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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Category Archives: Economics

Where race and gender overrode everything

11 Sunday May 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Work

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

21st century, academia, Adam Rubenstein, Adolph Reed, Boston University, Democratic Socialists of America, gender, Google, Ibram X. Kendi, John Lansing, New York Times, NPR, race, technology, United States, Uri Berliner

A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement‘s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity). I stand by that description. I think that that view is implicit in Ibram X. Kendi’s most widely quoted idea: that neutrality is a mask for racism, that anyone who isn’t actively antiracist is racist. Because that idea directly implies that one must prioritize racism over other issues, that neutrality might be acceptable on other issues but not on this one.

There’s plenty more evidence that a wide swath of influential people treated race and gender as the most urgent issues of all. Let’s turn first to National Public Radio (NPR), the US’s major public audio broadcaster – its audio equivalent to the BBC or CBC. An exposé of NPR delivered by its veteran ex-editor Uri Berliner makes it clear: CEO John Lansing

declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

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Checks and balances are only as good as their enforcers

13 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Courage, Economics, Leadership, Morality, Politics, Virtue

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

21st century, democracy, Donald Trump, Han Feizi, Korea, law, Liz Truss, Republican Party, Thomas Hobbes, Tim Wu, United States, Yoon-Suk Yeol

When the head of state or government goes rogue, what happens next?

Consider the recent experiences of three countries where the top leader pursued an agenda far more radical than they had campaigned on, in a way that caused widespread panic. In South Korea, Yoon-Suk Yeol attempted to impose martial law, marking an attempted return to something like the country’s past military dictatorship. In the UK, Liz Truss attempted tax cuts so radical that even the business community hated them. In the US, Donald Trump is now attempting something like both: after having been blatantly caught trying to sabotage the election and encouraging a riot that sought to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, now he is not only claiming to be move toward an unconstitutional third term in office, he has also engaged in tariffs so drastic that the market’s reaction to them was even worse than to Truss’s cuts. (Trump is taking as much from the rich as much as Bernie Sanders would – just without giving any of it to the poor.)

But there is an obvious difference between the three cases: Yoon and Truss were removed from power within a few months after their drastic measures, while there is not the slightest sign of any such thing happening to Trump. And that should lead us to ask: why this difference?

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The MAGA case against Trump

23 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

conservatism, Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Leslie Lenkowsky, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, Ronald Reagan, United States

As awful as the second Trump administration is, very little is accomplished by criticizing it from the perspective of a leftist like me. The administration wants to appall us, even take revenge on us. That’s the point. I’ve seen multiple bumper stickers and T-shirts proclaiming “Trump: Make liberals cry again.” As far as I can tell, last time, Trump drew strength from every apopleptic tweet our team raged out about how horrible it all is. We can and should take concrete steps to fight it all – the only obvious one being to contribute to legal funds challenging his actions in the courts, of which Democracy Forward seems to be the most prominent – but we do little by publicly expressing our outrage. Our hatred of any Trump administration is a feature, not a bug.

Old-fashioned Reaganite conservatives who stay true to their principles are going to be pretty horrified, too. When an unrepentant admirer of the old Soviet Union conquers back USSR territory (at great human cost on both sides), it’s got to be crushing to see the leader of “the free world” walk away from the conflict on terms favourable to the conqueror. But it’s been startling to see how few even care about those Reaganite principles anymore. Some of the ones who do, like Dick Cheney, often already campaigned for the other side – in a way that may have served only to illustrate that side’s complete ideological incoherence. (If you advertise that you’ve got endorsements ranging from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney, does that really look like you’re the common-sense consensus candidate, or does it look like you stand for nothing at all?)

All of which makes far too much criticism of the administration effectively irrelevant. If you’re a true-blue Reaganite, let alone a leftist, it means none of the people who put this administration in power actually care what you think. And that’s a big problem, because what the administration is doing is really, really bad – even from the perspective of its sympathizers.

