CONCLUSION OF MY MEDITATION

What can I know?  What must I do?  What may I hope?

I can know that my particular life cycle falls in a period during which the United States has become the sole imperial power in the world.  I was born at a time when that was not so, and I have lived through both the decline of the British empire, and the rise and fall of the Russian empire.  I don't like the fact that the United States is currently the dominant world hegemon;  indeed, I would much prefer that there be no nation with that sort of monopoly of military power.  But it is a fact, and pretty clearly when I will die it will still be a fact.  I also know that I live during a time when international financial capitalism flourishes and is unchallenged by any alternative, another fact I regret but that I know will still be so when I die.

I know that income inequality and social stratification have characterized the United States during my entire life, and that by all measures that inequality has increased rapidly in the last quarter century.  But I also know that this increase in inequality, which I view with great disapproval, is in part the result of deliberate governmental policies that it is at least possible to reverse.

I know that during my lifetime a number of legal and social barriers to equality have been successfully contested and to a considerable extent removed -- barriers against people of color, against women, against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons.  I know that the removal of these barriers was the result of deliberate and forceful struggle, sometimes violent, sometimes  non-violent.  And I know that these social and legal changes are still resisted by large segments of the American public who would, if they could, re-impose the disadvantages and oppressions that struggle eliminated.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I know that major change, whether economic or social, results from the organization of countless millions, not from the intentions, however admirable, of the few.  I know that merely electing public officials who share one's goals or principles is never enough, by itself, to effect salutary change.  Electing those officials is the necessary, not the sufficient condition of desired change. I know that during my lifetime, the most effective instrument of collective action -- the labor union -- has been suppressed, eviscerated, and disempowered, and I know that this too is the result of deliberate governmental policies that it is at least possible to reverse.

All of these things I know, and they narrowly circumscribe the possibilities that offer themselves at this moment in my one and only life cycle. 

What, then, must I do?  First, I must choose, in the words of the old union song, which side I am on.  [Which side are you on?, by Florence Reece, 1931, written during the Harlan County coal miners' strike.]  There is no argument that can establish with objective validity the correctness of such a choice, Immanuel Kant and John Rawls to the contrary notwithstanding.  I must decide who my comrades are as I live out the cycle of my life, from boyhood to old age.  I have made that choice.  I have chosen as my comrades the exploited, the oppressed, the down-trodden, those who labor but are not fairly compensated, those whose work creates and recreates the fabric of our society.  As the Occupy Wall Street Movement would have it, I chosen as my comrades the 99%, not the 1%, although that hyperbole overestimates considerably the numbers of my comrades in the United States.

Having made that choice, I must, it seems to me, do two things that may seem incompatible with one another but in fact are inseparable parts of the same struggle.  First, I must throw my support behind the national political party farthest to the left that has a realistic chance of winning national elections, which of course means the Democratic Party.  That it has become a centrist party with little of the working class bias and reformist thrust of earlier years is deeply regrettable but a fact that must be faced.  The failure of Obama supporters to turn out in sufficient numbers of hold control of the House in 2010 unleashed an assault on women's reproductive rights, indeed on women's sexuality, that was simply appalling.  A Romney victory, which fortunately will not occur, would result in further devastation to the economic and social needs and aspirations of those with whom I have chosen to make common cause.

But an Obama victory simply creates the possibility of the real work that must be done -- a ground level effort, by millions upon millions of men and women, to strengthen labor unions, recapture state governments, and organize to support any efforts that have even the slightest chance of success to rein in the imperial ambitions of America and the depredations of financial and corporate capital.

What may I [reasonably] hope?  Not that I will live to see the socialism for which my grandfather fought.  That will not happen in what is left of my life, and very probably will not happen in the lifetimes of my sons, although I may at least go to the grave hoping that my grandchildren will see that day, and will themselves fight to bring it about.  Nor may I reasonably hope to see the end of imperialism in the world, for it is virtually certain that when American imperialism passes from the world scene, as it will, another nation will step forward to take its place as hegemon, one no more likely to place the well-being of the billions of men and women over its own desire for world control.

