This is a long reply to Mr. Kalb; it could bear some more editing, but if I don't send it now, I don't know when. Apologies.
It seems to me technology as a social institution is a comprehensive expression of the modern outlook, so it doesn’t need to import standards from somewhere else. It can make up its own.
-well, this strikes me as tautological, especially if we are comprehensive in our understanding of the "social institution". The statement may be true enough but what does it really explain? (in any case, I must say it's a bit jolting to see a traditionalist seeming to write off technocratic modernity in its public entirety as a hermetically closed system devoid of any standards or ethical revelations from beyond itself.) It still seems to me that standards are an ethical issue and I fail to see how ethics can simply be reduced to technology, unless all forms of ethical debate are "technological". For example, technological and liberal Japan has a very different attitude towards immigration than does America. Ultimately, the difference must surely be located in the different ethical histories of the countries.
Specifically, “technological standards” are standards that treat means-ends reasoning (and formal logic) as the whole of rationality. Such standards treat everything as either (1) an arbitrarily desired goal, that is valuable only because somebody happens to want it, or (2) a resource to be employed to bring about such goals in accordance with some overall technically rational system.
-religious arguments (e.g. for keeping faith; for justifying sacraments) also use means-ends reasoning, with the ends often justifying the means; it's not clear to me what exactly is being argued here with respect to technological rationality. As for the two sub points, you make it sound as if the economic servicing of desire is largely unproblematic though (being tautological again) only if the desire is not at odds with the overall technical rationality of the system. But how useful is it to reduce our analysis of an economic system, that in encouraging, but less-than-fully servicing, a massive array of desires, creates, and thus must find ways to recycle, historically unprecedented levels of resentment, simply to questions of technical rationality? There is a whole arena of politics and ethical debate that comes into play.
Admittedly, in this arena, there is frequent recourse today to what you call technological reasoning. So, for example, the legalization of prostitution or polygamy is often successfully opposed in terms of p or p being an assault on women's rights and equality, instead of the question invoking more fundamental concerns about the relationship of the nuclear family to Western civilization. But it seems to me that if you want to make "technology" the fundamental answer for everything, you can't really explain why keeping prostitution illegal is more or less "technological" than legalizing it and treating sex or wives as just another market commodity (after all, prostitutes and polygamous women will invoke their equality rights to do what they do, too) The "technological" answer seems less elegantly minimal than question begging. Surely we must come out for or opposed to such issues as legalizing p or p on account of how we import ethics into our technologies, or vice versa. Which is not to say that over time we don't try to make ethics and technologies work together, so that they might give off the appearance of being seamlessly interwoven.
Again, it explains little to say a human system works simply by servicing unproblematic desires and rejecting those that are "intolerant". The question of how desires are created, and which are more or less successfully received and serviced, remains. A human desire is not an animal appetite. To have a desire is to postpone, be it briefly or for a lifetime, appetitive satisfaction by mentally substituting a representation of the desirable thing for the thing itself. In other words, desire has an ascetic quality however much it dreams of consumption. A culture or society is always some kind of shared "technology" for creating and deferring desires, deferral (and the social organization that the time of productive deferral, before consumption, permits) being the heart of ethics.
But the technologies for creating or deferring desires vary over time; in some sense they evolve. And if there is a key to understanding this evolution it must lie in recognizing the ethical or organizational limits of any technology and the means by which such limits may or may not be transcended in the struggles of societies to survive both themselves (their internal agon of competing desires) and the other societies with whom they compete for the earth's resources. These limits inevitably turn the more socially and historically conscious members of a society to fundamental religious and/or anthropological questions. An awareness of one's social technology develops that cannot itself be simply reduced to this historically specific technology of one's time. Man is not a machine, even when he worships one.
It seems to me, that if you want to understand what "inclusion" is today, you cannot simply attend to its current bureaucratic logics, but need also ask why the previous ethic, or frequent preference, for signs of exclusivity, for a certain sacramental solidarity, locally and nationally, was transcended. For example, you need to be able to explain how it was that people came to think that "the machine" works better by encouraging affirmative action and not, say, by stopping the march of liberalism at the elimination of all legal discriminations (segregation) and at insuring support for some objective forms of meritocracy.