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Globalization was never inevitable

26 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Globalization was never inevitable

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20th century, 21st century, Brian Mulroney, Canada, COVID-19, democracy, Donald Trump, Economist, European Union, George W. Bush, Jane Jacobs, Kofi Annan, Margaret Thatcher, Russia, Tony Blair, Ukraine, United States, war

Younger readers may not remember just what an aura of inevitability surrounded the idea of globalizing capitalism in the late 20th century. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, in a 2002 award acceptance speech, proclaimed: “It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the law of gravity.” And he did not dispute this thing that “has been said”. Margaret Thatcher’s frequent slogan was “there is no alternative“. Tony Blair went so far as to say “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

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In defence of bullshit Marxism

08 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Dialectic, Economics, German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Language, Politics

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Ben Burgis, Brendan Larvor, Erik Olin Wright, G.A. Cohen, G.W.F. Hegel, John Rawls, Joseph Heath, Karl Marx, nescio13, Plato, Thomas Kuhn

There’s been a lively discussion on Substack recently about a school of thought called analytical Marxism – which also likes to style itself as “no-bullshit Marxism”. This school (whose most prominent members are the sociologist Erik Olin Wright and the philosopher G.A. Cohen) call themselves the No-Bullshit Marxism Group. What makes them supposedly “no-bullshit” is their adoption of precise and formal methods within their respective disciplines, attempting to exorcise vagueness above all.

The discussion was triggered by Joseph Heath’s “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism”, which argued that John Rawls had basically already accomplished everything the analytical Marxists were trying to do, enough that the analytical Marxists eventually stopped being Marxists and just became Rawlsians.

Nescio13 agreed with the overall frame that analytical Marxists became Rawlsians, but laid the blame more on weaknesses in the analytical Marxist position than strengths in Rawls’s. By contrast Ben Burgis, who is something of an analytical Marxist himself, thinks that the core of Heath’s argument makes little sense – but in part because he sees no contradiction between being a Marxist and being a Rawlsian.

I’ve read very little of the analytical Marxists’ work to date, so I’m not going to weigh in on specific supposed problems in their work, or on the story of what happened to it. What I do want to do is defend the non-analytic style of Marxism – the kind that I think is actually found in Marx’s work, and which the analytical Marxists implicitly describe as bullshit.

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Being Ezili Freda

01 Sunday Sep 2024

Posted by Sandhya Lele in Aesthetics, Attachment and Craving, Deity, Economics, M.T.S.R., Rites, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Dykedon, Ezili Freda, gender, Haiti, Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola, race, slavery, Vodou

On a trip last year to New Orleans, I wanted to learn more about a tradition with deep roots there: the one whose West African root is called Vodún, became Vodou in Haiti, and in New Orleans is always known as voodoo. The book I read is Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola, which focuses on the Haitian version, so I’ll use the “Vodou” spelling. Any introductory discussion of this tradition always begins with an obligatory disclaimer about Hollywood stereotypes: very little of it is about zombies, and even less is about sticking pins in dolls. But the real tradition is fascinating in its own ways.

As a philosopher, I’m nearly always most intrigued by cultural traditions in their philosophical or theological aspect: what sorts of thinking and reflection they have about the universe and how to live in it. But that’s not all such traditions have to offer, and if I confined all my interest to the philosophy, I would have to have found Vodou a disappointment. Mama Lola, the Vodou priestess Brown learned from, would regularly tell her “Karen, you think too much!” or “You ask too many questions!” Brown gets excited when a discussion between Mama Lola and another Vodou expert starts to turn to the theological, but they quickly drop the subject and never return. The tradition is all about interactions with the loa or lwa, supernatural beings with the ability to possess people in ritual trances. But neither in Mama Lola nor in anything else I’ve read or heard on the tradition, do I see Vodou practitioners think much about what exactly those beings are – even though there’s a lot to wonder about, since most Vodou practitioners consider themselves Catholics, and the relationship of the loa to the saints and angels they’re identified with, let alone to any singular God (bondye), is hazy at best.

But in spite of all that, there is one element of the tradition that absolutely fascinates me and calls to me. And her name is Ezili Freda.

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How can we return to techno-optimism?

30 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

20th century, 21st century, Apple, European Union, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Google, Lina Khan, Nick Bostrom, technology, Ted Gioia

The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.

I am not a hard techno-pessimist; I don’t think I could be. I love technology too much. I remember eras where technology was making our lives better; that was most of my life, the ’80s, the ’90s, and especially the ’00s. There’s no iron law that says technology has to make things worse, things have to enshittify. It’s just that they are currently doing so, have been doing so for over a decade. The question is how we change things back – not reverting back to old technology, but reverting back to a state where new technology serves rather than opposes human interests, where it is progress and not regress.

