Hermeneutic Heretic

Amazon.com: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods: Books: Jonah Goldberg
Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that “political correctnessâ€? on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis’ suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic process when it yields results they dislike, insist on the centralization of economic decision-making, and seek to insert the authority of the state in our private lives–from bans on smoking to gun control. Covering such hot issues as morality, anti-Semitism, science versus religion, health care, and cultural values, he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.

D. A. Schön’s concept of “generative metaphor” (or the productive ‘displacement of concepts’) describes the conscious (if not deliberately algorithmic) elaboration of local metaphorical mappings between two concepts with the express intention of discovery (his example is ‘paint brushes are really pumps’) of new properties of one of the domains. It is generally implicitly assumed that the changes of understanding will mostly concern the target domain (e.g. the brush example will reveal much about brushes but nothing about pumps). However, particularly in more global contexts, the changes in conceptualization happen in both domains. This is sort of a special case of blending where the resulting blended spaces contains almost the entire input spaces separately but with changed properties — this needs to be investigated in some depth. The “Liberal Fascism” blend is a great example of this. It is global - i.e. it covers almost every aspect of the uses of both word; extensive - i.e. it is elaborated over a significant stretch of discourse with great intertextual potential; it is deliberate and most importantly it seeks to alter the conceptualization of both input spaces. The new ‘blended space’ has very interesting properties.

However, on the other hand, even though the argument is made in a book-length volume, the title and a brief blurb alone are enough to make most of the point. As the end of the Amazon blurb suggests:

Impeccably researched and persuasively argued, LIBERAL FASCISM will elicit howls of indignation from the liberal establishment–and rousing cheers from the Right.

Here’s an example of one of the liberal “howls of indignation”:

tomgpalmer.com: This is Nuts!
I know that authors don’t always come up with the titles or covers of their books, but they do get to veto them. This one is so utterly stupid that I hope that Goldberg is ashamed to show his face in public.

Of course, as this comment assumes, there is something ridiculous about the “liberal fascism” analogy given our current understanding. So the interesting question here is, what of the truth? Where does the concept of truth play a role in this discussion? In fact, it is mostly replaced by plausibility and credibility (or “aptness”). Here are some of the comments on the the critical blog post cited above that illustrate how plausibility and credibility are negotiated. First, defensive elaboration of the mapping:

Jonah doesn’t mean Whole Foods shoppers and people in the industry are sympathetic to national socialism. He’s pointing out how Nazis were at the forefront of modernity’s urge to go back to the land.

The point is that National Socialism (which did self-describe as ’socialism,’ after all) was originally conceived as a leftist movement, and forgotten aspects of fascism are still current in today’s left. He would surely admit that well known aspects (such as nationalism) are current in the right.

Second, offensive - questioning the very credibility of the mapping approach.

Goldberg’s response is at http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/
?q=ZjBmYmNmN2Q0NjkyYTNmOWQzNjU4YWJiOGRiZmM4NTk=

It’s pretty lame. The Nazis were into organic food, so if you’re into organic food, you’re a Nazi. Fish can swim. Jonah can swim. Jonah is a fish. That is pretty stupid.

Anyway, it says “the totalitarian temptation,” but were the Communists into organic food? Not that I recall.

Here’s a whole exchange regarding the appropriateness of mapping and some folk theory about the nature of meaning:

So the idea of aptness (both procedural, rhetorical and social) is intensively debated but the idea of truth simply doesn’t come up. It will certainly be applied to the book’s treatment of both domains once it comes out (almost six months from now) but ultimately the judgments will focus on all the kinds of appropriateness of the analogical mappings contained and implied.

