Letters to the Editor
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I got that memo
Didn't you get the memo?
Heh.
-- kovie
You missed the thread about labels, the "centrism fallacy" and confusing the map with the actual terrain for which the map is just a symbolic representation. To me, the left is purely a plot on a continuum of different economic ideologies and between the extremes of individualist vs. collectivist rights. I'm probably far left on most simplistic maps but in reality and practice, I'm all over the map, depending on the issue. My support of universal healthcare is based more on cost-benefit analysis, or fiscal conservatism, than any ideological determination. Willaim S. Lind is as far right as you can get, has opposed torture and the war since I don't know when and is an avid booster of public transit. The left is a useful term as far as it goes but to claim that opposition to Bush is only found on the left is actually echoing a false, misleading and harmful meme.
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jkalos' post almost stopped mine.
For a few comments back, I was thinking that if the discussion is about being an incrementalist or the alternative (a revolutionist?) then the distinguishing characteristic is that incrementalists do not believe that ends justify means, while the revolutionists do.
But then the I got as far as jkalos' comment, and wondered if that was even the point of the discussion.
And, I switched metaphors, mid-stream, so-to-speak. If we are indeed on the Titanic, then jkalos was making a case for being one of the musicians and continuing to play.
A far scarier, but much more dignified scenario.
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@Anonymust
Yes. I read it differently and Jkalos gets a tip of the hat for wading in like that. Nicely done, sir. I think it all went south when they started the ad homs. But I still think it fundamentally about power, not methods. The nature of power is what needs that needs to be understood and dealt with. Especially for people who keep reinforcing the meme that "We, the people, have no power." That's just not true. Not yet.
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How you get there from here
I'm sure that Ché is well-versed in this particular history, so I won't belabor the point, but parts of this dialogue remind me of the old Marxist-Leninist theoreticians of the CPUSA and the SLP, who were still around when I was a pup, straining to teach us how to identify pre-revolutionary conditions so we wouldn't -- History forbid -- fall victim to left aventurist deviations.
Being New Leftists, we mocked them mercilessly after helping them re-fold and stack the chairs, and heading off for the nearest bar to plan our next outrage. In fact, they taught us a lot, and not only about what didn't work.
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I have yet to find the passage where it is explicitly stated
But I have read passages of Orwell's that echo the sentiment:
Liberal: A power worshipper without power.
It's probably not something he said in so bluntly.
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@WT I thought you might see echoes of something
Being New Leftists, we mocked them mercilessly after helping them re-fold and stack the chairs, and heading off for the nearest bar to plan our next outrage. In fact, they taught us a lot, and not only about what didn't work.
-- William Timberman
Power. The view that we have no power is self-defeating.
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Ah, Stephen Jay Gould rears his head thanks to Joel_Grant
The controversy here over incrementalism vs overthrow (if you want to call it that) reminds me of the struggle in geology between the Uniformitarians and the Catastrophists that got reignited in the 1950's with the heretical (and often quite loopy) works of Immanuel Velikovsky. And of course, then as now, the Incrementalist/Uniformitarians typically refused to put their own assumptions to scrutiny and would accuse the Catastrophists of all sorts of calumy and "disrespect" of Authority.
Over time, Uniformitarianism became rigid, brittle, and fragile, while Catastrophism strangely made more and more sense, until, almost in an instant, the situation flipped, like the earth's magnetic field is said to, and catastrophe (specifically meteoric bombardment from the skies) seemed to answer for almost every mystery of the past. We were only saved from asteroids hurtling at us continuously by the fact that the Great Bombardment happened Long Ago. Used up almost all the asteroids, dontchaknow. Whew!
Geological understanding went through revolutionary changes between about 1965 and 1970, so much so that pre-1965 geology is all but unrecognizable to post-1970 students. So unrecognizable, it's almost laughable.
Uniformitarianism has not been discarded, not by any means, just the understanding of how it might work. In the field of evolution, Niles Eldrege and Stephen Jay Gould came up with sort of an amalgam of Uniformitarian and Catastrophist ideas that they called "Punctuated Equilibrium", a concept that might be applicable to social and political situations such as the frightful and untenable one we face in this country today.
I happily dispute the premise of Incrementalism as it applies to social and political change. I will grant that Incrementalism is a good description of political and social stasis. Given the history of revolutions and political transformations, the idea that somehow the piling of bits and pieces of this and that fashionable new idea onto rotting foundations and institutions is going to produce positive change -- "eventually" -- is self-evidently ludicrous and silly in my view. That's not how it works.
What happens is that the whole structure reaches a level of instability and it collapses -- suddenly. We've seen it too many times to count through our own nation's history, and we've witnessed it in action during the last few decades.
The political transformation/revolution is sudden, it is not incremental, and I'm actually sad for people like kovie who cling to the notion that given enough time and effort we -- or our descendants -- can change things for the better!
It's comforting, but it is naive, and it flies in the face of history that we have lived through and are living through right now.
Gould's and Eldrege's insight I think was profound (though there are those who dispute them, of course). There's no need to go into details here (though they are fascinating in their own right), but the basic premise is that evolutionary change occurs in spurts rather than at a constant rate.
The premise has been directly, and I would argue successfully, applied to social and political theory by such scholars as Frank Baumgartner. But the experience of our own senses should be sufficient to make obvious the fact that change -- for good or ill -- in most social and political systems often occurs suddenly not through gradual, incremental adjustments.
What intrigues me is the necessity so many feel to deny it.
Why?