It is Time to Choose the Blogging Trinity...

Hi all,

What that subject line above means is that I would like you to "pick the teams" you are going to be working in. There are 18 students. 3 members in a team. They can be (and a team or more will have to be) mixed class.

On Monday, I want to know who you are working with. If you already know, great, let me know.

What I expect you to do:

1. You will maintain doing three blog entries a week on your blog. From now on, though, I expect that two entries will be on the reading and discussion that we do (as before). The third entry should be directed to the work that the other members of your group have been commenting on. Of course, you can have more than the minimum number of blog entries required.

2. The first two entries should have links to URLs outside your group of three. The third entry should do this AND link to blog entries of your group.

3. Start thinking seriously about a topic you want to do. I will be asking you about that in a couple of weeks or so.

I will continue doing spot checks, and I will comment on my own blog on what I see in your group efforts.

Take care

Cas

The Evolution of an Idea

A number of folks posted on Social Darwinism:
PD Kong, argues that the issue about Spencer is that he lacks both observation AND a mechanism of transmission for his claims. It is interesting to note that Darwin himself believed in an idea of pangenesis, which held that characteristics were passed on physically by gemmules. This sounds suspiciously like Lamarck, and acquired traits. Thus, according to Darwin:

"It is universally admitted that the cells or units of the body increase by self-devision, or proliferation, retaining the same nature, and that they ultimately become converted into the various tissues and substances of the body. But besides this means of increase I assume that the units throw off minute granules which are dispersed throughout the whole system; that these, when supplied with proper nutriment, multiply by self-division, and are ultimately developed into units like those from which they were originally derived. These granules may be called gemmules. They are collected from all parts of the system to constitute the sexual elements, and their development in the next generation forms the new being; but they are likewise capable of transmission in a dormant state to future generations and may then be developed.)"

Classier Hoenig, saw Social Darwinism as a new dress for old ideas. I thought the Midnight Ponderer’s contribution raised interesting issues. Even if we got rid of the “Marching Morons”
or the idiocracy (in the worst of all possible worlds) there would be a new set of folks who would fill in the gap. The issue is the prevalence of capitalism. And one doesn’t have to rail about the injustices of capitalism to get this outcome. It could strictly be an outcome of the differentials between talents of individuals. As Nozick argues in State, Anarchy, & Utopia, differentials in outcome could be completely fair, if voluntarily arrived at. We all agree to pay a basketball star a little form each of us to see him or her play. The star does well, gets more than us, and they do well, and we do less well. So the question is: “How do we handle those that have lower status in our society?” I mean, one major critique of Nozick’s approach is that a differential in talent does not have to be very large (in fact quite small…) to get an inordinately large difference in compensation. I just have to be half a second faster than you, and I get paid twenty times as much to play the same game. Is that fair, even if it is the impersonal free market that determines it? There will always be an underclass (due to these differentials in talent, no matter how small in a capitalist system), even if that underclass is a lot brighter than the earlier underclass that had been, well, er,… “liquidated.”

The Use of Deadly Force is Authorized…

Natewazere did a nice job of summarizing a debate on the uses and limits of force in imperialist endeavours. How much force can we use to guarantee our “place in the sun”, so that we can spread our fairy dust of civilizing benefits? NWH suggests that there are limits—in the long run, echoing Major Tom, who thinks that brutality cannot secure what the Europeans need in the long run. WHat then is one to make of the Hereros, who the Germans basically wiped out?

If we visit Tyblogmeh, TY holds that it is part of human nature to up the level of brutality to get what we want. Elizabeth F supports this view with her meditation on the Heart of Darkness—brutality wasn’t a side effect of imperialism, it was an essential feature, given the mindset of Europeans interested in exploitation of material resources and markets. No matter how you sugar coat it, some excuse to differentiate those folks who needed to be crushed from the imperializing Europeans would be made, as Classier Hoeing argues, even if you happen to be European in ancestry—not just the Irish, but also the Boers, as several readings made clear. Zak P laments the loss of European decency that it had tried to attain after the first phase of imperialism in 16th and 17th centiries, with the interdiction of slavery. I wonder how the Africans who fought the Europeans throughout the period to keep the Euros away from their land might have felt, or the Indians for that matter? At least one blogger spoke about the brighter side—those who resisted the imperialist enterprise, but just as those who resisted were a minority so was letstalkaboutmeh--an outpost of some hope in a see of pragmatic economic, political, and military necessity.

