interim findings

Hello, my pseudonym is Jon. Here are some things that I found interesting and worth sharing.

[lamestream-media]

When it comes to teaching history, nothing destroys student interest faster and more completely than a heavy reliance on textbooks. During my first three years of teaching high-school history I would see students’ eyes glaze over as we reviewed from a 1,000 page textbook. Five years later, I don’t blame them. So much is wrong with history textbooks, I hardly know where to begin, but here is my short list.

David Cutler (Jan 31 2014, The Atlantic): Down With Textbooks

[lamestream-media]

Today, the understanding of the Jewish state that Herzog conveyed - a normal state with normal problems - is almost entirely absent from the public discourse. For many of its supporters, Israel must be defended absolutely as an unassailable island of moral rectitude, an exception to the rule of human error and imperfection. It never commits war crimes, and it seldom makes mistakes. Israel’s critics, by contrast, often imagine the Jewish state as heir to the Third Reich and a uniquely evil blight on the face of the Middle East. There is no depravity to which this 'Zionazi' regime will not stoop, and no crime too lurid for it to commit. In other words, Israel is either superhuman or subhuman.

Yair Rosenberg (2014, Tablet): When an Israeli Ambassador Debated a British Historian on Israel’s Legitimacy

[lamestream-media]

too many “liberals” are really conservative apologists for the status quo political order, just as too many “libertarians” are really conservative apologists for the status quo economic order.

Will Wilkinson 2014: Liberalism, Libertarianism, and the Illiberal Security State

[lamestream-media]

The transdisciplinary project of historical sociology is founded upon the premise that neither historiography nor social science can proceed, independently, to a full or sound explication of any collective human action. The mutual engagement of history and sociology is an analytical prerequisite for keeping in focus the simultaneity that determines the social constitution of historical events and processes, and the historical transformation of the agents, institutions and cultures that constitute the fluxional realities within which ‘history/social life’ is made. The epistemological challenges entailed in this joint venture are manifold: questions of evidence, concept-formation and theory must all be rethought so as to permit an integrative comprehension of the historical and the social, the diachronic and the synchronic.

Joseph Bryant 2006: Grand, yet grounded - ontology, theory, and method in Michael Mann’s historical sociology

[lamestream-media]

The example of states as contingent, historical constructions is important for social theory because it underlies a major scholarly misconception up through the mid-twentieth century. The unit of analysis was typically and unreflectively taken to be the ‘society’, a bounded system with a shared identity, culture, and economic and political institutions. The ‘society’ was a concept abstracted from the nation-state, the result of successful state-building culminating in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Functionalist and cultural anthropologists projected it onto tribal societies, disregarding or minimizing their relationships with other tribes; nationalist historians, even in parts of the world where states were clearly riven with ethnic and other divisions, projected the ideal backwards in picking out a clear channel of national development leading up to the unified society even if it were still a future project.

Randall Collins 2006: Mann's transformation of the classic sociological traditions

[lamestream-media]

[...] power is never free-floating; we are never tempted to treat it merely as an abstraction, somehow existing inherently in the ‘system’, or in the ‘logic’ of social form, as in the tendency for scholars influenced by semiotic post-Marxism to talk about the logic of capitalist reproduction, or of feminist theorists to talk about the logic of patriarchy. Networks do not have logics; they are real connections among people, empirically observable as to where they spread out in space.

Randall Collins 2006: Mann's transformation of the classic sociological traditions

[lamestream-media]

As long as the irrational and narcissistic, but powerful and alluring, narrative of an Arab and Muslim world under siege by hostile forces from within and without continues to be embraced by significant constituencies within the Sunni Arab world – even if most who subscribe to some version of this narrative reject al-Qaeda's ideology, goals, and methods – it will continue to be able to draw upon a fringe of a fringe of a very large population.

Hussein Ibish (NOW News, 12/24/2013): The monster that won't die

[lamestream-media]

Most German Zionists, like most Jews in Germany, were culturally and spiritually German. [...] That they responded as they did to the idea of a völkisch basis of national life in Germany that the great majority of their non-Jewish neighbors demanded should be neither surprising nor unsettling. The dominant Zionist approach, like that of most non-Jews at the time, shared a reliance on the idea of an ethno-nationalist state, an idea that was the societal norm in Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their embrace of that norm does not make the Zionists the moral equivalent of Nazis.

Francis Nicosia 2008: Zionism and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany

[lamestream-media]

The scale and range of non-Western debate on the West is vast. Moreover, far from being merely a response to Western images of 'self' and 'other', it has often exhibited novel a and influential ways of defining the West. Indeed, it appears that non-Western ideas about the West, in many cases, precede Western ones; that it was the non-West that invented the West.

