Terrified of Change and Its Terror, Composing, 25/04/2016

My old friend The Yalie, who I’ve known since we were in university together back in Newfoundland, used to comment pretty regularly in the early, clunkier days of the blog. I remember in those early days, he’d compare my own thinking and perspective to Max Weber, one of the innovators of sociology.

I didn’t know Weber’s work well at the time, so I didn’t really know what The Yalie saw of Weber in me. I’ve read a little of his work since then, mostly the Vocation lectures and a few critical essays about Weber’s theories and character. 

I'd like to get his opinion on this again, now that it’s been nearly three years since I started this bloody project. Because I’m not sure that my ideas and Weber’s are really all that close.* Maybe it’s because I’m reading him with a particular intent of my own, that I focus on some ideas but not others. So here’s what I see and why I see it.

Max Weber and his piercing eyes.

* I have a lot in common with his ideas about bureaucracy and the culture of state organizations. But that’s not really what I’m thinking about when I read Weber.

Weber seems to have a lot of pessimism because he could see Europe’s growing popular collapse of belief in religious authority about moral and spiritual truths. And he thought this was a bad thing, because it undercut people’s beliefs about whether there were universal moral truths. 

It’s based on his reading of Nietzsche, which understood him mostly as a nihilist. In this sense, Weber was among the first generation of postmodernists. Here’s another oversimplified story about how this idea works. 

The liberal ideas of secularism and cultural pluralism had worn away the ability for reasonably educated people to think that their religion was better or more true than anyone else’s. Pluralism about the nature of God is incompatible with religious belief in a simple, popular sense, because religious belief is authoritative and exclusive.

And loss of faith in a religion corrodes people’s moral sense – again, according to this really simple but very popular view about what God is for. God’s purpose is to underwrite our moral beliefs so that they’ll be valid. God is the transcendent authority whose stamp of approval makes a moral principle universal.

This is a popular view. It’s Oprah’s view. The idea that atheists can’t be moral people, because they don’t have a transcendent authority underwriting moral principles. Far be it from me to say that a moral principle can be justified immanently, through their pragmatic effects and the constants of human nature. I might contradict Oprah.

But Weber was in a less condescending form of the same trap in thinking. Without a society’s unity and faith in a godly authority underwriting their morals, social harmony would be under serious threat. He was still trying to wrap his head around what atheism was. Thinking of Nietzsche as a pure nihilist is a sign that Weber couldn’t even catch up to the moustachioed one in his own lifetime.

I’m looking into Weber because he was one of the major creative figures in philosophy of this clique of thinkers who were trying to figure out the end of modernity in the shadow of the First World War. They could see that the dream of modernity was coming to an end, that it was going to be disastrous, and that nothing modernity promised us was going to work out, or work out well for people.

Some embraced it and some were afraid. Some who embraced it were the reactionaries of this generation – Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt. The scared ones – Weber, Walter Benjamin, Edmund Husserl – were afraid of more terror if industrial technology was used with a nihilist attitude. 

When I sit down to write Utopias, it can’t be a typical academic-style book of philosophy. Not only am I not in academia anymore, but I don’t even have access to the same resources. I can’t use a lot of the paywalled journals as resources. So I’m going to try to write some valuable philosophy using only primary sources.

The idea isn’t to make the book’s goal about providing commentary on specific thinkers. Instead, I’ll discuss some broader social and political concept by – in part – thinking along with different primary, creative thinkers from the whole tradition. 

So the ideas of that first postmodern generation will supply my framework for understanding a world without the moorings and foundations of an authority to give you your laws. Facing the prospect of such a world, you can react with fear, reaction and restoration, enthusiasm, or a kind of redemption. 

Doom Prophets V: People I Miss and Seeing God, A History Boy, 24/02/2016

Continued from last post . . . The last two names on Antonio Negri’s list of the visionaries of modernity’s self-destruction are the two I don’t know as well. There’s Max Weber and Franz Rosensweig.

From what I know of their work, I can give a hypothesis of what role they’ll play in Utopias’ analysis of modernity’s implosion. They both try to redeem Western humanity, given that Western humanity’s major cultural project and theme – modernity, the industrial revolution, the nation-state and nationalism, colonial conquest of Earth – turned into an undeniable disaster of bloodshed, destruction, and horror.

Not only do my ideas apparently resemble
Max Weber, but I even have similar hair
when I cut it short. And that's a seriously
awesome beard.

So . . . yeah. That’s a bit of an issue for those of us who consider Western culture part of our heritage (whether we like it or not). Grappling with that heritage in many weird ways – that’s what Utopias will do.

Weber is an interesting figure to me. My gaps regarding his philosophy is pretty ironic, as my old friend The Yalie has said that my own perspective, especially in some of the early philosophy-related posts on Adam Writes Everything, reminded him very much of Weber.

So why didn’t I ever read his work until recently, when a copy of The Vocation Lectures has been sitting on my bookshelf for about two years now? Because I haven’t taken a sociology course since I was 18 years old, and disciplinary boundaries severely affected what I was exposed to and what I could spare time to devote to, for much of my time in the academy.

That’s why I’m looking forward to diving into Weber, and his apparently optimistic vision (a rarity among Negri’s list of doom prophets). 

But the thinker on that list that I’m most looking forward to diving into is Rosenzweig. I only have a little knowledge of his work, most of what came from my old rebbe Arnold. 

Arnold wasn’t a real rabbi – he wasn’t accredited, and I’m actually not sure how much yeshiva he attended over the years. Most of his career he spent as a documentary filmmaker. I’ve seen his award shelf at his old house in Manuels. He was a soft,* thoughtful, sardonic, and wise man.