Metaphorically Challenged : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com
“That is an awesome metaphor,� I said. Because it is. It’s funny without the use of burning children. But it isn’t accurate. John isn’t on some emotional island where he can’t understand what he’s doing. And he isn’t trying to fight, really. He doesn’t want to be inconvenienced. He doesn’t want to step up. He is, basically, an inadequate father. And I haven’t found a metaphor, war or otherwise, that says it any better. [my emphasis]

This is a rather interesting self-reflective observation (apart from the rather compulsively good writing) for a writer whose stock in trade is the creative analogy (generative metaphor). And reflective of something most metaphor theorists tend to neglect. What happens if there is no good metaphor? Metaphors are frequently presented as omni-present and unlocking this or the other of our mind. But just as often people turn away from outward metaphor or try to eliminate the metaphoricity of one and come up with a “literal” description. Of course, by conceptual metaphor standards, the statement in bold is frought with metaphors of all kind but the explicit desire of the author is to reject metaphor for something identified (through a folk theory of literal meaning and the ornamental nature of figurative language) as a ‘down-to-earth’ description of life ‘as it is’. That doesn’t invalidate the ubiquity of metaphor theory (which is really a ‘centrality of conceptual integration’ theory) just shows that there are different levels of magnification that we need to operate on. The writer rejects the generative (educational) metaphor and simply settles for integrating scenarios of fatherhood with her narrative depiction of events and describing the results in the normal attributive manner. What is interesting, is that the standards of fatherhood are implied in the preceding narrative (not cited here) in interesting ways that would bear further investigation. Clearly, something cognitive is happening at the level of discourse rather than the smaller chunks of perception cognitive psychology of text generally operates on.

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Freedom, not climate, is at risk
As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

…

â– Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided
â– Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants
■Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus�, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority

I have hinted before (in Czech press) that the Czech (my) president is an idiot. However, he is not a total idiot. Anybody who can call somebody else “a Malthusian pessimist” has to have at least read a book and Klaus has read more than a few. Everytime I read him I am puzzled by this strange combination of insight into the reality of social science and at the same time complete divorce from it. Such as when he forbids the politicization of science and at the same time exhorts scientists to take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinion:

The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions. They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence.

So it is hard to say whether he makes some interesting points or just that some of his points are interesting. I definitely like the idea of opposing the “scientific consensus” or rather a more general “scholarly consensus” at pretty much every turn. That doesn’t necessarily mean disagreeing with it but rather not invoke it as part of the evidence. Consensus is simply a rhetorical device and scientists have agreed on erroneous ideas more often than on those that withstood the test of time. Of course, academic consensus also plays a social and discursive role. Anybody who every taught first year undergraduates has to distinguish between interesting challenges to accepted doctrine based on freshness of perspective and annoying disruptions based on lazy ignorance. They’re usually easy to spot (the former being much rarer) but there is no easy heuristic for these decisions (for instance, Godel’s initial presentation of his theorem was almost completely ignored by the assembled mathematicians).

Moreover, if today’s vision of science as a process of hypothesis formation and challenge is an accurate depiction of actual practice (and it isn’t), any consensus must be purely provisional (see Dawkins’ cowardly insistence that there is a small degree of probability that there is a God).

So that bit is interesting and not often heard by a head of state. Of course, Klaus is/was all too happy to rely on the scholarly consensus of Thatcherian economics to shepherd in a semi-successful economic reform that resulted in a disgraced exit from office amid corruption allegations and his eventual transformation into a petty (or populist) nationalist.