I don’t think the Holocaust as an actual event really explains anything.
But do you generally hold up particular historical events as key to understanding social systems or do you think, something more or less like system x would have evolved, at some point in time, regardless of the particular shape events have taken? If you want to argue that something like modern liberalism was bound to have evolved among human beings, sooner or later, for reasons having to do with our fundamental nature, ok. It's impossible to know, but it seems plausible. But if you are interested in particulars, in timing, you need to attend to events, and the Holocaust is one of the most important.
It surely explains, for starters, the timing and rhetorics of the postwar decolonization movement, the civil rights struggle in the US, anti-apartheid movement, the present situation of Israel and the ME, the rhetorics that prove so powerful and consequential among leftists who profess, e.g., to be physically sickened (i.e. physically, existentially, threatened) when the Harvard president merely raises the question of statistically-measurable differences in the overall range of men's and women's cognitive abilities. Without the Holocaust, how can we explain the fact that only in the post war era can one be discriminated against simply because one is not any kind of recognizable victim? More on the Holocaust as a historically central event, below.
It’s important as a symbol, and its importance has grown as it’s become more distant because the institutions and attitudes that use it as a symbol have become more dominant. Advanced liberalism causes our recollection of the Holocaust rather than the reverse.
You're trying to split the atom here. If something is important as a symbol to us, it has causal power. Symbols are not mere epiphenomenal superstructure as the Marxists had it; they have ethical, organizational, consequences as is evident to those who shape symbols as they first emerge, by shaping the events in which they emerge in order to shape historical memory. It is not possible for something like "advanced liberalism" to emerge other than simultaneously with the symbols by which it will be known; there can be no ethical system without first its symbols.
But it is certainly fair to ask why some symbols (or the events from which they arise) prove memorable and others don't. For example, will 9/11 turn out to have an irreversibly transformative impact on American culture? It remains unknown. There is still a party in America, maybe half the population, that wants to find a way to act and think as if it didn't happen (and they have the conspiracy theories to prove it). But maybe the party that wants to transform liberalism to duly recognize the terrorist danger from the Islamic world will win out. In any case, if the symbol 9/11 is or isn't memorable in future, for someone in future to reduce the question of why to the logic of his then current ethical system, is to deny the human freedom we have at the moment to change, or not, the present logic of liberalism in recognition of the reality of Islamic resentment of the West.
Now, returning to the Holocaust, we do indeed have to explain why it has a much more profound effect on Western culture in the last thirty or so years than have the horrors of communism. Obviously it is not a simple question of horror of mass murder, or so many kids today wouldn't be wearing commie nostalgia t-shirts; and of course it is about which stories prove powerful. But why? Why is it that there remain today so many people, clinging to utopian fantasies, keen to deny that communism and national socialism weren't essentially the same kind of totalitarian phenomena? The short answer is that the Nazis serve as the scapegoat to allow the commie fantasies to survive because many people cannot live without some such Gnostic utopian fantasy (of which liberalism is itself a variety and hence inherently unstable).
In the evolution of free market society, the Holocaust plays a fundamental revelatory role. Up until then, and still in ways today, the hope was that some kind of "exclusivist", compact, national identity, or some form of international solidarity, to counter the alienating and individualizing forces of market society would be possible. What the Nazis taught us (and the commies less successfully) were some of the consequences of attempting to realize such an identity in opposition to a personification of the market, "the Jew". Long story short, we had to learn that to fully transcend the market's individuating and alienating power in a certain kind of secular-national sacramental solidarity, one eventually has to dive into an endless war. The occasional Kristallnacht was not a satisfactory response to the obsessive antisemitism that distinguished the Judeophobia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from those less continuously intense varieties that came before. Only by engaging a war against "the Jew" (and his Bolshevik and Anglo-American allies) could the modern state both utilize the full power of a modern economy AND create the sacramentally-charged social solidarity that was desired as an alternative to the anomie of market society. Lacking such a war, the mature economy, given its inherent logic, would continue to serve the many forces of an individuating, decentralizing, "Jewish" desire.
