Your personal feelings on the importance of NHL players taking part in the 2018 Olympic games aside, Bettman and the owners are nearly always the enemy of fans and the players. They will speak in grandiose terms about the growth of the game, the league and the respect of hockey on the national stage while caring about one thing only: the expanse of their wallets.

So lets call this article a preemptive strike on Bettmans particularly odious brand of rationalism. NHL players going to the Olympics wont hurt anyone but the NHL, and even then, does anyone believe three weeks off in February every four years actually hurts the on-ice product? Perhaps the better question is: Does anyone else believe the NHL actually gives a shit? The league introduced the World Cup of Hockey this season and as a result introduced the exact same problems while ostensibly pocketing the profits.

Its all about the money, baby. Dont let anyone tell you differently. If you dont mind NHL players skipping the Olympics (frankly, I dont) fair enough. But dont accept the NHLs arguments for doing so. The only thing the league cares about is its bottom line it doesnt care about the quality of its product, the disruption to the season or the respect it receives on the world stage. Frankly, it should be so lucky to be recognized on any stage at all.

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Don't become a pawn in the NHL's Olympic Games - Fear the Fin

Laura Akin: Overwhelming majority of the Founding Fathers were Christian Modesto Bee Of the 55 Continental Congress delegates, 28 belonged to the Church of England and 21 were protestants. The six remaining members supported theistic rationalism. So there you have it, only six of the signatures on the Constitution were not Christian. I ...

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Laura Akin: Overwhelming majority of the Founding Fathers were Christian - Modesto Bee

During his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 2, the President issued a stark forecast that should have every freedom-loving American deeply concerned. There has always been a thinly-veiled assault on the separation of church and state by the religious right, but the Constitution has performed as intended by successfully keeping imaginary deities out of our national governance. The Johnson Amendment is a vital tool against efforts to make our country a theocracy. It rightfully strips away the tax-exempt protections for any religious figure or church that openly endorses or opposes a political candidate or referendum.

President Trump has pledged to eliminate the Johnson Amendment from the U.S. tax code, promoting the unfettered accumulation of tax-free wealth by religious fundamentalists and thereby paving the way to mono-theocratic rule. The Constitution protects each citizens right to individually choose freedom of, or freedom from religion and nobody has the right to impose their particular brand of superstition on anybody else. Despite the fact that reason, rationalism and access to science-based information arecompelling intelligent people to turn away from faith in record numbers, the accelerated accumulation of obscene wealth by organized religion will make the fight for freedom of thought more difficult.

President Trumps misguided pandering to religions power structure should give everybody pause -- at least everybody capable of thinking for themselves. Call your congressional delegates and demand that the Johnson Amendment stand as a vital protection to our democracy.

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The separation of church and state - Helena Independent Record

With every change of administration come charges of hypocrisy. Those who governed by executive order suddenly learn the dangers of unilateral presidential power, and those who thought executive orders were an impeachable violation of the separation of powers start using them without missing a step. Supporters of federalism embrace the benefits of national uniformity. How soon is too soon to start protesting a new administration? When does criticizing a president spill over into disrespecting the presidency? Should we insist on patient bipartisanship, or is it enough to say that elections have consequences and the winner is in charge? Should officials treat a court decision as the last word and the law of the land, or should they stand up for their understanding of the Constitution?

With depressing regularity, partisans and pundits switch sides on political principles depending on who gains and who loses.

At its worst, hypocrisy can be a kind of furious projection of ones sins onto others; think of the official filled with obnoxious self-righteousness about other peoples sexual behavior whose personal life turns out not to bear scrutiny. Or it can turn values into mere talking points, and drain them of any real force. But what the great Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar called anti-hypocrisy is a talking point of its own. It is a lazy substitute for making and defending real value judgments; I dont have to be able to show which principles are good ones if I can just show that you violate your own. That strategy encourages a spiral downward; having higher standards always increases the chance that one wont live up to them. In a culture that cant agree on shared moral judgments but that delights in exposing hypocrites, the easy strategy might be to have no standards at all.

The 17th century French author La Rochefoucauld famously described hypocrisy as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Ordinary political hypocrisy of the sort that we see when parties trade power typically has that character. The out-party hypocritically recites principles it violated just yesterday important legal changes should be made by congressional lawmaking, not executive order, for example. But in so doing it rearticulates norms and principles that officials, institutions and citizens can use as benchmarks. Without that rearticulation, the norms themselves would lose their force and be forgotten.