But the paradox central to his column is worthy of consideration. Science never is and cannot be apolitical. There are elements of it that seem to be (e.g. mathematics) but they are all tied to essentially political considerations (e.g. mapping of variables onto the real world). Therefore, all of these decisions eventually have to be political. And the rhetoric of environmentalism is a perfectly valid part of political decision-making. As are decisions about which freedoms to curtail for the greater good. Klaus is only too happy to give complete freedom to economic agents but not when they interfere with the rights of the nation(alistic) state, for example, he favors great restrictions on migration. So I say, it serves him and his rich buddies right if they are forced to negotiate with the rabble of global environmental movement.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the global warming science proved to be inaccurate and the consensus just another example of how easy it is to be for the majority to be wrong. However, it seems that most of the proposals of the green lobby make sense independently of the global warming scare: renewable energy sources, sustainable development,  recycling, the occasional hug to a tree. And their promotion could spur just as much economic growth as oil subsidies.
So the conclusion is: let us oppose “scientific consensus” but accept science in the political arena as a valid participant with the same rhetorical and other symbolic rights as all other political actors. That’s different than saying the practice of science itself must be political. Only that it becomes political when it becomes public. And since all scientific endeavor has a public dimension, there is a bit of politics even in the most innocuous bits of science. (Politics meaning ‘reflective’ of communal matters - whether internal or external to what is so strangely called the ’scientific community’.)

CBC.ca Arts - Retired Czech leader Havel pens new play
“Living in the world of political language was quite an inspiration” he said. “I try [in my play] to reflect the automatic political language, where you say one word to which other words are immediately added and the cluster [of words] then travels from one speech to another.”

I’m not a big fan of Havel the playwright or Havel the “philosopher” but he’s entitled to interesting insights just like anyone else and this is one. I don’t have much hope that he will represent it as anything else than a ‘politics is insincere’ cliche but then few people have done a better job. What he reflects on seems to be a genuine phenomenon that is not limited to politics. Something similar is behind popular terms such as ‘word of mouth’, ‘viral advertising’, ‘peer pressure’, etc. One of the early descriptions of how certain patterns of speech spread was by Labov but he only focused on the social aspects of it. However, there seem to be a cognitive and textual dimension here, as well. Here are some questions to ask:

Q: What determines the ‘viral’ spread of some words over another?  Tentative answer: Some words are more amenable to auspicious blending, presenting the right balance balance of resonance with other cultural patterns and underdetermination to make them blend with a wide variety of other cultural frames.
Q: Is the spread of cultural references automatic, unconscious or purposeful? Tentative answer:  Most of language is of necessity unconscious and automatic (how exactly is matter of less debate than it perhaps should be). There are even several folk theories about the power of language to influence thought and action that are often invoked (e.g. political correctness). However, much of linguistics/discursive/social consensus is negotiated in one way or another. Some of these ways of negotiation are possibly more entrenched (less volitional) than others but neglecting this aspect, I’m convinced, is to neglect something essential about language in all its dimensions.

The Newshoggers: Jeri Thompson - asset or albatross? [Part Two]
However, thanks to a commenter at my place, I see by common definition “trophy wife” is indeed considered to be an insult.

All I can say is that I didn’t mean it as such. I define the term to simply mean a marriage where the wife is 20 years or more younger than the husband, with no other implications, no matter what circumstances led to the pairing. To the extent that I insulted the women in these marriages, I apologize, but frankly I think it’s silly not to take it as a compliment and rather dishonest not to admit it’s true. No matter what led to the marriage, or how well suited you are despite your age difference, or how happily married, a young wife is still a prize catch for an older man; one that he is rightly proud of and when you walk into a room together, you are a visual symbol of his success. I would take that as a compliment myself, but that’s just me.