The kind of social solidarity and modern state and economic power that the Nazis sought can only be combined in a way that is likely to leave your nation a pile of rubble because the solidarity requires endless and irrational war of the kind Hitler pursued. That's the lesson and its consequence has been to create a great postmodern phobia of anything that looks remotely like a modern state trying to build social solidarity against an Other - something George Bush is continually accused of. If all the massive resentment that the market system creates is well focussed on any particular group, then the market system can only continue to work by aiming to destroy that group. This revelation has a profound result in allowing anyone who seems remotely to be a victim or a target of exclusionary resentments to say that their persecution not only threatens, of course, their own existence, but also the very health of the entire social system. Inclusiveness becomes the mark of social health. This has had all kinds of political and ethical consequences, some of which I noted above. Thus many will take seriously the rhetoric of a representative "woman" whom Larry Summers has made physically ill by a few words that, in many another historical context, would be taken as in honest service of our need to develop new and better technology.
Many took the lesson of the Holocaust to mean that only a certain kind of nationalism had to be abandoned and not the entire vein of socialist-Gnostic thought. But if it took the Communists longer to collapse in a cold war, the lesson was basically the same: focusing your people and their desired solidarity on the resented agent of the marketplace - America - means you will eventually be destroyed by the adaptation of modern economic forces to military purposes. In the Soviet case, you simply won't be able to compete for long with that freer form of market civilization which you scapegoat, along with the millions you murder.
To my mind the basic point is this: moral blackmail based on victim status is only possible if established concepts of justice say you’re a victim. So to explain inclusiveness you have to explain why excluding someone because she’s a woman is colossally evil (and also “ignorant” and “irrational”) while excluding someone because he’s not a Harvard graduate is OK. It seems to me that to explain that you have to appeal to notions of rational social functioning, which thus turn out to be fundamental in the matter.
-I don't disagree with any of this; it's just that invoking our present ethical technology doesn't explain how present notions of rational social functioning have emerged or hold power (not that I think they will for much longer).
Now you sound like a Marxist historian!
This is a long reply to Mr. Kalb; it could bear some more editing, but if I don't send it now, I don't know when. Apologies.
It seems to me technology as a social institution is a comprehensive expression of the modern outlook, so it doesn’t need to import standards from somewhere else. It can make up its own.
-well, this strikes me as tautological, especially if we are comprehensive in our understanding of the "social institution". The statement may be true enough but what does it really explain? (in any case, I must say it's a bit jolting to see a traditionalist seeming to write off technocratic modernity in its public entirety as a hermetically closed system devoid of any standards or ethical revelations from beyond itself.) It still seems to me that standards are an ethical issue and I fail to see how ethics can simply be reduced to technology, unless all forms of ethical debate are "technological". For example, technological and liberal Japan has a very different attitude towards immigration than does America. Ultimately, the difference must surely be located in the different ethical histories of the countries.
Specifically, “technological standards” are standards that treat means-ends reasoning (and formal logic) as the whole of rationality. Such standards treat everything as either (1) an arbitrarily desired goal, that is valuable only because somebody happens to want it, or (2) a resource to be employed to bring about such goals in accordance with some overall technically rational system.
-religious arguments (e.g. for keeping faith; for justifying sacraments) also use means-ends reasoning, with the ends often justifying the means; it's not clear to me what exactly is being argued here with respect to technological rationality. As for the two sub points, you make it sound as if the economic servicing of desire is largely unproblematic though (being tautological again) only if the desire is not at odds with the overall technical rationality of the system. But how useful is it to reduce our analysis of an economic system, that in encouraging, but less-than-fully servicing, a massive array of desires, creates, and thus must find ways to recycle, historically unprecedented levels of resentment, simply to questions of technical rationality? There is a whole arena of politics and ethical debate that comes into play.
