Letters to the Editor
Rowan Berkeley
Published Letters: 176
-
@ Baldie McEagle
[Read the article: McCain embraces Bush's radical views of executive power]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm sorry if I got too arcane with calvinist hermeneutics and so forth, but my concern is that opposition in the USA comes largely from the so-called 'libertarians,' whose alternative is a sort of utopian hyper-individualism, and my argument would suggest that this is just pushing the problem even further, and digging the hole even deeper. Another way of expressing this would be to say that 'sociology' in the European sense seems to be largely condemned in the USA a sort of 'socialist' ideology, because it treats 'society' as a really existing phenomenon with laws of its own. US hyper-individualism is so extreme, even in its mainstream forms, that the mere idea of 'sociology' tends to be regarded as a sort of wedge whereby totalitarianism can enter in. As a result, 'society' keeps making a 'return of the repressed' to the USA, in the pathological form of collective apocalyptic hysteria.
I have lost a lot of my respect for the antiwar.com crowd over this. Ask yourselves, what the HELL is Gary North - an unabashed theocratic totalitarian - doing posing as a 'libertarian'? Answer : theocracy is defined as an 'alternative' to government, because 'government' is defined in terms of the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The resulting utopianism regarding an imaginary theocratic alternative is yet another reason for the US infatuation with religious zionism, and simultaneously for its terror of 'Islamism.' This is a collective, schizophrenic, dissociative split, in my opinion.
There is probably something in Tocqueville I could have used to introduce my argument much more comprehensibly, but I have never bothered to read him. I have an awful lot of books I never manage to read, mostly dealing with political philosophy and its relationship to religion, but to be self-educated in this field (i.e. not supervised by an academic tutor) is to condemn oneself to almost certainly becoming a 'crank.'
-
@ baldie again
[Read the article: McCain embraces Bush's radical views of executive power]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]well, we do have it, but it isn't seen as something spiritual, just as an ultra-free-market economic doctrine : Thatcherism, asset-stripping, privatisation, rolling back the "welfare state," etc. This last point about the "welfare state" is extremely imnportant, I think for this reason : immediately after WW2 a "Labour" government came to power, which promised to provide cradle-to-grave basic services for all, without means testing. This was to include : comprehensive unemployment benefits to a modest but tolerable standard of living, including rent ; "council housing," i.e. publicly subsidised housing administered through local councils, which are what we call our borough administrations ; a "national health service," i.e. 100% subsidised basic health care ; and subsidised primary and secondary education, including 100% grants for both tuition and maintenance expenses for those who passed fairly basic entrance exams qualifying them for further education. Of these currently only the "national health service" remains. The roll-back of all these things and the re-privatisation of "the commanding heights of the economy" such as power and telecoms has been accompanied by a strident Hayek-style rhetoric under the "Conservative" governments and a more shamefaced version of the same doctrine under "Labour" ones, but grandiose claims of spiritual superiority have not been so common, and I really think this is because, at least in south-east England, the dominant area in mass media terms, Calvinism is not and has never been fashionable.
-
Where's the electro robot gunslinger?
[Read the article: McCain embraces Bush's radical views of executive power]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]He must have noticed that I have snuck up on his unguarded flank, carefully disarming as many as possible of his usual polemical weapons in advance. He must be out there, consulting with his armorers ...
-
Wage 'slavery', debt 'peonage', interest-bearing capital and consent
[Read the article: McCain embraces Bush's radical views of executive power]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I use those terms, with the scare quotes, deliberately, to make a point in the simplest possible way : if we start from a set of assumptions about the organisation of labor that imply a degree of subordination of the wills - and this includes the moral values - of people without capital to people with it, then we will have to allow an ideology that justifies or purports to justify this, by invoking a higher moral interest. A relatively sober way of doing this is to argue that, no matter how amoral the intentions of the capitalists, the market will bring about some sort of adjustment towards industries of general human utility, and away from grossly immoral ones, because the laborers - now wearing their 'consumer' hats - will prefer to buy things that reflect a general utility. Unfortunately, as the mass communications systems become more and more sophisticated and manipulative - and they cannot help doing this, because they also compete with one another for 'market share,' it becomes less and less easy to believe that 'general human utility' is the spontaneously emergent outcome of the 'market forces' involved. Thus, eventually, you get a mutation : Alissa Rosenbaum, the apothecary's daughter from Petersburg, goes to Hollywood and becomes 'Ayn Rand' the mini-nietzchean nemesis of the Reds ...