This is an example of a very common phenomenon that, to my knowledge, has received no attention from linguists and cognitive scientists. Viz. persistent (long-term) personal misunderstanding of a word or phrase that has a particular codified restrictions set on integration or is  completely entrenched. The ‘trophy’ in ‘trophy wife’ can be interpreted with respect to the husband (she’s his trophy) or the wife (she’s a valuable trophy). The former is the entrenched integration (and a collocate with a specific semantic prosody) but here’s at least one prominent, literate (and female) person who has persistently interpreted the phrase using the latter integration (if we choose to believe the self-report, which I don’t see a problem with doing). Now, everyone I’ve talked to about it, has had the experience of a phrase or word that they have found out years later meant something other than what they’d thought. Very often, this is in funny contexts (something misheard as a child) but there are many more unspectacular instances of the same thing. What is interesting, is that if we assume (as I do following Langacker, Croft, Lakoff and others), that lexical items and phrases are constructions of essentially the same sort as what is traditionally known as syntactical rules (and morphonological rules, as well), then we would expect the same level of misunderstanding of general schematic constructions such as subject-verb agreement or object marking. Yet, these examples are rarely if ever reported. Do they not exist? The answer is that we simply do not know but I suspect that they do occur. They are unlikely to happen to constructions as generalized and commonly used as object marking but they certainly happen on the periphery of the system. For example, very few speakers distinguish between “*He came with Jane and I.” from He’s taller than Jane and I.” as instances of different generalized complement constructions. I would also imagine that most English speakers do not properly interpret the subjunctive in “She recommends that he do it.” This would be more pronounced in highly inflected languages (such as Slavonic languages) where object marking or subject-verb agreement are typically marked beyond doubt but it does happen when it is associated with certain lexical items. Clearly, more (or rather, at least, some) research is need.

Malfunctioning fax machine prints out bomb ClipArt, forces evacuation of area - Engadget

In any normal town across America there are countless faxes sent and received which feature poorly chosen ClipArt: why then must a promotional fax like the one pictured above fail to print out correctly — leaving only a picture of a bomb — in the town of Ashland Massachusetts, not far from the recent high profile Boston bomb scares? This innocent fax caused the evacuation of a dozen nearby businesses after it was received at a Bank of America branch, coinciding with what police said was the delivery of a suspicious package by a customer. The package turned out to merely be “papers,” and the fax turned out to be a promotion counting down to an explosion event called “Small Business Commitment Week.” Maybe next time the company behind the fax will be a little more wary of the consequences of inappropriately using bomb imagery, and the staff that received the fax will stop to consider whether a potential bomber would use an off-center and badly stretched ClipArt image of a bomb to illustrate their intent.

One of the properties of conceptual blending is that it is opportunistic and individual. So, for instance, the author of a flyer with a bomb has no control over the circumstances which might override all the constrains on integrating the image with an actual real-world explosion rather than (idiomatically) an event that is ‘the bomb’. This is a good example of how blending on the edges of codification and entrenchment requires negotiation (such as calling the originator of the fax or calling the troops). Of course, there are some contexts in which no amount of negotiation may be sufficient - resulting in practical taboos such as restrictions on mentioning bombs at airports (no matter how jokingly). Once a bomb is mentioned at an airport check-in, there is almost no way of successfully suppressing all the possibilities of blending with a real threat at least in the minds of some passengers.

Hitchens vs Hitchens | the Daily Mail
If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return.

But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop us, unobserved, doing and planning acts of selfish unkindness against others, as so many of us do – for example – in office politics?

What is to stop us, in the privacy of the home, taking advantage of the goodness of others more generous than ourselves? Who will ever know?

Who would have thunk it that the person to get closest to this whole New Atheism would be the right-winger Peter Hitchens of all people, writing in the Hitler-supporting Daily Mail of all rags. He skirts the issue of ‘Atheism is just another kind of faith’ rather artfully, perhaps thanks to the privileged access he has to the other Hitchens’ background, but he gets it right about the constant debate what is a greater source of ‘evil’ faith in God or no God. (It, of course, is ‘faith’ in general. It is rather hard to commit evil without faith in one absolute or another, the occasional psychopath notwithstanding. One of the more deadly absolutes seems to be the faith in the sanctity of human life, probably because of the definitional indeterminacy of both ‘human’ and ‘life’ (and ’sanctity’ too when it comes to it).

But P. Hitchens even hints at the much more interesting source of faith and religious action, viz social cohesion (more but not that much more than peer pressure). All religion has a social dimension, and, as Milgram has shown so incisively (also see Bauman on the holocaust), it is with reference to social authority that unpleasant acts find their most inventive representations.