Admittedly, in this arena, there is frequent recourse today to what you call technological reasoning. So, for example, the legalization of prostitution or polygamy is often successfully opposed in terms of p or p being an assault on women's rights and equality, instead of the question invoking more fundamental concerns about the relationship of the nuclear family to Western civilization. But it seems to me that if you want to make "technology" the fundamental answer for everything, you can't really explain why keeping prostitution illegal is more or less "technological" than legalizing it and treating sex or wives as just another market commodity (after all, prostitutes and polygamous women will invoke their equality rights to do what they do, too) The "technological" answer seems less elegantly minimal than question begging. Surely we must come out for or opposed to such issues as legalizing p or p on account of how we import ethics into our technologies, or vice versa. Which is not to say that over time we don't try to make ethics and technologies work together, so that they might give off the appearance of being seamlessly interwoven.
Again, it explains little to say a human system works simply by servicing unproblematic desires and rejecting those that are "intolerant". The question of how desires are created, and which are more or less successfully received and serviced, remains. A human desire is not an animal appetite. To have a desire is to postpone, be it briefly or for a lifetime, appetitive satisfaction by mentally substituting a representation of the desirable thing for the thing itself. In other words, desire has an ascetic quality however much it dreams of consumption. A culture or society is always some kind of shared "technology" for creating and deferring desires, deferral (and the social organization that the time of productive deferral, before consumption, permits) being the heart of ethics.
But the technologies for creating or deferring desires vary over time; in some sense they evolve. And if there is a key to understanding this evolution it must lie in recognizing the ethical or organizational limits of any technology and the means by which such limits may or may not be transcended in the struggles of societies to survive both themselves (their internal agon of competing desires) and the other societies with whom they compete for the earth's resources. These limits inevitably turn the more socially and historically conscious members of a society to fundamental religious and/or anthropological questions. An awareness of one's social technology develops that cannot itself be simply reduced to this historically specific technology of one's time. Man is not a machine, even when he worships one.
It seems to me, that if you want to understand what "inclusion" is today, you cannot simply attend to its current bureaucratic logics, but need also ask why the previous ethic, or frequent preference, for signs of exclusivity, for a certain sacramental solidarity, locally and nationally, was transcended. For example, you need to be able to explain how it was that people came to think that "the machine" works better by encouraging affirmative action and not, say, by stopping the march of liberalism at the elimination of all legal discriminations (segregation) and at insuring support for some objective forms of meritocracy.
I don’t think the Holocaust as an actual event really explains anything.
But do you generally hold up particular historical events as key to understanding social systems or do you think, something more or less like system x would have evolved, at some point in time, regardless of the particular shape events have taken? If you want to argue that something like modern liberalism was bound to have evolved among human beings, sooner or later, for reasons having to do with our fundamental nature, ok. It's impossible to know, but it seems plausible. But if you are interested in particulars, in timing, you need to attend to events, and the Holocaust is one of the most important.
It surely explains, for starters, the timing and rhetorics of the postwar decolonization movement, the civil rights struggle in the US, anti-apartheid movement, the present situation of Israel and the ME, the rhetorics that prove so powerful and consequential among leftists who profess, e.g., to be physically sickened (i.e. physically, existentially, threatened) when the Harvard president merely raises the question of statistically-measurable differences in the overall range of men's and women's cognitive abilities. Without the Holocaust, how can we explain the fact that only in the post war era can one be discriminated against simply because one is not any kind of recognizable victim? More on the Holocaust as a historically central event, below.
It’s important as a symbol, and its importance has grown as it’s become more distant because the institutions and attitudes that use it as a symbol have become more dominant. Advanced liberalism causes our recollection of the Holocaust rather than the reverse.
You're trying to split the atom here. If something is important as a symbol to us, it has causal power. Symbols are not mere epiphenomenal superstructure as the Marxists had it; they have ethical, organizational, consequences as is evident to those who shape symbols as they first emerge, by shaping the events in which they emerge in order to shape historical memory. It is not possible for something like "advanced liberalism" to emerge other than simultaneously with the symbols by which it will be known; there can be no ethical system without first its symbols.