* And seriously overweight, which was a likely contributor to his death at 70 back in 2011, which I consider premature, given modern medical science and preventative care.

I sometimes wish I could still talk to Arnold, as someone else who’s gone through some difficult economic times as a young man and still lived a fulfilling creative life. In my more stressful times, I really could have used one more friend like him, an intellectual who succeeded in life by living it largely on his own terms. 

Arnold knew Talmud better than the one rabbi at the one synagogue in St. John’s, and he’d sometimes school the official head of that city’s Jewish community in the more esoteric, less doctrinaire elements of the Jewish intellectual tradition.

Rosenzweig died of ALS just before
his 43rd birthday. In his last years,
he was able to communicate only by
blinking his eye yes or no as his wife
read the alphabet for him, one
painstaking letter at a time.

He introduced me to Rosenzweig and Martin Buber through the Jockey Club meetings that I used to organize at Memorial University’s Philosophy Department. I only read a few chapters by these inspiring thinkers, copied and sent around for our discussions. 

Arnold helped me understand the concepts in millennia of Jewish thought as Rosenzweig gave them voice. And there was more there than Negri’s cursory mention of a failed redemption suggest. 

In The Star of Redemption and the guiding philosophy of Rosenzweig and Buber’s phenomenological translation of the Torah into German, that compelled me – a committed atheist – to understand a deeper kind of atheism that could understand how the divine rises from existence, from life, and from thought. 

“There is no God in Judaism,” I remember Arnold saying, to provoke scorn as much as to provoke thought. “The divine is the ethics.”

Those papers that Arnold gave me, excerpts from Rosenzweig’s work and articles about him, are gone now. Lost in my move from Hamilton to Toronto just over a year ago. 

But the memory remains. And the Amazon Cart that still has The Star of Redemption in it, just waiting until I can find room in the budget again. It’s moved up closer and closer to the top of my list. Living in a Jewish household now has helped. 

That vision of God in my friend Arnold’s Judaism – the knowledge of an amateur Talmudic scholar whose intelligence was so deft, he could school the rabbi himself – is the only God that I could ever accept. 

I don’t think I’ll ever fully convert to Judaism – I’d be too argumentative with the Orthodox rabbis, and I’d eventually take things too far – they’d either kick me out of class, give me a job, or send me to a kibbutz. But those ideas in Rosenzweig’s work and my conversations with Arnold made the only route by which I’ve ever experienced God. 

And God will be in Utopias. As well as in our utopias.

Who Can Determine a Whole Culture? Research Time, 29/10/2015

Let’s look at this problem of fate again. Who we are depends on where and when we were born and raised. It’s not controversial to say that a wealthy man from Kolkata will have a different personality (and positionality) than a poor woman from Namibia or a working-class trans man from Toronto.

The problem of fate for our moral thinking goes deeper than personality. Leo Strauss gets so steamed with the social sciences because he sees what its historicism implies for thinking. 

Our place in culture and history determines the limits of our cognition. They make up the horizon of what we can even conceive. Historicism, as he understands it, means that what each of us can think about coherently is beyond our control. 

Is a world without absolute universals really a world
with nothing to believe in? I don't think the contingency
of reality needs to make us nihilists.

Because our culture determines the horizon of our thinking without any input from us, Strauss worries that total cultural relativism about moral and political values will result. It’s a nihilist’s world.

But there’s a limit to Strauss’ influential conception of historicism. It comes out of his own writing – against what Strauss himself believes – when he starts a long discussion of Max Weber.

Weber is one of the Big Three of the foundation of sociology.* Strauss was delivering the lectures that became Natural Right and History in the 1950s. You engage the fundamentals of Weber’s thinking, it means you’re engaging the fundamentals of the whole social science field.

* Say it with me everybody: Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber.

So Strauss talks about Weber’s key idea that social actions and changes are all constituted by individual agency alone. A society isn’t an entity with its own agency, but the accumulated acts of everyone in it.

Today, we know what that sounds like. It’s a chaotic system where a lot of individual units behave in ways that look unified, controlled as a whole. But they’re the much more complex causes of an aggregate.

When the whole is a culture, individuals determine what happens at the social level. Yet textbook cultural relativism implies that the society as a whole has all the agency over an individual. 

But this still works with Strauss’ worst notions of historicism, relativism, nihilism. Not some monolith like Society™, but all your ancestors’ and community members’ thoughts and actions make the fixed limit to your own thinking.

I’m not yet sure where Strauss is going with this. I’ve only read a little bit into this chapter so far, so I’m just explaining the idea and where I stand in relation to it. But this is how my ideas on it are shaping up. 

A philosophical inspiration to us all.

The real counterweight to this picture of historicism as nihilism comes from a simple fact. Social change is real. It takes time for the change to become comprehensive, but a culture’s attitudes and ideas change over time. If the horizons of our thinking are fixed by our ancestors and community, then each of us would be copies of the past. Social change would be impossible.

And social change clearly comes from individuals. Just roll with Weber’s idea that only individuals – acting in unplanned, messy aggregate – have agency in society. So individual activity prompts and leads social change. 

Each of us has the power, as individuals, to change how we think and understand the world. We can change those limits of our conception, figure out new possibilities for existence itself. 

Strauss says that philosophy is the search for wisdom, and he considers that wisdom the correct answers to universal metaphysical and moral questions. I say philosophy is the tradition of thinking of new ways to think. Social change in the mind before it proliferates through the world. Free your mind and your ass will follow.

Our motivations for agitating for social change might include fidelity to some moral value you consider universal. It might not. Unlike what Strauss believes, you don’t need a universal truth to motivate changing your society in a more just direction.

The quest for justice comes from a realization that anyone can have at anytime. Something is wrong. Something has gone wrong. Something is not working. We must repair it.