In 2017, we should be less worried by hypocrisy than by its absence. Some hypocrites dont feel shame, but at least they formally acknowledge that there are things about which one should be ashamed (the norms the other guy is violating). The Trump administration operates on a different, shameless, plane.

In a recent interview, the Fox News host Bill OReilly asked President Trump about his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying Putins a killer. Trumps reply was astonishing: There are a lot of killers. Weve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our countrys so innocent?

Theres often been real hypocrisy in American denunciation of authoritarians, dictators, warmongers and killers. The United States has shed a lot of blood, including innocent and civilian blood. We dont have to go back to the Cold War, with CIA assassinations and support for murderous Latin American dictatorships, to see this. The Obama administrations drone war campaign is more than enough.

But that hypocrisy was itself an acknowledgement that America aimed to do better. The public expected, and elites at least tried to deliver, a government that could claim the moral high ground.

Trumps shrug abandons that striving idealism. Why bother to have standards? Why bother to treat political killings as even worth criticizing? Why bother to acknowledge that, even granting American misbehavior, Putins regime today is accused of doing far worse: murdering critical journalists, assassinating political dissidents, committing war crimes from Chechnya to Syria?

The president wasnt just suggesting that government is a morally gray business thatalways involves some violence and wrongdoing. In his comments, he seemed to give up on the idea that there is such a thing as wrongdoing at all.

More talked about but quite similar is the possibility that Trump either doesnt think truth matters or doesnt think it exists.

Think of the Trump administrations constant, brazen falsehoods about easily checked facts from violent-crime rates to election fraud to inauguration crowds. Theres no real pretense of telling the truth; the virtue of truthfulness isnt getting its normal tribute.

For another example, think of Kellyanne Conways abrupt reversal of the election-season pledge that Trump would release his tax returns once they were audited. Hes not going to release his tax returns. People didnt care. They voted for him.The audit excuse was a bad one, but at least it was an excuse; it paid lip service to the norm of presidential financial transparency. Abandoning the excuse, treating the election victory as a substitute for the norm, is a way of saying that the norm doesnt bind at all.

Compared to that nihilism, hypocrisy is a vice well worth preserving.

Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and director of the Lin Centre at McGill University, and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. His most recent book is Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom.

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Hypocrisy isn't the problem. Nihilism is - Los Angeles Times

Imagine a budding philosophy professor on a tenure track at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell coming across a library built at West Wind, the private estate of American philosopher and Harvard professor William Hocking.

It's a library that had not been touched since Hocking's death in 1966; a library full of first editions of American thinkers such as Thoreau, Emerson, James, Royse, and of the European philosophers Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke; a library of precious books mildewing in the cold New England winters and the heat of summer.

American Philosophy, A Love Story, by John Kaag, (Farrar, 2016), combines Kaag's own modern existential conflict with his discovery of the story of America's brand of philosophy as seen through the writings of its most influential thinkers from 1825 to 1966.

With his marriage breaking up, Kaag's experience cataloging and storing the 10,000 volumes in Hocking's library helped him work through not only his love of philosophy, but the meaning of love itself and the idea of a life well-lived as examined by the world's most notable philosophers.

Kaag's book is as slow going as his work in Hocking's library was. The reader must digest a compendium of American thinking on idealism, naturalism, rationalism and pragmatism that has made us who we are as a nation. But it is worth every minute of discovery in the library of modern American thought.

Out here, we have our own philosophy when it comes to steak. Serve this Valentine's Day menu prepared with love for your Oklahoma philosopher.

Reach Melony Carey at foodbythebook@gmail.com or (918) 683-3694.

MARINADE FOR GRILLED STEAK

2 garlic cloves, finely minced

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

1/2 teaspoon oregano

1/4 teaspoon cayenne

5 tablespoons soy sauce

4 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

1/4 cup vegetable oil

1/4 cup red wine

1 teaspoon black pepper

Daddy Hinkle Dry Quick Marinade

Sprinkle steaks with Daddy Hinkle. In a 2-cup measuring cup, place remaining ingredients. Whisk until emulsified. Place steaks in zip-lock bag and pour marinade over. Seal and place in refrigerator for 6 or more hours. Remove steaks, throw marinade away. Grill over medium coals until desired doneness. Adjust quantity for amount of meat.