But it is certainly fair to ask why some symbols (or the events from which they arise) prove memorable and others don't. For example, will 9/11 turn out to have an irreversibly transformative impact on American culture? It remains unknown. There is still a party in America, maybe half the population, that wants to find a way to act and think as if it didn't happen (and they have the conspiracy theories to prove it). But maybe the party that wants to transform liberalism to duly recognize the terrorist danger from the Islamic world will win out. In any case, if the symbol 9/11 is or isn't memorable in future, for someone in future to reduce the question of why to the logic of his then current ethical system, is to deny the human freedom we have at the moment to change, or not, the present logic of liberalism in recognition of the reality of Islamic resentment of the West.
Now, returning to the Holocaust, we do indeed have to explain why it has a much more profound effect on Western culture in the last thirty or so years than have the horrors of communism. Obviously it is not a simple question of horror of mass murder, or so many kids today wouldn't be wearing commie nostalgia t-shirts; and of course it is about which stories prove powerful. But why? Why is it that there remain today so many people, clinging to utopian fantasies, keen to deny that communism and national socialism weren't essentially the same kind of totalitarian phenomena? The short answer is that the Nazis serve as the scapegoat to allow the commie fantasies to survive because many people cannot live without some such Gnostic utopian fantasy (of which liberalism is itself a variety and hence inherently unstable).
In the evolution of free market society, the Holocaust plays a fundamental revelatory role. Up until then, and still in ways today, the hope was that some kind of "exclusivist", compact, national identity, or some form of international solidarity, to counter the alienating and individualizing forces of market society would be possible. What the Nazis taught us (and the commies less successfully) were some of the consequences of attempting to realize such an identity in opposition to a personification of the market, "the Jew". Long story short, we had to learn that to fully transcend the market's individuating and alienating power in a certain kind of secular-national sacramental solidarity, one eventually has to dive into an endless war. The occasional Kristallnacht was not a satisfactory response to the obsessive antisemitism that distinguished the Judeophobia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from those less continuously intense varieties that came before. Only by engaging a war against "the Jew" (and his Bolshevik and Anglo-American allies) could the modern state both utilize the full power of a modern economy AND create the sacramentally-charged social solidarity that was desired as an alternative to the anomie of market society. Lacking such a war, the mature economy, given its inherent logic, would continue to serve the many forces of an individuating, decentralizing, "Jewish" desire.
The kind of social solidarity and modern state and economic power that the Nazis sought can only be combined in a way that is likely to leave your nation a pile of rubble because the solidarity requires endless and irrational war of the kind Hitler pursued. That's the lesson and its consequence has been to create a great postmodern phobia of anything that looks remotely like a modern state trying to build social solidarity against an Other - something George Bush is continually accused of. If all the massive resentment that the market system creates is well focussed on any particular group, then the market system can only continue to work by aiming to destroy that group. This revelation has a profound result in allowing anyone who seems remotely to be a victim or a target of exclusionary resentments to say that their persecution not only threatens, of course, their own existence, but also the very health of the entire social system. Inclusiveness becomes the mark of social health. This has had all kinds of political and ethical consequences, some of which I noted above. Thus many will take seriously the rhetoric of a representative "woman" whom Larry Summers has made physically ill by a few words that, in many another historical context, would be taken as in honest service of our need to develop new and better technology.
Many took the lesson of the Holocaust to mean that only a certain kind of nationalism had to be abandoned and not the entire vein of socialist-Gnostic thought. But if it took the Communists longer to collapse in a cold war, the lesson was basically the same: focusing your people and their desired solidarity on the resented agent of the marketplace - America - means you will eventually be destroyed by the adaptation of modern economic forces to military purposes. In the Soviet case, you simply won't be able to compete for long with that freer form of market civilization which you scapegoat, along with the millions you murder.
To my mind the basic point is this: moral blackmail based on victim status is only possible if established concepts of justice say you’re a victim. So to explain inclusiveness you have to explain why excluding someone because she’s a woman is colossally evil (and also “ignorant” and “irrational”) while excluding someone because he’s not a Harvard graduate is OK. It seems to me that to explain that you have to appeal to notions of rational social functioning, which thus turn out to be fundamental in the matter.
-I don't disagree with any of this; it's just that invoking our present ethical technology doesn't explain how present notions of rational social functioning have emerged or hold power (not that I think they will for much longer).