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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> (Fwd) references for technology, politics and culture
... some references (randomly chosen bookmarks, sorry!) to understading how/why various elements of the establishment control the *structures of knowledge* (and thus control the language used to "debate" politics, and limit the challenges that the wealthy {and other corrupt powerful elements such as the liberal educational and social-work bureaucracy} are subjected to in the political arena):
http://www.unifem.undp.org/
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http://www.socstark.com/map.asp?VN=3D13&File=3DGLOBAL&Map=3D1
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http://sociology.wadsworth.com/soc_global/glossary.html
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http://www.wiesenthal.com/resource/slavery.htm
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http://www.tao.ca/fire/nettime/0023.html
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http://www.cpsr.org/conferences/cfp92/liasson.html
( http://www.cpsr.org/ )
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http://www.flywheel.com/
Constructivism is best known as a critique of international relations theories which assert that rational behaviors of nation-states must necessarily conform to the exigencies of an anarchic world system. The framework can be extended to reveal similar patterns in superstitious eschatologies, statements like "The devil made me do it," and a wide range of modern materialist and historicist philosophies, notably extremist forms of Marxism and Social Darwinism.
The propensity to "blame" environmental factors as an excuse for human behavior has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, leading to a philosophy of mind that proclaims computerized telecommunication as destiny. Not only are such concepts being promoted with fanatical energy, they are being used to justify social transformations that are increasingly rapid and disruptive. The rising interest in "memes," which holds that ideas acquire people (rather than people acquiring ideas) is an important part of this distressing trend.
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So what if some people anthropomorphize the gene and the meme? What's the big deal? What harm is there in staying up all night arguing about this? What difference does it make? The short answer, I think, is that these philosophies can be used to justify new kinds of universal social obligations, and notions of "the way the world is." These are the kinds of excuses one social group tries to impose their precepts over others. I'll deal with the particular manifestations elsewhere, but I think David Shenk hit close to the mark when he said, "Cyberspace is Republican."
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http://www.meaning.org/fem/index.html
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http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/wilber.html
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http://www.scottlondon.com/insight/programs/index.html
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http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/index.html
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http://www.scottlondon.com/articles/index.html
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http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/index.html
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http://www.scottlondon.com/insight/scripts/saul.html
John Ralston Saul has been called "an erudite Toronto gadfly whose bete noire is the abuse of thought and language at the hands of arrogant elites." He is perhaps best known for his international bestseller _Voltaire's Bastards_, a wide-ranging and unwieldy jeremiad about the decline of Western civilization that appeared in 1992. The book is still at the center of a lively debate about the trouble with rationalism in contemporary Western culture. One critic went so far as to call it "a hand-grenade disguised as a book." When asked why he wrote the book, Saul has said, "I thought I would write a book which would be the sort of book you're not supposed to write: an anti-expert book which will be hated by all the ideologues and all the beneficiaries of the system." While Saul is forceful and convincing as a cultural critic, I wondered after reading the book whether he is just a fussy intellectual or, as the Utne Reader suggested, one of today's great visionaries. I had a chance to find out in person in late 1996 following an academic conference in southern California. Our conversation began with the subject of his then newly released The Doubter's Companion. ...
ARROGANT CAPITAL
Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American
Politics
By Kevin Phillips
Little, Brown and Company, 1994, 231 pages
The failure of Washington politics "goes far beyond
simplistic talk of gridlock," according to Kevin Phillips. The growing ineffectiveness of American government is part of a larger "reversal of fortune" where political and economic influence has shifted from the grassroots of America to a new "guardian class" in Washington. Since the 1940s, Phillips observes, Washington has become increasingly dominated by an interest-group elite which is now so deeply entrenched and so resistant to change that the proper functioning of government is impossible. For example, Phillips points out that the District of Columbia bar had fewer than a thousand members in 1950; today it has over 60,000. The number of journalists in Washington soared from 1,500 to 12,000 over the same period. Since 1970, congressional staff has nearly doubled. And one recent estimate put the number of lobbyists in Washington at 91,000.
The Founding Fathers warned of the dangers of an overgrown capital. Jefferson noted that when government is "drawn to Washington as the center of all power," it renders "powerless the checks provided of one government on another," and becomes "as venal as the government from which we separated." Phillips believes that the natural order of American politics and the unique genius of the system is that "bloodless revolutions at the ballot box" every generation purge the government of failed establishments and create new ones. Quoting Jefferson, he holds that "each generation has the right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness." Although it is high time for Washington to undergo one of its periodic renewals, the concentration of interest-group power and today's "Permanent Washington" make that impossible. Today, Phillips writes, our capital has become a city "so enlarged, so incestuous in its dealings, so caught up in its own privilege that it no longer seems controllable or even swayable by the general public."
Phillips draws a number of portentous historical analogies between Washington and other great capitals that have seen the rise and fall of power. He points to the degenerative corruption that pervaded such cities as Rome, Athens, Alexandria, Hapsburg Madrid and The Hague. "There is no point in mincing words," he charges, "aging great-power capitals often become parasitic cultures" and today's Washington "is beginning to resemble those wayward governmental centers of previous declining empires." He describes four "pillars" of the American political system which were "once ingredients of its youthful success" but have now become "weak foundations in old age": 1) the traditional separation between the legislative and executive branches; 2) the two-party system; 3) America's patchwork system of local governments and bureaucracies; and 4) the judicial and legal system which today "has saddled the country with a globally unique and crippling weight of judges, jurisprudence, lawyers, litigation, and rights."