BROWN BUTTER MASHED POTATOES

Salt

3 1/2 pounds white or all-purpose potatoes, peeled and cut into large chunks

1 stick plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 cup milk

1/4 cup crme fraiche or sour cream

In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the potatoes over moderate heat until tender, about 25 minutes. Drain well. Return the potatoes to the pot and cook over high heat for 1 minute to dry them out slightly. Pass the potatoes through a ricer and return them to the pot.

In a small saucepan, cook the butter over moderate heat until the milk solids turn dark golden, about 4 minutes. Add all but 2 tablespoons of the brown butter to the potatoes along with the milk and sour cream and stir well. Season with salt and stir over moderate heat until hot. Drizzle the remaining brown butter over the potatoes and serve.

RUSTIC PEAR AND APPLE GALETTE

1 refrigerated pie crust or home made

Streusel:

2/3 cup chopped walnuts

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

1/2 teaspoonkosher salt

6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cubed

Filling:

2 Granny Smith appleshalved, cored and thinly sliced lengthwise

2 firm Bartlett pearshalved, cored and sliced lengthwise 1/4 inch thick

1/4 cup granulated sugar, plus more for sprinkling

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

1 large egg beaten with 1 teaspoon water

Confectioners' sugar, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 400. Spread the walnuts in a pie plate and bake for about 4 minutes, until lightly browned. Let cool.

In a medium bowl, whisk the flour with the brown sugar and salt. Add the butter and, using your fingers, pinch it into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the walnuts and pinch the streusel into clumps. Refrigerate until chilled, about 15 minutes.

Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. In a large bowl, toss the apples with the pears, 1/4 cup of granulated sugar, the salt and lemon juice. On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the dough to a 19-by-13-inch oval. Ease the dough onto the prepared baking sheet. Mound the filling in the center of the oval, leaving a 2-inch border. Sprinkle the streusel evenly over the fruit and fold the edge of the dough up and over the filling.

Brush the crust with the egg wash and sprinkle evenly with granulated sugar. Bake the galette for 45 to 50 minutes, until the fruit is tender and the streusel and crust are golden brown. Let the galette cool. Dust with confectioner's sugar before serving. Adapted from Food and Wine, November 2015.

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Food by the Book: Philosophy, love, steak - Muskogee Daily Phoenix

1. Our way of life takes liberties with human nature. It uses Enlightenment ideas about reason which Samuel Hammond says psychologists know are very unrealistic (if not laughable).

2. Hammonds essay on liberalism (=workable liberties sought by lefties and conservatives) makes many crucial points, but isnt entirely realistic about reasons role.

3. Key principles of workable liberty are discovered, not invented. For instance, Hammond says, church/state separation and multicultural religious toleration were discovered in 1590s India under Islamic rule. And in 1640s Europe after many wars. (Aside, the supposed failure of multiculturalismisnt universal).

4. Certain behavioral rule patterns (like the Golden Rule, or property rights) are discoverable by any perspective-taking game-theoretic thinking.

5. Game theory enables mathematicalethics" with patterns as provable as geometry. And like geometry, game theory takes teaching (try rediscovering Euclid). But cooperation-preserving game theory matters far more than geometry.

6. Hammond mentions the badly taught Prisoners Dilemma game. If the strategy labeled rational produces bad results, is it rightly called rational? That the Golden Ruled or god-fearing beat rationalists suggests we need to rescue rationality.

7. Experts play a vital role says Hammond. Yes, but only if theyre properly motivated. If experts (or leaders) arent loyal to something above self-gain, like the public good, theyre buyable and unreliable (see Plato on greed-driven politics, + original idiocy).

8. Hammond feels that reason can help establish cooperative norms. But theyre also established, transmitted and internalized emotionally (see paleo-economics). Social emotions evolved partly for cooperation, as did language (weve got evolved social cooperation rule processors, akin to our tacit grammar rule processors).

9. Darwin saw that in humans workable cooperative norms work like natural-moral selection. Your way of life discovers them, or it dies out (see needism, + negative telos).

10. Hammond advises reason and persuasion, not fear-mongering or other emotive strategies. But persuasion often requires emotion (see Aristotles rhetoric). The trick is to recruit emotions for good, not to ignore them (see Platos emotive Chariot, + facts versus fears).

