Briefly Noted

The Postmodern Mind, China and the Western Classics, and Getting Borked

The Post Modern Mind: If you want a readable book that gives a remarkable overview of Western philosophy from the Greeks to Postmodernism, I strongly recommend Richard Tarnas’s Passion of the Western Mind. I first read it in the 90s, and in rereading it recently, I was struck by how well it has stood up and how it maps to so much of what I’ve written over the years. I couldn’t agree more with what he says here toward the end of the book about our situation now: “If the postmodern mind has sometimes been prone to a dogmatic relativism and a compulsively fragmenting skepticism, and if the cultural ethos that has accompanied it has sometimes deteriorated into cynical detachment and spiritless pastiche, it is evident that the most significant characteristics of the larger postmodern intellectual situation—its pluralism, complexity, and ambiguity—are precisely the characteristics necessary for the potential emergence of a fundamentally new form of intellectual vision, one that might both preserve and transcend the current state of extraordinary differentiation”. Yes. Everything is under suspicion, but perhaps most under suspicion is Postmodern suspiciousness itself. When held to its own standard, why should it be taken any more seriously than any other philosophy? As Tarnas says, “On its own terms, the assertion of the historical relativity and cultural-linguistic bondage of all truth and knowledge must itself be regarded as reflecting but one more local and temporal perspective having no necessarily universal, extrahistorical value. Everything could change tomorrow. Implicitly, the one postmodern absolute is critical consciousness, which, by deconstructing all, seems compelled by its own logic to do so to itself as well. This is the unstable paradox that permeates the postmodern mind. (p. 402) And so in the future, anything goes. Whoever tells the best story wins.

China and the Western Classics: I mentioned yesterday that The New Yorker came out with a piece last week Chinese interest in the Western classical tradition. It’s ironic that Chinese political elites are more interested in the Western tradition than Western educated elites. Key quote: “Even as foreign textbooks are banned and news broadcasts portray Western societies as gun-toting hellscapes, Chinese universities are hiring Greco-Roman classicists. One Beijing university recently completed a new translation of Plato. Another university established a research center, led by an Oxford professor, that puts ancient Chinese texts in conversation with other classical textual traditions, including Greek and Latin. The reason for the classics fervor varies depending on whom you ask, but most scholars agree that Chinese officials tend to see the Western classics as a complement to their politics.” Goes to what I’ve been saying off and on about my hope that societies East and West will find a a lingua franca in what is shared in their respective postAxial philosophical religious heritages. I’m no Sinologist, but I do have conversations with many of my bright Chinese students. With one exception, I can’t recall having a conversation with any of them who had any knowledge or love for their own philosophical religious heritage, much less the Western heritage. I remember remarking in class that Hegel through Marx was perhaps the most consequential global philosopher of the last two hundred years, particularly in China. One Chinese student objected. She didn’t see how Marx had any impact whatsoever on China. Oy. I’m not picking on her. She’s no different from most bright American students who also have no understanding whatsoever of the philosophical presuppostions that shape contemporary American society. They might have taken a poly sci class that talks about the John Locke’s ‘Two Treatises’ and the formation of the U.S. constitution, but they don’t know anything about the philosophical context from which it arose—except to talk about how racist and sexist it is. Is there reason to hope that will change both in China? Who knows, because anything goes. One thing Hegel and Taoism share is a dialectical understanding of history—things can flip rather quickly. As Tarnas says of our postmodern condition, “Everything could change tomorrow.”

Getting Borked: Kurt Anerderson in Evil Geniuses says, “…in the 1970s and ’80s a whole new field of law emerged out of the theories and ideas that Bork and his fellow Chicago School libertarians had been crafting. Its name is simple and deceptively generic: Law and Economics. Getting lawyers and especially judges more fluent in economic analysis is a good thing, of course. But the animating idea behind Law and Economics was political—that a main point of the law, not only of antitrust, is to maximize economic efficiency, that the law’s bottom line is the economic bottom line. So if you happen to think it’s a good idea for judicial decisions to also consider fairness or moral justice, or other values or versions of social happiness that can’t be reduced to simple metrics of efficiency, Law and Economics says you’re a fool. Like its brilliantly anodyne name, the equations and other math in Law and Economics texts give it an impartial, scientific sheen.” —but it’s all poltical b.s. Bork was also one of the founding fathers of Originalism, and if you suspected but were not sure that the Federalist Society isn’t a political arm of the Billionaires, Anderson will lay it out for you why the “evil geniuses” behind its founding were nothing else. Amy Coney Barrett might do well to read the book. I believe she rules in good faith, but her naiveté is astonishing in that she believes her own b.s. Maybe Roberts, Gorsuch, and Kavanagh do too, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s b.s.