This is where I see the world and myself in relation to it, as the years of my eighth decade wind down.  I do not think I can say, with Wordsworth, that to be alive in the dawn of my life was bliss, nor that to be young was very heaven.  I came upon the scene as the hopes of my grandfather were being dashed, and there have been more disappointments than moments of triumph along the way.  But there have been many, many life cycles that offered less hope and more disappointment, and I imagine that after I pass, there will be many more.

GUEST POST

Professor Charles Pigden sent me the following long email reaction to the first half of my Meditation post.  While I write the second half of that Meditation, I trhought I would post his message.  Note that some software gremlin changes his apostrophes to question marks.

Dear Professor Wolff,

A few months ago Brian Leiter started a thread on ?What would your biggest regret be if this were the last day of your life?? Unlike some others I took the question seriously, hoping to start a political discussion. I?m reposting it here because it?s kind of a propos.

Regrets, I?ve had a few but then again, not too few to mention ?

1) For fourteen years (1989-2003) I devoted a great deal of my time and energy to political activism, combatting the rise of the New Right in New Zealand, my adopted country. We achieved some successes, but it was a great deal of work for some very Pyrrhic victories. I did not neglect my students and I worked, at least, a forty-hour week at my official job. But it is difficult to be a high-achieving research philosopher if you only work the traditional forty hours. So during those years of political activism, my research career slowed, if not to a crawl, then to a very sedate walk. Between 1996 and 2006 I published no journal articles whatsoever (though I did publish an annotated collection of Bertrand Russell?s writings on ethics plus a couple of book chapters on the same theme). Since 2003 when I effectively resigned from my party (which had imploded because our leader preferred power to principle) I have published 50% more papers than I did in the preceding nineteen years. The result of all those years of activism is that I find myself in my middle fifties scrambling to do all the things that I have always wanted to do in philosophy before I run out of time, talent and energy. (So in a way, I DO regret the time I did not spend at the office.) I am also (though this doesn?t matter to me so much) a lot less rich than I might otherwise have been, since a lower research output led to slower promotion. I regret all the time that I devoted to politics at the expense of philosophy - or, at least, I regret the situation that made it seem necessary.

2) I regret that, along with the rest of my generation on the broad Left, I have done such a dismal job of defending the institutions of the social democratic state which handed us so many golden opportunities on a platter. New Zealand, the US, the UK and (I think) Australia are less equal now than they were thirty or forty years ago, with less equality of opportunity and less social mobility. Of course, the New Right is principally to blame, and some of us fought against it, but its stunning success in making the world a worse place must have something to do with our stupidity, cowardice, inaction and incompetence and the relentless way in which we have persistently barked up the wrong trees. We have failed not only as citizens and activists but also as thinkers, since we have not managed to articulate an intellectually effective opposition to the New Right?s ideas (one that resonates with the wider public). This is not the world that our mothers and fathers fought to create when they defeated fascism and voted for social democracy. And the fact that it isn?t, is at least partly our fault.

?3) I regret that in so far I have been politically active, I have devoted most of my political energies to what is really a side-show. By far the most important issue facing the world today is not the rise of the New Right per se but the threat of Global Warming. (Of course, the rise of the New Right has contributed to Global Warming and has helped to stifle attempts to do something about it, so there is some connection.) Global Warming is likely to bring about the deaths of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people over the next century, partly because of desertification and partly because of the drowning of populous and productive deltas. It might even lead to the collapse our civilization. And all I have ever done about this is write a few articles in the local paper and make a Quixotic gesture at the 2008 meeting of the AAP. It?s not enough, and if I believed in God I would dread his judgment at my combination of complicity and inaction.

As you can see my regrets don?t form a consistent set. I regret BOTH doing certain things and NOT doing them more (or more effectively). You might say that I don?t really regret my period as an activist but the political situation which I felt called upon to deal with. And perhaps you would be right (though I have certainly been a lot happier at the personal level since I gave up on my party). But it?s the second two regrets that are really important. For if you are roughly my age and of roughly my political persuasion, and if you DON?T, to some extent, share in my second two regrets, then the chances are that you are deceiving to yourself somewhere along the line. As a generation of intellectuals, we haven't done a great job. We have a great deal to be sorry for.

