Wow, lots to dig into with Chris and E.D.’s respective posts. In the spirit of keeping things short and sweet, though (and to hasten the opportunity for someone else to pick the ball up and run with it), I’m going to focus my first offering on Erik’s contention about the ideological tendency towards absolutism, which I think cuts nicely across both posts.
My own diagnosis would take Erik’s focus on the cultural absolutism of prevailing political and cultural perspectives and call for a quarter turn in re-identifying this malady as one of essentialism. As I’ve often griped, overtly ideological thinking seems to persistently exhibit a tendency to speak in unwarranted certitudes about having figured everything out. Much of that false certainty, by my lights, is derived from a belief in the ability to deduce the essential nature of any number of things, be they government, the free market, freedom, or democracy, via one’s particular brand of ideological calculus.
Of course, as soon as any of these institution/concepts cease to operate in the fashion that our essentialist rendering describes, we immediately seek to ameliorate the anomaly via appeals to the evils of the essentials of some other countervailing institution, rather than, perhaps, attempting to come to grips with the fallacy of our logic. Insofar as this tendency is one of an inborn drive towards universalizing a certain subset of beliefs as a means of understanding the world, I think it dovetails nicely with Chris’ contention that the dominant political institutions aren’t much more than outmoded modernist jalopies.
Outmoded because, despite its now decades old lineage, contemporary ideologies still haven’t swallowed the bitter postmodernist pill about essentialism and absolutizing universality being zombie concepts: dead, yet refusing to die.
In this regard, I think that even the Front Porchers with their variety of perfectly legitimate gripes against modernity, remain firmly ensconced and swimming quite happily unawares in its waters with their determined prostrations around universalizing the essential nobility of the local. Hence my inability to go fully localist, glocalism via my definitions is precisely the attempt to wrest localism from the grip of essentialism and thereby fee its strengths to really bear fruit in a world whose driving conditions have moved well past such quaint banalities.
This hanging about in the quagmire of modernity now well past a reasonable stay extends well beyond our institutions, and what I gather to be our collective mistrust of the truths they wend, and finds its reach into the very means by which we see and interact with one another. If we ever found ourselves capable of relating to one another beyond the essentialist labels of liberal, conservative, libertarian, Democrat, Republican, and so on, we certainly and actively choose not to do so today. Insofar as we make that choice, we fail to live in the terrain of the real, opting instead for the clean but mythical angles of Platonic forms.
It is in this regard that I keep harping on this notion of engagement in our political discourse by a much broader cross section of and revitalized conception of citizenry. I understand how such a call could be seen as Jeffersonian shoulder checking, but when one considers the context in which it is made (beyond the modernist malaise of essentialism and pushing our outmoded institutions so inflicted), I think it becomes clear that my intentions are pointed true north.
To be sure, I don’t expect some harmonious Shangrila to emerge from such a move, polemics will continue as ever a pace. But at least those polemics will have a realistic grounding in the firm post-neo-Aristotelean ontology of particularity.
The further move, as also described in my acrobatics around glocalism, is towards something resembling inter-subjective/inter-objective (or inter-particular, if you like) approach to cultural and political organizing that hues to the cautionary note of “unity without violence to particularity”. But it increasingly strikes me as silly to hand wave about such a post-postmodern move when we have yet to move into, let alone past, the realizations of a postmodern frame.
As such, while I share much of Chris’ frustration and, at times, feeling of helplessness around our current predicament, I think the only means of catalyzing the required diffusive engagement is to give one’s self over to a full throated and, in many regards, unrestrained participation in this imperfect practice of discourse we find ourselves embedded. In that I expect things will get much worse before they get better (only, really, to get much worse again in new and improved ways), I continue, in my better moments, to remind myself about keeping my chin up come what may.
Will Truman 
Teacher 
Burt Likko 
Mary 
James K 
Jaybird 
Tod Kelly 
Borat: “I do a picture, only small, of the Tishnik Masacre. Where many Uzbeks…crushed!”
Kindly Gray Hippie: “How did you feel when you drew this?”
Borat: “Very proud!”.
KGH: “I am just listening with sadness…sadness for your people…?”
Borat: “Yes…no, it is not sad. It is us who do the kill!”
When in doubt,
{ 4 comments }
Great post, Scott. Short and sweet he says….by whose standards? :)
Yeah, it got away from me a bit. But still, it’s relatively short for me.
Well I started off mine intending something short as well. So it goes….
I’ve been kicking around an essay in my head (called “The Grey”, maybe?) that discusses the whole ideological stance thing. I tend to assume that when a person takes the attitude that the other side is not merely wrong, but evil, they probably don’t understand the other side.
The fact that someone has reached a different conclusion is not, in itself, evidence that they haven’t thought about it.
My suspicion is that the assumption that the opposition has not thought about it is, more often than not, an indicator of having not thought about it. If the only reason one can come up with for reaching a different conclusion is, at best, laziness (or, at worst, wickedness), then one’s own grasp of the subject is likely to be less than stellar, I’ve found.
I mean, imagine someone saying something like “People who oppose circumcision are not only racist, but homophobic! They care more about engaging in primal scream therapy over their own supposedly “diminished” sexual pleasure than about the fact that PEOPLE ARE *DYING*!”
This hysteria, to me, would communicate, at least, a lack of familiarity with the arguments of the other side.
But it’s an essay I’m still kicking around.
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