11. Many besides psychologists know that the Enlightenments reason-reliance is laughably unrealistic. Only the unobservant or experts educated into rationalist delusions or theory induced blindness (like model-mesmerized economists) could believe otherwise.

12. Some Enlightenment thinkers understood; Hobbes>Reason is not...born with usbut attained by industry, Hume>Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions:

13. But less realistic ideas won, and Enlightenment errors, though unempirical, still underpin democracy and economics.

14. Three unempirical Enlightenment errors, rationalism, individualism, and hedonism, are particularly seductive because theyre partly truth. However their elegant oversimplifications exclude much that matters. Theyre typically empirically complex compositions hybridized with their opposites (emotional and relational rationality, self-deficient individualism, painstaking mattering and meaning-seeking).

15. No workable liberty can permit freedom to harm what your community depends on. Yet logic that pits self-interest against collective self-preservation lurks among the market-mesmerized.

16. Ways of life built on unempirical views of emotions or reason arent sustainable. Hammond makes progress by using empirically sounder psychology (e.g., mentioning System 1 + System 2). But long-lived liberty requires behavioral politics and better behaved behavioural models.

--

IllustrationbyJulia Suits,The New Yorkercartoonist & author ofThe Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions

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Taking Liberties With Workable Liberty - Big Think

Every once in a (long) while a book comes out that rips the zeitgeist, shining on like a crazy diamond.Age of Anger, by Pankaj Mishra, author of the also-seminal From the Ruins of Empire, might as well be the latest avatar.

Think of this book as the ultimate (conceptual) lethal weapon in the hearts and minds of a rootless cosmopolitan Teenage Wasteland striving to find its true call as we slouch through the longest the Pentagon would say infinite of world wars; a global civil war (which in my 2007 book Globalistan I called Liquid War).

Mishra, a sterling product of East-meets-West, essentially argues its impossible to understand the present if we dont acknowledge the subterranean homesick blues contradicting the ideal of cosmopolitan liberalism the universal commercial society of self-interested rational individuals first conceptualized by the Enlightenment via Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire and Kant.

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Historys winner ended up being a sanitized narrative of benevolent Enlightenment. The tradition of rationalism, humanism, universalism and liberal democracy was supposed to have always been the norm. It was clearly too disconcerting, Mishra writes, to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic rationalism, imperalism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering) already convulsing Europe in the late 19th century.

So, evoking T.S. Eliot, to frame the backward half-look, over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror that eventually led to The West versus The Rest, weve got to look at the precursors.

Enter Pushkins Eugene Onegin the first of many superflous man in Russian fiction, with his Bolivar hat, clutching a statue of Napoleon and a portrait of Byron, as Russia, trying to catch up with the West, mass-produced spiritually unmoored youth with a quasi-Byronic conception of freedom, further inflated by German Romanticism. The best Enlightenment critics had to be Germans and Russians, latecomers to politico-economic modernity.

Dostoevsky: Society dominated by the war of all against all in which most were condemned to be losers.

Two years before publishing the astonishing Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky, in his tour of Western Europe, was already seeing a society dominated by the war of all against all in which most were condemned to be losers.

In London, in 1862, at the International Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, Dostoyevsky had an illumination (You become aware of a colossal idea that here there is victory and triumph. You even begin vaguely to fear something.) Amid the stupor, Dostoyevsky was also cunning enough to observe how materialist civilization was enhanced as much by its glamor as by military and maritime domination.

Russian literature eventually crystalized crime at random as the paradigm of individuality savoring identity and asserting ones will (later mirrored in the mid-20th century by beat icon William Burroughs claiming shooting at random as his ultimate thrill).

The path had been carved for the swelling beggars banquet to start bombing the Crystal Palace even as, Mishra reminds us, intellectuals in Cairo, Calcutta, Tokyo and Shanghai were reading Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill to understand the secret of the perpetually expanding capitalist bourgeoisie.

And this after Rousseau, in 1749, had set the foundation stone of the modern revolt against modernity, now splintered in a wilderness of mirrored echoes as the Crystal Palace is de facto implanted in gleamy ghettos all around the world.