T-T-Talkin? ?bout my g-g-generation. Hard to do it without some shame.

MEDITATION

I apologize for my relative absence from this blog in recent weeks.  Part of the reason is the demands of my new Bennett College job, which grow heavier with every passing day.  When I began working at Bennett, I repeated, as a mantra, that it was the hardest thing I had ever attempted.  Little did I know how true that would turn out to be.  But a second reason has been the evolution of the presidential race.  In the past month or so, the prospects for the Republicans have grown bleaker and bleaker, leading Obama partisans like myself to indulge in giddy rehearsals of the mistakes made by the Romney camp and endless checking of the steady growth in the polls of the Obama lead.  Yesterday I officially marked the all but certain outcome of the race by going to A Southern Season, the ultimate yuppie food and kitchen store in Chapel Hill, to buy an extremely pricey bottle of Chateau Neuf du Pape [sixty-eight dollars, for heaven's sake!], which I plan to drink on election night as I sit in front of the TV set and watch the results roll in.  As I remarked a few days ago, the pleasures of schadenfreudeare much underrated.

Now that an Obama victory is all but certain, and even the fate of the struggle for the Senate seems to have been pretty much settled [the House is quite another matter], I think it would be seemly for me to stop reveling in the misfortunes of the Republicans and start thinking seriously about what we are going to do on November 7th.  A lengthy interview with Norman Finkelstein, the link to which is provided in the previous post, crystallized this thought in my mind.  Herewith then is not a plan or a set of marching orders, but rather a meditation, some reflections on where we will find ourselves after the defeat of the Republican ticket.  I take as the themes of my meditation two passages.  The first is a famous pair of lines from a Wordsworth poem referring to the French Revolution:

  "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

          But to be young was very heaven!--

The second is a line from Erik Erikson's great book, Childhood and Society which I used as one of the epigraphs of my Autobiography: 

"An individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history."

Each of us lives for no more than a few moments, and then we are gone.  Even if I restrict myself to recorded human history, and set aside as unfathomable the scale of geological time, my life is no more than the briefest flicker in the ten millennia since the Neolithic revolution.  It is just fortune, good or bad, whether I happen to be alive during a time of great social progress, or am condemned to live out my life in one of the many stretches of historical time during which nothing uplifting or liberating happens.  Something like that, I imagine, is what Wordsworth had in mind.  Think how exciting it would have been to live during the outbreak of the French Revolution, when centuries of encrusted privilege and repression seemed to be crumbling before one's eyes and the head of Europe's most powerful monarch fell into a basket.

During the nearly eight decades of my life, there have been two moments of great hope -- moments when it was possible to believe that great, positive advances were taking place in America.  The first, which I am not quite old enough fully to have appreciated, was Roosevelt's New Deal.  The second, during which I had the great good fortune to be all grown up, was the period usually referred to as "the Sixties," during which a great Civil Rights Movement transformed the lives of Black Americans and irreversible social progress seemed all but inevitable.

The iconic moment for me was a lazy Fall afternoon, October 10, 1973, when I sat in the lovely third floor study of my home in Northampton, Massachusetts, watching on a tiny TV set as the Mets won the fifth game of the playoffs to take the National League pennant, the telecast being interrupted by spot announcements of the resignation of Vice-President Spiro Agnew. Spiro Agnew's resignation would be followed a year later by the resignation of President Richard Nixon.  "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive..."

But it was my portion, dictated by the accident of when I was born, to live long enough to see the frustration and defeat of those millenarian hopes and dreams.  The Sixties were followed by the nightmare of Reagan, of first one Bush and then another, of wars, assaults on the rights of women, the dramatic expansion of America's imperial pretensions, the victories of rightwing orthodoxy, the attack on science and the plain facts of nature and society, and the complete disappearance form American life of even a memory of the dreams of socialism.

I supported Barack Obama enthusiastically because I believed he was the best this terrible time had to offer, and that belief has been confirmed by the appalling lurch to the right of the Republican Party in response to his 2008 electoral victory.  I welcome with deep relief the prospect of his re-election because I think his defeat would be a disaster for this country and the world.