Alastair Bonnett 2004: The Idea of the West

[lamestream-media]

What is perhaps most fascinating about postmodern theory is that for all the talk of how things are socially constructed, they forgot the implications of 'social' in social construction. After their supposedly new insight that nearly everything is socially constructed, they do not advocate much for transformation at the social level, ie. for changes in institutions, social norms, social structures such as the family, etc. Instead there is much attention to individual acts of transgression of conventional social norms as a way of highlighting that social norms are constructed and not natural or inevitable. This kind of rebellion in postmodernism is a very isolated activity - it consists of individuals taking it upon themselves to fight battles all alone. There is not an emphasis among postmodern theorists for building a critical mass of people united in a social movement which could begin to effect changes at the social level. There is instead a very superficial understanding of the how social forces work - a naive and libertarian emphasis on individual actions and choices as though the cumulative effect of each isolated individual choice or action will effect largescale social transformation. The net effect of such an atomization of individual activities serves to prevent rather than foster social change.

Karla Mantilla (off our backs, August/September 1999): Let them eat text: The real politics of postmodernism

[lamestream-media]

Al-Qaeda’s use of the Internet to spread its fundamentalist message and Iran’s determination to build nuclear weapons in service of an ideology that also rejects Western political and intellectual modernity are both variations of reactionary modernist ideology and politics. In this sense, Europe’s past does compare, despite key differences in language, culture and context, with Saddam Hussein’s more secular form of totalitarian dictatorship as well as with the distinct, but selectively modern, variations of radical Islamism. Our own time is another chapter in the history of reactionary modernism, one that is taking place largely outside Europe, but that recalls the paradoxes of modernization that historians have noted in Germany, Japan and Italy.

Jeffrey Herf 2009: The Totalitarian Present

[lamestream-media]

What is striking in rereading this now-classic work is how little, if any, space is allotted to the Enlightenment as a contributor to the liberal political tradition - political pluralism, parliaments, public discussion, the defense of individual liberty against the state - and how much the book focuses on scientific reason undermining universal normative claims to the good life. The book is also striking in how little it has to say about the fate of the Enlightenment in Germany, discussing it instead as if it were a uniform development throughout Europe and America. [...] But they mistakenly attributed to the Enlightenment what was in fact the product of Germany's particular misery. Germany did not suffer from too much reason, too much liberalism, too much Enlightenment, but rather from not enough of any of them. [...] Horkheimer and Adorno misinterpreted modern German history so badly because they remained too loyal to a version of Marxist orthodoxy that failed to reflect enough on the weakness of liberalism in the German national context.

Jeffrey Herf 1984: Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich

[lamestream-media]

By viewing the Jews as the cause of the destruction of particular, idiosyncratic individuals and their national identity and culture, the anti-Semite turned anticivilizational moods into racism. [...] What was peculiar about modern anti-Semitism was that it presented the Jews as both the primary agents of this rationalization process and the remnants of tabooed elements of life that civilization was trying to repress. The Jews both lagged behind and were too far ahead of civilization. [...] Modern anti-Semitism translated a revolt against commodity fetishism into biological terms. The Jews stood for abstract labor and the Germans for concrete labor. Anticapitalist revolution was thus redefined into its subsequent murderous paths. A powerful German revolution was necessary to destroy the all-pervasive power of the Jews.

Jeffrey Herf 1984: Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich

[lamestream-media]

Nowhere else in Europe did technological modernity and romantic protest clash with such force as in Germany. Nowhere else had industrialization developed so quickly in the absence of a successful bourgeois revolution. And nowhere else was protest against the Enlightenment a constitutive element in the formation of national identity as it had been in Germany from the early nineteenth century up through Weimar.

Jeffrey Herf 1984: Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich

[lamestream-media]

Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis overlooked this national context and generalized Germany's miseries into dilemmas of modernity per se. Consequently they blamed the Enlightenment for what was really the result of its weakness. [...] The thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment obscured this historical uniqueness. As a ‚critical theory,‘ it is strangely apologetic in regard to modern Germany history. It is one of the ironies of modern social theory that the critical theorists, who thought they were defending the unique against the general, contributed to obscuring the uniqueness of Germany's illiberal path toward modernity.

Jeffrey Herf 1984: Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich

[lamestream-media]

The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough people working at jobs, or working long enough hours. The problem is that capitalist employers, working in league with the capitalist state, have created an economy where working 40 hours a week at a job is the toll-gate you have to pass through to subsist comfortably. What we need is for workers to appropriate the full benefits of their increased productivity, and for the reduced work hours to be distributed equitably, instead of letting corporations use “intellectual property” law to enclose increased productivity as a source of rent. Rather than celebrating the relocalized, post-capitalist p2p economy made possible by new technology, progressives want to perpetually maintain a Rube Goldberg state machine, keeping as many people as possible running in the hamster wheel.

Kevin Carson (10/22/13, Before It’s News): Infrastructure is not “Progressive”

[lamestream-media]

Many people on the left celebrated the diplomatic solution to the poison gas crisis without acknowledging that what made the diplomacy possible was the US threat to attack Syria. All of us on the left hope for a negotiated solution to the civil war - maybe we need to acknowledge that only a forceful US intervention would make (or would have made) that possible.

Michael Walzer (10/30/2013, Dissent Magazine): Were We Wrong about Syria?