Mishra credits the idea of his book to Nietzsche commenting the epic querelle between the envious plebeian Rousseau and the serenely elitist Voltaire who duly hailed the London Stock Exchange, when it became fully operational, as a secular embodiment of social harmony.

Nietzsche: Ultimate cartographer of Resentment. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But it was Nietzsche who eventually came from central casting, as a fierce detractor of both liberal capitalism and socialism, to make Zarathustras enticing promise a magnetic Holy Grail to Bolsheviks (Lenin, though, hated it), the left-wing Lu Xun in China, fascists, anarchists, feminists and hordes of disgruntled aesthetes.

Mishra also reminds us how Asian anti-imperialists and American robber barrons borrowed eagerly from Herbert Spencer, the first truly global thinker who coined the survival of the fittest mantra after reading Darwin.

Nietzsche was the ultimate cartographer of Resentment. Max Weber prophetically framed the modern world as an iron cage from which only a charismatic leader may offer escape. And anarchist icon Mikhail Bakunin, for his part, had already in 1869 conceptualized the revolutionist as severing every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose to destroy it.

Bakunin: the revolutionary as merciless enemy of the civilized world. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Escaping the Supreme Modernist James Joyces nightmare of history in fact the iron cage of modernity a viscerally militant secession from a civilization premised on gradual progress under liberal-democratic trustees is now raging, out of control, far beyond Europe.

Ideologies that may be radically opposed nonetheless grew symbiotically out of the cultural maelstrom of the late 19th century, from Islamic fundamentalism, Zionism and Hindu nationalism to Bolshevism, Nazism, Fascism and revamped Imperialism.

Not only WWII but the current endgame was also visualized by the brilliant, tragic Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, when he was already warning about the self-alienation of mankind, finally able to experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. Todays live-streaming DIY jihadis are its pop version, as ISIStries to configure itself as the ultimate negation of the pieties of neoliberal modernity.

Weaving savory streams of politics and literature cross-pollination, Mishra takes his time to set the scene for The Big Debate between those developing world masses whose lives are stamped by the Atlanticist Wests still largely acknowledged history of violence and the liquid modernity (Bauman) elites yielding from the (selected) part of the world that made the crucial breakthroughs since the Enlightenment in science, philosophy, art and literature.

This goes way beyond a mere debate between East and West. We cannot understand the current global civil war, this post-modernist, post-truth intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, if we dont attempt to dismantle the conceptual and intellectual architecture of historys winners in the West, drawn from the triumphalist history of Anglo-American over-achievements.

Even at the height of the Cold War, US theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was mocking the bland fanatics of Western civilization in their blind faith that every society is destined to evolve just as a handful of nations in the West sometimes did.

And this the irony! while the liberal internationalist cult of progress glaringly mimicked the Marxist dream of internationalist revolution.

Arendt: Homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In her 1950 preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism now a resurgent mega-best seller on Amazon Hannah Arendt essentially told us to forget about the eventual restoration of the old world order; we were condemned to watch history repeat itself, homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.

Meanwhile, as Carl Schorske noted in his spectacular Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, American scholarship cut the cord of consciousness linking the past to the present; bluntly sanitized history; and then centuries of civil war, imperial ravage, genocide and slavery in Europe and America simply disappeared. Only one TINA (there is no alternative) narrative was allowed; how Atlanticists privileged with reason and individual autonomy made the modern world.

Enter master spoiler Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, born in 1928 in poor south Tehran, and the author of Westoxification (1962), a key reference text of Islamist ideology, where he writes about how Sartres Erostratus fires a revolver at the people in the street blindfolded; Nabokovs protagonist drives his car into the crowd; and the stranger, Mersault, kills someone in reaction to a bad case of sunburn. Talk about a lethal crossover existentialism meets Tehran slums to stress what Hanna Arendt called negative solidarity.

And enter Abu Musab al-Suri, born in 1958 one year after Osama bin Laden in a devout middle class family in Aleppo. It was al-Suri not the Egyptian Al-Zawahiri who designed a leaderless global jihad strategy in The Global Islamic Resistance Call, based on unconnected cells and individual operations. Al-Suri was the Samuel clash of civilizations Huntington of al-Qaeda. Mishra defines him as the Mikhail Bakunin of the Muslim world.

Responding to that silly neo-Hegelian end of history meme at the end of the Cold War, Allan Bloom warned that fascism might be the future; and John Gray telegraphed the return of primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian.