Not to be too nice about Hitchens, he does resort to the annoying kind of middle-class agnosticism that declares uncertainty about the less palatable sections of the scripture while spouting the sickeningly sweet belief in something greater and better out there.

For all I know, Christopher is absolutely right – my prayers are pointless and a meaningless oblivion awaits. But if he is right, what a dispiriting, lowering truth it is.

This kind of polite agnosticism is no good to anyone. Personally, I am a complete atheist with respect to any possible God so far or yet to be conceived by the religious mind. There is no faith or reason involved in this, the possibility of faith in the flying spaghetti monster simply displaces the possibility of any seriously revered deity (the only good argument Dawkins and his buddies bandy about). I am, however, agnostic when it comes to science. I am pretty sure that 2+2 is indeed 4, but I wouldn’t stake anyone to the cross over saying that it is really 6. The mathematical regularities (’laws’) of the universe are too neat for my taste and I know too much about the processes of scientific discovery to sacrifice at its altar. I am even more agnostic about what I see with my own four eyes or conceive of with my brain. If somebody wants to find a circularly defined God(dess) in this space of doubt, be my guest.

And finally, my world coming slowly to the upside up state I prefer it in, Hithens cannot help but descend into the nasty Daily Mailism that makes me instinctively recoil from the gentle elderly couples I see sharing pages of this rag on trains hurtling through this sceptered countryside.

They [inner city thugs, termed practical atheists] would never behave like that, surrounded as they are by the invisible web of ten centuries of Christian law and morality, which still protects the nicer parts of our country.But it is the application of what they preach, the worship of self and power.

Faith and belief can be and often are restraints on this arrogance of power. They offer the possibility of justice where human society fails to provide it – as it almost always does fail.

It is almost as if he hadn’t read himself. Faith is no good as a restraint of action (didn’t he say the same thing only a few paragraphs before). With respect to evil, the only safe inner conviction I know of is utter moral relativism. Proper moral relativists have no time for evil on a grand scale because they are too busy working out all the variables of difference. It is when they glimpse shimmering fata morganas of certainty that the world is in real danger. (As to the interesting small evil of petty self-interest, moral relativists are probably no better than anyone).

What he speaks of nicer parts of this country he is referring to the savagery of conformity that places everyone in their place (foreigners with tans preferably on the outside of it) defined by the social propaganda of fiction found in Wodehouse, Dad’s Army and other faded reminders of post-Edwardian aesthetic.

If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power, whether it is Kim Jong Il, Leon Trotsky or the military might of George W. Bush. In which case, God help you.

This ‘faith-vacuum’ cliché is a fitting conclusion to this journey of near self-discovery Hitchens undertakes.  It is not, on its own, an uninteresting hypothesis. Is there something in the human make up that requires certain mental, bodily and social configurations typically described as faith? If so, what do they look like, what is there purpose and are some faiths better than others in fulfilling that purpose? But even if we postulate some sort of ‘faith universal’, it is still not a good argument for the existence of God. It is merely an instance of Voltairian hypocrisy: “I don’t need to believe in God but I like it that my servants do lest they steal from me.” A world built on this premise may lend itself better to idyllic depiction but seems of no deeper virtue than the “pre-medieval savagery” dispensed in the “harsher parts of our great cities” by the “strong, violent people” whose darker complexion and difference is so instinctively afeared by many of Hitchens’ readers (if not by himself).

The problem, to repeat myself, is the reliance on virtue, goodness, and life as transcendent absolutes (of God or upbringing) rather than a considered choice. It may not result in much real-world difference and possibly in no difference at all but I would prefer that those who matter make a conscious decision to consider others less human as a matter of practical expedience rather than spend time justifying that denying someone’s humanity (in the sense of equal rights to those one expects of herself; in the same sense that armies justify killing) as part of an absolute truth. If for no other reasons than that the parameters of expedience are more easily changed than faiths on which individuals and nations have staked their sense of self-worth.