It's time to shake up the category list. Social Practice becomes Zombies. In the next few weeks Culture will be folded into Zombies. Politics is Liege & Lief, which is obscure but accurate, with an arcane folk music reference. The old names were too formal, and I had too many subcategories. I will phase out some subcategories, add MT tags to my entries and let the tags lay the trail.
Why Zombies?
The English writer, mathemetician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote The Conquest of Happiness in 1930. It was written for a general audience. It has aged well.
The Doubter's Companion (1994, ISBN 0-670-85536-7) followed Voltaire's Bastards in Canadian writer John Ralston Saul's books on modern economics, politics and culture. His Wikipedia entry identifies him as a philosopher. I see him as a public intellectual and a social critic. His academic background appears to have been in economics. His arguments blend careful analysis with colourful and forceful presentation.
This book is subtitled "a dictionary of aggressive common sense", which plays out as an alphabetically organized collection of essays running from a few lines to a few pages. His essays explore concerns that are discussed in more detail in several of his other books.
A few weeks ago I read Letters to a Young Contrarian (ISBN 0-465-03033-5) by Christopher Hitchens. The book is part of a series published by Basic Books called "The Art of Mentoring". Hitchens has made his career as a journalist, literary critic, political commentator and public intellectual. The pieces in Letters to a Young Contrarian are gems - finely crafted essays on living the examined life in public.
Neat. The English online version of a Turkish paper has a interview with James W. Bernauer, the American author of several books on the French philosopher Michel Foucault, tied in to the publication of a Turkish translation of one of his books. Bernauer teaches at Boston College and many of his books and papers identify him as James w. Bernauer S.J. which indicates that he is a member of the Jesuits, and therefore a Catholic scholar.
Bernauer says that Foucault's later writings looked at philosophy as a method of care for the self and spirituality as a method of resisting the ideology of power imposed over individuals by society.
Yesterday, in a happy coincidence, I read an article in Spiked magazine and the entry on happiness in John Ralston's Saul's The Doubter's Companion.
Saul argued that the meaning of happiness has slipped, and that in modern times we tend to look for the wrong kind of happiness in the wrong places. In Aristotle's ethics, happiness meant human harmony, and ethical actions were actions that produced that kind of happiness. In modern liberal discourse, happiness means basic material comfort in a prosperous well-organized society. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that Americans had a natural right to pursuit of happiness, he meant the right to work for their own prosperity and to work collectively for that kind of society. When we say that politicians have a responsibility to promote happiness in that sense, we mean to promote laws and policies that promote a prosperous well-organized society.
Happiness has another meaning. Saul suggests that as Western society achieved the goals of prosperity and organization, "the word's meaning declined into the pursuit of pleasure or an obscure sense of inner contentment". He cites a comment attributed to the late French president Charles DeGaulle - "happiness is for idiots". He unpacks this as describing the fact that the political and economic processes of Western society are losing their focus. Those processes should be aimed at maintaining prosperity and well-being, not contentment. People are coming to expect the rest of the world to make them feel good and blaming "society" and life for being uncertain, risky and messy.
The second of Alasdair MacIntyre's lectures published in The Religious Significance of Atheism (I discussed the first lecture in my preceding entry, The Fate of Theism) was Atheism and Morals. His approach was to consider one of the key claims of theists, that without belief in God, morality collapses, expressed in Dostoyevsky's saying that without God, everything is permitted.
His answer as an observer of life and history, is that morality exists independently of a religious belief system. While some of the atheists of the Victorian area led notoriously unconventional social lives, the majority were moral, principled, conventional, socially conservative. And on the other hand good Christians on both sides in World War II firebombed civilian cities. The repressive morality of the Victorian era was a secular morality of respectability and convention, justified and advanced by atheist utilitarian thinkers like Mill and Bentham, as much as by religious thinkers.
Alasdair MacIntyre crossed my radar when I was reading Francis Wheen's Idiot Proof this winter. Wheen, writing as a defender of Enlightenment rationalism, trashed MacIntyre's 1981 book After Virtue as a thin polemic in favour of enforcing conservative social values under the guise of promoting "virtue".
MacIntyre is a difficult academic writer. His ideas run in odd directions, and off at tangents. (I found a summary of After Virtue, dense work in itself). He can fairly be called a social and political conservative in his writing after 1968, and his writing underlies much of the writing by modern conservatives about the virtues. He is admired by the conservative Catholic intellectuals at First Things magazine. For instance in 1996 Edward Oakes wrote a favourable evaluation of his work. Conservative Catholics like the fact that he converted from Marxism to Catholicism and has been trying to revive the moral philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and perhaps some of the medieval Scholastics.
In 1966 while he was still a Marxist, and still teaching sociology in England, he lectured at Columbia with the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. The lectures were published in a short book called The Religious Significance of Atheism. The first of MacIntyre's lectures was called The Fate of Theism. His perspective was neither Marxist nor Thomistic at that stage. His approach was more that of the philosopher, social critic and intellectual historian than the professional sociologist.
Harry Frankfurt's little book On Bullshit seems to have been selling briskly. I have seen it listed as a bestseller on some of the lists in any given week. Bullshit is becoming a fertile tool for fashionable social criticism, although it seems to be falling back into its old usage of an epithet. People are jumping on the honeywagon, talking about the things things they don't agree with as "bullshit". Do some kinds of bullshit smell worse than others?
A couple of weeks ago, the Free Press published a review of Laura Penny's book Your Call is Important to Us - The Truth about Bullshit. According to the reviewer, Penny quotes Frankfurt and applies the idea of bullshit to the way companies and bureaucracies treat their customers and clients, and to American politics, foreign and domestic. She is politically on the left, vaguely anti-American.
The book is being promoted like a new book, but it's actually a quality paperback release, by McLelland & Stewart of a book originally published Your Call Is Important to Us: So Why Isn't Anyone Answering? published by Macfarlane, Walter & Ross as (ISBN ISBN 1-55199-092-X). Macfarlane, Walter & Ross was a non-fiction publisher, sold by Stoddard to McLelland and Stewart before some of the turmoil in the Canadian book trade in the last decade. M&S announced it was shutting down that division in April 2003. I haven't been able to find when the original edition of Your Call is Important to Us was published. Most bookstores don't list it, or list it as unavailable. Some bookstore catalogues have obviously incorrect publication dates - they are in the future. Some pages that say it was published in April or September 2004, which may be more accurate. It's a nearly dead Canadian book on the back list, revived by good marketing, riding the bullshit wave. The author owes something to some of the business bullshit of her publisher and agent.
In Michael Lynch's book about Truth, which I mentioned back here, he mentions Harry Frankfurt's paper "On Bullshit". It has just been printed as a very short book. The paper was available on line here and elsewhere, but Frankfurt's publisher - the Princeton University Press - has been asserting copyright. [Updated March 16/05; it was availabe when I wrote this post but taken down]. Frankfurt is going to be on The Daily Show. Blog news about that at Crooked Timber.