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Mystics, Marx, and negating the negation

28 Sunday Jan 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Deity, Dialectic, Economics, German Tradition, Logic, Metaphysics, Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alfred North Whitehead, Bernard McGinn, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Colledge, Friedrich Engels, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Meister Eckhart, nondualism

The phrase negation of the negation is best known from Karl Marx’s work, as when he uses it to describe capitalist production in Capital. It’s an odd phrase that seems simply redundant in the formal logic taught to analytic philosophers and computer scientists. There, the principle of double negation elimination tells you ¬¬P -> P: that is, the negative of the negative is the positive, and nothing more. Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica say simply: “a proposition is equivalent of the falsehood of its negation.” On that account, to “negate the negation” of something just leaves you with its affirmation, the original thing you were negating: all you’re doing is being unnecessarily wordy, by saying not-not-P when you could have just said P.

But in Marx’s inspiration Hegel, there is much more to the phrase than this redundancy. A great deal of Hegel’s thought proceeds in the kind of three-part progression that introductions to Hegel often call thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (though Hegel never used those terms in that way). When thinking through a particular idea we begin in a first, unquestioned or immediate, position – a prejudice. This idea gets challenged by its opposite, the negation or negative moment. The third and final step is in some ways closer to the first than to the second, but it is crucially different: it takes up the truth of the second within it, transcends and includes it. This is negating the negation: negating here is a process, not a simple inversion or opposite but a rational movement forward. That movement is at the heart of Hegel’s thought.

I was startled recently to encounter the phrase “negation of negation” in a rather different place: the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. At first, Eckhart’s only obvious commonality with Hegel and Marx is that they are all German. But the commonalities go deeper, at least with Hegel. Hegel isn’t obviously a mystic: his logocentrism leaves little room for ineffability or mystery, and leaves him to be disdainful of mystical experience. Yet depending on how one defines mysticism, there is a mystical dimension at least in Hegel’s nondualism, where everything comes back to a spirit or mind (Geist) that is both subject and object, both God and self. And Hegel traces that nondualism directly back to Eckhart himself. In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel describes Eckhart as having “a thorough grasp of the divine depth” in this passage from Eckhart’s sermons:

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Power in anarchism and project management

17 Sunday Dec 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Leadership, Politics, Social Science

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

David Graeber, David Wengrow, Gary Gemmill, Hans Thamhain, Max Weber, Project Management Institute

In everyday communities and institutions – families, universities, businesses, clubs – we cannot help but engage in politics, in the sense of influencing or making collective decisions. I think political philosophy does better when it turns its attention to those communities and institutions smaller than the state, where most of our political actions take place: political philosophy should be a philosophy not just of the state but of office politics, of academic politics.

In that regard, I’ve noticed an interesting commonality between two works whose authors likely wouldn’t see themselves as having anything in common: Graeber and Wengrow’s anarchist anthropology The Dawn of Everything, and the standards set out by the Project Management Institute. Graeber and Wengrow look at a wide range of anthropological and archaeological sources on how humans organize their societies; the Project Management Institute examines how an individual (a project manager) can get a group of people to succeed at a collective institutional goal.

To the former (one of whom is the author of Bullshit Jobs), the latter probably looks like a deadening or sinister tool of The Man. To the latter, the former likely looks like a juvenile whining that refuses to sully its hands with getting anything done. Yet both concern themselves with the questions of how non-state institutions can be run: the latter in the day-to-day practice of making those institutions’ projects succeed, the former in imagining the functioning of a world without a state. And so both wind up exploring one core and inescapable concept: power.

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On AIs’ creativity

30 Sunday Jul 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Economics, Work

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

academia, ChatGPT, expressive individualism, Gartner, Harvard University, Maya Bodnick, music, pedagogy, technology, Ted Gioia, Thomas L. Friedman

Until recently, my approach to the very new technology of large language models or LLMs – the AI tools of which ChatGPT is the most famous – had been heavily shaped by my experience of feeding it an essay assignment like my classes’ and thinking the result merited a B or B-. On the disturbing side, that meant that ChatGPT could easily generate a passable paper; on the reassuring side, it meant that it could not easily generate a good paper. The latter still required the human touch.

Imagine my alarm, then, at reading this essay by Maya Bodnick.

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