17 Sunday Jul 2022
Posted in Politics
Tags
autobiography, Canada, Ibram X. Kendi, identity, Ireland, Leo Varadkar, Martin Luther King Jr., race
While I think it is important not to pretend our society is post-racial or colour-blind now, I insist on the importance of colour-blindness (in a racial sense) as a future ideal to strive for. And I maintain that the ideal of a colour-blind society, a post-racial world, is not a pipe dream. How do I know that? Because I’ve lived it.
Continue reading09 Sunday May 2021
Posted in Politics
Tags
Canada, identity, Iris Marion Young, Jona Olsson, Martin Luther King Jr., Mellody Hobson, Prince Ea, qualitative individualism, race, Zadie Smith
My previous points about colour-blindness are important because I don’t want to be misunderstood on a larger issue. I believe the critique of colour-blindness in the current context is well founded. Mellody Hobson, for example, rightly points out that colour-blindness too often means we act as if race isn’t a problem now, and thereby ignore the many ways in which it is. There is a studied ignorance in comments like those of Chief Justice John Roberts, that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Ignoring the current problem is the approach of American conservatives who take Martin Luther King’s words out of context to pretend that he opposed affirmative action, when he clearly and visibly supported it. Yet there is one thing those conservatives do see accurately. And that is that King did express a hope for colour-blindness in the future, “one day”. This is the part that contemporary left-wing critiques of colour-blindness often leave out – with awful consequences. Too often, these critiques refuse even the ideal of colour-blindness. In so doing, they effectively work to condemn us forever to the prisons of our socially constructed skins.
Continue reading02 Sunday May 2021
Posted in Economics, Politics, Psychology, Unconscious Mind
Tags
caste, Implicit Association Test, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jay Garfield, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Prince Ea, race, Ronald Reagan, Śāntideva, United States
Perhaps the best-known quote from Martin Luther King Jr. is: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The kind of society that King dreams of in this sentence is often called “colour-blind” – in a meaning referring not literally to the disability, but to skin colour being irrelevant to people’s lives and the way society judges them. Prince Ea’s wonderful “I am not black, you are not white” video, which I cited as an exemplar of qualitative individualism, further expresses the ideal of colour-blindness: race is just a label that diminishes who we really are. For my own qualitative individualist reasons, it is an ideal I endorse.
In recent years, though, the concept of racial colour-blindness has come under attack. And I do believe that one strand of this attack is entirely justified.
Continue reading17 Sunday Jan 2021
Tags
Communism, democracy, Karl Marx, Martin Hägglund, Martin Luther King Jr., Pius XI, qualitative individualism
Martin Hägglund develops a neo-Marxist politics that is deeply informed by qualitative individualism – quite appropriately, since qualitative individualist ideas inform Marx himself, especially in the theory of alienation. Hägglund wants to envision what a social world without alienation would look like.
Possibly the core distinction in Hägglund’s thought is between a “realm of freedom” and a “realm of necessity” – and he identifies time as central to both of these.
Continue reading21 Friday Jul 2017
Posted in Politics
Tags
academia, Barry Daniel, conservatism, Edmund Burke, interview, Joseph de Maistre, Martin Luther King Jr., race, Sarah Silverman, technology, United States
Barry Daniel of the Middle Way Society recently held a podcast interview with me, asking about my ideas on literal conservatism. It’s about half an hour; have a listen if you’re interested.
10 Sunday Apr 2016
Tags
20th century, 21st century, academia, autobiography, Canada, conservatism, Donald Trump, Eric Hobsbawm, gender, generations, identity, Jayant Lele, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King Jr., race, United States
In the early 1960s, my father finished his PhD in political science from Cornell. Under the restrictive and racialized American immigration rules of the day, he needed to work in a neighbouring country for two years before he could come to the US. So he applied for six tenure-track faculty jobs in Canada. He was offered five of them. The sixth, at the relatively low-prestige Memorial University of Newfoundland, turned him down with a curt letter that said “In our competition, you failed to qualify.” He found it amusing that such a lower-tier school would say such a dismissive thing when he had offers from so many places higher in the hierarchy.
This story ceased to amuse me when I received my PhD from Harvard in the late 2000s and began applying for faculty teaching jobs myself. I sent out nearly two hundred job applications, most of them for tenure-track jobs, across Canada and the United States, and a few off the continent. I received not one tenure-track offer anywhere. If Memorial University of Newfoundland had offered me a position, I would have taken it without hesitation and been grateful to have the opportunity. The same applies to most of my generation in academia. To those coming of age in the 21st-century university, my father’s story sounds as implausible as if he had wandered into the White House, said “I’d like a job as President of the United States”, and been offered it on the spot. But it was and is true. His experience was in Canada, but as far as I know, those faculty of his generation with a similarly prestigious degree who could apply for jobs in the United States had a comparably wide range of opportunities.
This intergenerational experience should highlight how the story in the academic humanities and social sciences from the 1960s to the 2010s has been above all a story of decline. Many North American leftists look at the real accomplishments made in areas of race, gender and sexuality and see this period as a time of unalloyed progress. I cannot. Continue reading
08 Sunday May 2011
Posted in Anger, Compassion, Death, Friends, Gentleness, Happiness, Karmic Redirection, Meditation, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Morality, Politics
Tags
George W. Bush, Harvard University, Jim Wilton, Linton Weeks, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nazism, Osama bin Laden, Pamela Gerloff, S.N. Goenka, T.R. (Thill) Raghunath, United States, war
The momentous yet mixed results of this week’s Canadian election were overshadowed on the global scene by the killing of Osama bin Laden. Though the first event riveted me more, the second has more philosophical significance – or rather, not the event itself, but the reaction to it.