But I never indulged in the illusion that Obama was a progressive liberal, let alone a socialist, and I do not suffer that illusion now.  My life, as Erikson so wisely notes, is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history, and for better or worse, it is in this segment of history that my personal life cycle will come to its natural end.

So, echoing Immanuel Kant, I must ask, situated as I am in this moment, and confronted as I am with this world, What can I know?, What must I do?, What may I hope?

Tomorrow, I shall continue this meditation and address these three questions.

GOOD READ

Jerry Fresia sent me this link, and I read the interview.  It is extremely interesting and well worth your time.  I recommend it:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/28/an-interview-with-norman-finkelstein-2/

REALLY INSIDE BASEBALL

Just about everyone, including me, has had something to say about Mitt Romney's "47%" statement to a bunch of fatcat donors, but there is one tiny point that struck me especially hard, and has not been commented on at all.  To get the full flavor of this, it is not enough to read the transcript of the remarks, devastating though they are.  One must actually listen to the intonation of Romney's voice at each point in the recording.

A "tell" is what serious poker players call that unconscious and revelatory bit of behavior that can be used to tell whether a bettor is bluffing -- see John Malkovich and Matt Damon in the great all night poker game in Rounders [Malkovich's tell is that he separates the two halves of an Oreo cookie and licks the filling off one of them.  Malkovich, always a treat, is spectacular as Teddy KGB.]  More broadly, a tell is any bit of behavior that gives us a window into someone's true beliefs or point of view.

The moment of revelation for me comes during the passage in which Romney says "All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon the government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it."

You cannot tell this from the transcript, but as Romney says "who believe that they are entitled to healthcare ..." his voice rises sharply on the word "entitled."  There is incredulity in his voice, a sense of personal affront.  The tone of his voice clearly communicates something like this:  "Can you believe it?  They have the colossal nerve to think that they are entitled to food, or healthcare, etc."  This is the voice of a noble whose robe has just been brushed by the dirty foot of a commoner.  It is the voice of an aristocrat in whose presence a serf has not tugged his forelock or doffed his cap.  It is not anger, exactly.  Rather it is an expression of disbelief that one of the lower orders could so completely violate the natural order of things as to presume to think that he has any entitlement at all to anything.

Google the remarks and listen to them again, and you will, I think, hear what I mean.

DE MORTUIS

John Silber has died at the age of eighty-six, thus confirming Billy Joel's view ["Only the good die young."]  Silber was trained as a philosopher, and early in his career he wrote several decent articles about Kant's ethical theory, one of which I anthologized in my 1967 book Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays.  It is hard to imagine a person in whom the philosophical temperament was less manifest.  Indeed, it was Silber who is responsible for the only time in my entire life that I voted for a Republican.  He managed somehow to get the Democratic Party nomination in 1990 for the office of Governor of Massachusetts, and after much anguish, I decided -- correctly, I think, in retrospect -- that the Republican, William Weld was by far the less objectionable of the two.

There are many things to reproach Silber for, his homophobia among others, but it was in his twenty-five year long presidency of Boston University that he fully revealed himself as completely devoid of any comprehension of, or respect for, the guiding principles of Academe.  He bullied the faculty, did everything in his power to destroy the faculty union, drove good people on the faculty to leave, and comported himself as a pint-sized dictator.  [He also blocked my appointment to a professorship in the B. U. Philosophy Department, through his cat's paw, Jon Westling, but since in the end my failure to join the B. U. faculty worked out well, I do not hold that against him.]

Those of us in the Philosophy game like to believe that a serious engagement with our field of study will have the effect of leading us to wisdom as well as tenure, and though professional philosophers [an oxymoron if ever there was one] are not generally wiser or more possessed of the virtue of gravitas than those in other fields of academic work, they are generally a pretty humane lot.  If one were to draw a curve plotting philosophical knowledge against common human decency, that tiny blip at the far end of the curve, completely removed from the general locus of points, would be John Silber.

I cannot imagine that anyone will mourn his loss.