In the final chapter of the book, Phillips outlines a "blueprint for a political revolution" in the form of ten proposals: 1) decentralize and disperse power away from Washington; 2) modify the Constitution's excessive separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches; 3) shift representative government more toward direct democracy and open up the outdated two-party system; 4) curb the Washington role of lobbies, interest groups, and influence peddlers; 5) diminish the excessive role of lawyers, legalism, and litigation; 6) Remobilize national, state, and local governments through updated boundaries and a new federal fiscal framework; 7) regulate speculative finance and reduce the political influence of Wall Street; 8) confront the power of multinational corporations and minimize the effects of globalization on the average American; 9) reverse the trend toward greater concentration of wealth and make the tax system fairer and more productive; and 10) bring national and international debt under control.
Books In Review
Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 93 (May 1999): 60-64.
1642 and All That
The Cousins=92 Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, and the Triumph of Anglo=96America. By Kevin Phillips. Basic. 651 pp. $32.
Reviewed by Mark A. Noll
Perceptive students of the 1996 presidential election have noticed an uncanny trend that links geography, religion, and politics. Take the nine regions into which the U.S. Census Bureau divides the country. Rank the regions according to the percentage of the people who, according to an Angus Reid poll taken right before the election, affirm major tenets of evangelical faith and rank "high" in the practice of their religion. Then rank the same regions again according to the percentage of the popular vote for Bob Dole. You find that the rankings are almost identical (the Mountain region being the only exception: high support for Dole but relatively low in evangelical practice).
While many pundits ignored such relationships, sophisticated commentators knew they deserved serious analysis. An affinity for broad patterns of political and cultural understanding has been a driving force behind Kevin Phillips=92 many books, beginning with The Emerging Republican Majority (1969). Its argument that the Republican Party would increasingly become the majority party of the South and that, on the basis of this realignment, a new conservatism would become much more important in American public life was a remarkably prescient forecast that, in fact, has described much of the nation=92s electoral history over the last three decades.
Now Phillips has published a sprawling, audacious book which suggests that broad cultural analysis should be extended back in time and out in space in order to grasp essential features of American and British society over the last four centuries. By comparison to the considerations of this book, the United States=92 recent election returns are mere epiphenomena. But, Phillips implies, those who seek intellectual purchase on these and other contemporary developments would do well to study the past.
The arguments of The Cousins=92 Wars shy away from putting the past to use for predicting the future. Rather, they are relentlessly historical in contending that the three great civil conflicts of modern Anglo=96American history exerted an enormous influence in shaping nearly every aspect of American and British life, as well as substantial elements of world history. First was the English Civil War of 1642=961649, which led to the triumph of Parliament and its Puritan allies over King Charles I and his royalist supporters. Second was the American Revolution, 1775=961783, which Phillips successfully depicts as both a dispute among Britons=97colonists vs. colonists, English vs. English, Scottish vs. Scottish, over the proper application of British law, custom, and political traditions=97and a war for American Independence. Third is the American Civil War, 1861=961865, which in Phillips=92 vision sustained patterns of antagonism and principle whose major outlines had been drawn by the earlier conflicts. Phillips devotes almost five hundred pages to explicating the connections, recurring relationships, and symmetrical effects he observes in these three wars, while the last one hundred pages explain how he thinks this sequence of conflicts influenced American, British, and world history during the last 150 years.
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(Lipset -see following- is particularly good at describing the origins and characteristics of the major ideological constellations, including libertarianism, in the USA, and why a communitarian value system such as socialism is doomed to failure in a culture who dominant protestant values are rooted in moral individualism.)
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/lipset.html
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http://www.gmu.edu/depts/tipp/faculty/lipset/lipset5.htm
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http://www.gmu.edu/depts/tipp/faculty/lipset/lipset4.htm#bmp
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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/lipset.html
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http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring00/04098.htm
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http://www.georgetown.edu/conferences/welfare-reform/papers/~lipset.html
excerpt:
---
CONCLUSION
The political divisions of modern democracy, conceptualized since the
French Revolution as between the Left and the Right,
remain. The Democrats and Republicans, the Social Democrats and
Conservatives, still provide choices on the ballot, although their
ideological bearings and internal factions are changing (Furet 1998:
79).
...
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http://www.booknotes.org/transcripts/50050.htm
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http://www.ned.org/pubs/reports/parties2.html
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en espan~ol:
http://www.usinfo.state.gov/journals/itdhr/0796/ijds/lipset.htm
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http://www.etcetera.com.mx/2000/371/gesml371.html
---end of references---
BTW, my wife, who is a Catalan ethnic and Spanish national from a mercantile family (textiles), had a grandfather that was targeted for assasination by the anarchists and collectivists during the spanish civil war, so I'm not exactly a big promoter of classic leftism. All you have to do is go into the old sections of Barcelona, and you can Received on Fri Sep 01 2000 - 20:23:07 CDT
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