Americans have typically greeted bin Laden’s death with jubilation and celebration, often waving American flags and chanting “U.S.A.” But some minority voices, such as Linton Weeks at NPR radio and Pamela Gerloff of the Huffington Post, have raised questions about this celebration. Is it really a good idea to celebrate a human death, even the death of one’s enemy? Continue reading
22 Sunday Aug 2010
Tags
20th century, Bill Clinton, Canada, Communism, conservatism, Edmund Burke, French Revolution, Front Porch Republic, Jane Jacobs, Margaret Thatcher, Martin Luther King Jr., Mike Harris, natural environment, Pol Pot, Rod Dreher, Ronald Reagan, United States
Note (12 Jul 2022): This post, written in 2010, contains a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. In that quote is a six-letter derogatory term for black people, which has become much more taboo since I wrote the post. I include this note so that the term’s appearance in the King quote does not hit readers as a surprise.
A flip side of the previous post: while I am not a right-winger and would never want to be called one, I have far less antipathy to the term “conservative,” and sometimes even describe myself that way. For at least to some extent, I see myself as a conservative in the literal sense of that word.
Literal conservatism is a view I have found increasingly appealing after the radical political transformations of the ’80s and (in the US) the ’00s – this not despite, but because of, my left-wing convictions on many particular issues. The literal meaning of the word “conservative” should be fairly obvious: it is about conserving, preserving, existing states of affairs. That’s what it would have meant in the time of Edmund Burke, considered the father of modern conservatism. The problem with the word is that in the ensuing two centuries, the world has changed drastically in ways that Burke would have wished it hadn’t. And that means that if one wants the kind of society that Burke tended to advocate – especially if one wishes “small government” – one will need to change society in quite drastic ways from what it has become. Which, in turn, means not being conservative – not in the literal sense of the world.
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23 Wednesday Jun 2010
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Adolf Hitler, Aristotle, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Martin Luther King Jr., Mencius, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Peimin Ni, Plato, relativism, SACP, Thrasymachus
In his talk at the conference this year, SACP president Peimin Ni pushed further on the claim he made last year: the idea of philosophy as a technique. I was fortunate to spend a long and enjoyable lunch discussing the talk and its ideas with him further. (I love the SACP conferences because their format is designed to encourage the emergence of mealtime conversations like this; last year I enjoyed a similarly thoughtful discussion with Ted Slingerland.) The present post recounts the ideas expressed at the lunch, naturally from my own side; I hope I am being fair to Ni’s arguments in what follows.
Ni’s talk focused on the Chinese concept of gongfu 功夫, dating from the early centuries CE and meaning any practical art – it could include calligraphy, sports, cooking, good judgement or statecraft. (Although the word gongfu has long ago passed into English with an alternate spelling, it is probably best to keep using the Pinyin spelling rather than confuse people with a term most associate with goofy movies about roundhouse kicks.)
Gongfu as Ni understands it then bears some resemblance to the Greek concept of technē, or Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practice, with one crucial difference. Aristotle’s technē involves a telos; it is embedded within a larger determinate framework of human flourishing. With gongfu, on the other hand, Ni agreed with my earlier characterization of the process as a technique. It is open to us to choose our aims; gongfu merely allows us to achieve those aims. There is a gongfu of killing as well as a gongfu of saving. Continue reading
21 Sunday Feb 2010
Tags
Ayatollah Khomeini, Graham Priest, J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, Martin Luther King Jr., Michel Foucault, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Paul Feyerabend, Plato, postmodernism, relativism, Socrates, Stanley Fish, Thrasymachus
The term “postmodernism” (or “poststructuralism”) is notoriously elusive; it’s sometimes said that if you think you know what it is, you don’t. But that doesn’t stop its practitioners from talking about it, and I don’t think it should stop anyone else either. I will use “postmodernism” to refer to a set of ideas, widely held among academics in the past 30 years, which takes inspiration from Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and denies the worth of claims to truth. One will frequently find postmodernists (John Caputo is one of the more explicit about this) claiming that “the truth is that there is no truth.”
The claim that there is no truth is false. It contains a contradiction that cannot be resolved unless one takes it to mean something very different from what it appears to mean. Nor is this one of that narrow group of paradoxes which could be taken as true on the grounds of Graham Priest’s dialetheism. Priest tries to argue that most of the problems with contradiction stem not from accepting some contradictions, but from accepting all; but if one accepts “there is no truth,” one comes much closer to allowing all contradictions in. Indeed postmodernists often approvingly quote the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend in telling us that “anything goes.”
It is not true that there is no truth. What is crucial about this and other postmodern claims, however, is that its truth value is not the point. Like Stanley Fish, postmodernists shift our attention away from contradiction and truth entirely, claiming they’re not the important thing. (Caputo at one point approves one of his opponent’s moves because “it drops the stuff about contradiction and actually addresses the issues.”) Drawing on J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, postmodernists will argue that the reason to make such a claim against truth is its performative dimension. The point, that is, is not what the sentence says, but what it does.
It is on this last point, however, that the evidence against postmodernism seems strongest. What, exactly, has postmodernism accomplished? I have previously mentioned cognitive dissonance and spiritual transformation as reason to be concerned about contradictions. But these are typically not at the forefront of postmodern concern. Rather, most postmodern writers express some sort of concern for marginalized political groups – women, gays, transgendered people, the poorer or working classes, people in nonwhite racial groups, people from colonized societies. But what has postmodernism actually done to improve their situation?
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