HOUSE EFFECT

Nate Silver, the statistics guru who now writes for the NY TIMES, is well aware of the fact that a sizable share of his readership consists of freaked out junkies like myself who crave not merely daily but hourly analyses of the upcoming presidential election.  Since he rigorously confines himself to an analysis of polling data, eschewing speculation or political commentary, he is on some days hard put to come up with something new to satisfy our cravings.  Today, for example, having nothing much in  the way of new data to crunch, he devoted an entire column to analyzing the extremely outré circumstances under which the entire election could turn on the results in the Congressional District that includes Omaha, Nebraska.  Nebraska is one of only two states [the other is Maine] that award electoral votes by Congressional District, and in 2008, in that overwhelmingly Republican state, Obama actually snatched a single electoral vote from the sea of red by carrying that district by a single percentage point.  The odds of the election turning on that electoral vote, by the way, are apparently a thousand to one, but the Nebraska Republicans, stung by the insult to their purity, have rearranged the district so that it is unlikely to occur again.

Another wonkish topic Silver spent some time discussing is the tendency of some polling firms systematically to tilt more toward one side or the other than the other firms that are doing polling.  Rasmussen, for example, can be relied upon to tilt Republican.  This tendency is called by statistics nerds "the house effect" [for reasons a quick Google search failed to disclose.]  It is not that any firms actually cook their data.  Rather, the technique they use for forming their sample or making their contacts has built in biases one way or the other.

For example, pollsters regularly distinguish between the universe of Registered Voters [RVs] and the universe of Likely Voters [LVs].  A poll of RVs will tilt more to the Democrats than a poll of LVs, because the sub-populations strongest in their support for the Democrats [Hispanics, young people] are also less likely to turn out and vote than the sub-populations favoring the Republicans [rich people, old people, white people].  Silver has no patience with those who average polls of RVs with polls of LVs.  There is also a good deal of disagreement among pollsters as to how one identifies LVs.

There are other sources of bias, or a House Effect.  Rasmussen leans Republican in part because it calls people only on landlines.  But young people, who tend to favor Obama, are more likely to be reachable only on cell phones.

Since I obsess a good deal about these matters, I got to thinking last night at one a.m. about other examples of House Effects.  One that occurred to me concerns my life-long tendency to daydream.  As readers of my Memoir will know, I spend a goodly part of my waking hours in my head, daydreaming.  Sometimes I daydream about having magical powers, with which I correct much that is wrong in the world.  I also do my share of daydreaming about sexual conquests, of course.  And a not inconsiderable portion of my daydreaming is actually a form of work, in which I give extended lectures to imaginary audiences as a way of thinking through  a theoretical problem.  On occasion, I write imaginary reviews of books I have published.

I have noticed that my daydreams exhibit a significant House Effect.  They tend to biased in my direction.  There are limits, of course.  I do not write reviews of my books that begin, "Not since Immanuel Kant burst upon the scene has an author so stunned the philosophical world ...", but the reviews do tend to be somewhat more enthusiastic about the arguments of which I am singularly proud, and unusually forgiving of such shortcomings as I am willing to acknowledge.

You might think that such self-regarding daydreaming would, from the standpoint of a utilitarian calculation, be a net minus, since the momentary pleasure from the imagined review would be more than compensated for by the eventual pain of realizing that it was only a daydream.   But like Walter Mitty, I am undeterred by such hard-eyed calculations.  I have long since become inured to the disappointments of reality, while remaining enraptured by the enticements of fantasy.

There is one odd counter-example, however,  As I am now only fifteenth months from my eightieth birthday, I have begun musing on the possibility of throwing myself a big party on December 27, 2013.  I thought maybe I would hold it in Paris [which would have the effect of keeping the attendance within manageable limits].  I would invite everyone:  family, friends, former students, colleagues, everyone who reads this blog.  We would take over an entire restaurant in Paris and spend the evening celebrating -- me.  But somehow, the prospect does not enchant.

I think the problem is like that attendant upon the fantasy of being present at your own funeral.  You can count on the speeches at the funeral being encomia -- de mortuis nil nisi bonumand all that -- but the problem is that you would be dead.   An eightieth birthday bash carries with it the suggestion that you are pretty well finished and are just putting a cap on it.

I guess I will wait until I am ninety.