On some level—could we argue that it was “nothing personal”? Did the treatment of the Boers and the Irish show that for Europeans it really was just about economics, plain and simple, as Lenin suggested—afterall, the British were quite prepared to ruthlessly crush European descended stock in South Africa; or, to oppress the European Irish. The concentration camp is an innovation, though it had been echoed earlier in time.

This points to an increasing power of technology to help shape brutal practices—railways help us to gather and move populations efficiently, as well as increase the distance between those who give the orders and those who carry them out. We can see a sense of “diffused responsibility” that will be a classic hallmark of later atrocities like The Jewish Holocaust that accompanied the rise of Nazism. Is it the fault of the soldiers who gathered the Boers and sent them to the railheads for their journey? What off the rail workers who got them there? Or, the guards at the camps. Or the doctors who were overwhelmed? Or the supply masters who didn’t get the supplies to the camps? No one was solely responsible for the tragic end of those in the camps. Is this a great comfort for those who suffered? Or does it make the suffering worse, not to have someone to blame, except the amorphous—“English.”

Two caveats to my sweeping claim--JED makes the excellent point that the Congo worked in Leopold's favour precisely because he was able to play the French and English off against each other--a balance of power issue. Though obviously informed by economics, as Lolette shows us, , this is also clearly a political issue. And second, I borrowed a link from LTAM for the picture you see above. I think it is instructive as to the mindset (also in our text, p788). That ideological/military stuff surely will not go away...

Anarchism as Justice?

Declan’s blog says:

“It is not enough for Mr. Kropotkin to simply assume his belief system is right and that “any man with a heart” would naturally resign himself to death upon committing whatever an anarchist subjectively declares is unholy. Any common criminal can convince himself of the worthiness of his punitive actions; however, without a common consensus of the injustice of the original action, punishment for such an action is limited to simple terrorism.”

What interests me about this post is the meditation on the role of justice and what it is. For Declan, justice is a communal enterprise: “Justice, of course, requires due process and a consensus among a body of people.” But what is justice? As I read this, he appears to be saying that justice is an historically emerging process, requiring a broad consent of those who obey these laws. After all, anarchists are a “body of people” if narrowly defined as such, and, given his dislike of anarchist rationalizations of violence, one possible way to distinguish them from an actually just grouping, is the assent of a broad grouping—say a majority? The corollary of Declan’s excellent observation is that—at what point can a minority actually resist an unjust distribution? I am thinking of any number of situations, both historical (civil rights) and in “literature” such as Rand’s Atlas Shrugged? Couldn’t a majority—or a broad consensus, argue that any aggravation on the part of the minority that broke the laws (civil disobedience?) be a form of terrorism, no matter how mild?

The Bolsheviks--Or, We'll Get By With a Little Help From Our "Friends"…

There are a number of folks who argued that it was “inevitable” or “nearly inevitable” that the Bolsheviks should win the debate (even if the Octobrists put up a good fight). The ball got rolling with Major Tom, the “divine arbiter”:

“The Bolsheviks were the most radical group of all the three, and had the distinct advantage of having the future on their side. They were arguing that in 1905 the time is ripe for a revolution, since the peasantry has just had its bond with the Czar broken by Bloody Sunday.”

Makaveli says:
" So, in summary, the debate was rigged from the beginning (as Charlie has admitted on his summation) and the Mensheviks were headed towards failure from the start."

MLC asserts similarly:
“It was sort of inevitable that the Bolsheviks would win the debate, though I do have much respect for the Octoberists.”

And then, The Midnight Ponderer adds in her claim that:

“There was really no other direction to go in. The Tsars and their governments were corrupt and had been for a while, as many of you addressed in your blogs. Russia, in order for it to become and remain a world power needed to immediately oust the tradition and "backward-ness" of the past and move into the future, which is what the Bolsheviks wanted and is why they, of course, will always win.”

I wonder about the possibility of the excluded middle. Why do we have to EITHER have a dictatorship of the masses OR a dictatorship of one (i.e., the Tsar)? Why was Russia’s experiment with representative democracy in the February Revolution of 1917, which led to the formation of the Russian Provisional Government, a failure? I think a key item in answering that question revolves around what they did not do—get out of the war, which was destroying the country. Maybe it was because the Bolshevik platform was so uncompromising on this issue. After all, Lenin, being a true believer, thought that after the war, the Communist revolution would come (sparked by Bolshevik revolutionary fervour and dedicated cadres—after all, if you can get a communist revolution in backwards Russia, it will be a SNAP!!! To get it in advanced industrialized Britain and Germany) and all the land that Russia had given up in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would be handed back.

PS. I just came across JED's analysis; what do you think?