And that leads us to why the exceptional bearers of Enlightenment humanism and rationalism cannot explain the current geopolitical turmoil from ISIS to Brexit to Trump. They could never come up with anything more sophisticated than binary opposition of free and unfree; the same 19th century Western clichs about the non-West; and the relentless demonization of that perennially backward Other: Islam. Hence the new long war (Pentagon terminology) against Islamofascism.

Islamofascist? Photo: AFP

They could never understand, as Mishra stresses, the implications of that meeting of minds in a Supermax prison in Colorado between Oklahoma City bomber, all-American Timothy McVeigh, and the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef (non-devout Muslim, Pakistani father, Palestinian mother).

And they cannot understand how ISIS conceptualizers can regiment, online, an insulted, injured teenager from a Parisian suburb or an African shantytown and convert him into a narcissist Baudelairean? dandy loyal to a rousing cause worth fighting for. The parallel between the DIY jihadi and the 19th century Russian terrorist incarnating the syphilis of the revolutionary passions, as Alexander Herzen described it is uncanny.

Bombing Barcelona in 1893

or executions in the 21st century. Photo: Reuters

And the DIY jihadis top enemy is not even Christian; its the apostate Shiite. Mass rapes, choreographed murders, the destruction of Palmyra, Dostoyevsky had already identified it all; as Mishra puts it, its impossible for modern-day Raskolnikovs to deny themselves anything, and possible to justify anything.

Its impossible to summarize all the rhizomatic (hat tip to Deleuze-Guattari) intellectual crossfire deployed by Age of Anger. Whats clear is that to understand the current global civil war, archeological reinterpretation of the Wests hegemonic narrative of the past 250 years is essential. Otherwise we will be condemned, like puny Sisyphean specks, to endure not only the recurrent nightmare of history but also its recurrent blowback.

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Age of Anger - Asia Times

Its time the Left parties introspect where they had floundered, and developed a lingo to address the aspirations of the new middle class, Hamid Dhabolkar, son of the slain anti-superstition campaigner Narendra Dhabolkar and a leader of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti that works towards eradicating superstitions, has said.

They must ask themselves and find out where they went wrong. As to whether they were not adequately appreciative of the new role of the middle class that emerged in the 1990s, he said in an interaction with The Hindu on the sidelines of the DYFI national meeting which he addressed on Thursday.

Dr. Dhabolkar, a psychiatrist by profession, feels that Left politics for some reason had taken the back seat in national polity in the 1990s and the vacuum thus created was soon captured and filled by the far Right communal forces with a flourish. It is therefore important that the Left in India remain sensitive to issues of culture, which are political as well, and address them as part of their pro-poor agenda, he says.

To cite an instance, sorcery and black magic have been used time and again by opportunistic, self-proclaimed godmen to exploit the poor, he says. While his father had led the struggle for legislation against black magic, Maharashtra promulgated an Act after his father fell to the guns of bigots in 2013.

Dr. Dhabolkar is happy that the Kerala Sastra Sahithya Parishad has taken up the cause for such an act with the Kerala government.

Sabarimala temple

If the anti-superstition body that he is part of had successfully led a struggle for entry of women into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra, he now would want the same to be allowed at Sabarimala temple.

The case is coming up for hearing in the Supreme Court on February 20, on the second anniversary of communist leader and rationalist Govind Pansares murder by anti-nationalists, he says.

It pains Dr. Dhabolkar to think that justice has not been delivered yet in the murders of Narendra Dhabolkar, Govind Pansare and M.M. Kalburgi; trial has been rather slow and the actual shooters are absconding. But it is important that the message left by them go far and wide.

Megha Pansare

Govind Pansares daughter-in-law Megha Pansare thinks combating superstition is as important as the fight against globalisation. By opposing superstition, you are promoting rationalism, scientific temper, and freedom of thought, says Dr. Megha, an activist with the National Federation of Indian Women and a lecturer in Russian at the Shivaji University in Kolhapur, Maharashtra.

Govinda Pansare was a cultural activist and a politician and deemed cultural activity as part of his political commitment. He was gunned down when he was on the morning walk with his spouse. Now, as an act of resistance, Dr. Megha is organising morning walks by people on the 20th of each month.

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Go for introspection, Left parties told - The Hindu