Force & Truth (was Re: litcritter bashing...)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Nov 2 07:21:47 PST 1999



>I mystified by some of the arguments carried on in the name of
>Marxism. What patience would Old Whiskers have had for arguments
>about choosing between moral rights and wrongs? Didn't he say
>somewhere of the class struggle that between two such enemies there
>is no right & wrong, that only force prevails?
>
>Doug

Doug, the opposition between 'right' and 'wrong' is not the same as that of 'true' and 'false,' and what is at stake is the latter here. (I only introduced the question of morality because once you dispense with the true/false distinction, you tend to go by customs, common sense, received moral ideas, aesthetic preferences, etc., lacking in the standard of critical judgment -- the fact that ancient & modern sceptics -- with the exception of postmodernists -- did not deny and in fact often argued for as a kind of virtue.)

Is your argument that, _in so far as the social world and human beings' perceptions of it are concerned_, those who have the most military might -- who also have the most means of communication -- have a much better chance of having their story commonly accepted as 'truth,' even though what comes to be widely accepted as 'common sense' is very far from the truth? If so, your argument is a truth claim in itself.

If only postmodernists were simply Machiavellians who limited their observation to the social world and human beings' relations to it, while simply disputing the relevance of moral value attribution ('right' vs. 'wrong'), without arguing that we ought to refrain from the science/ideology distinction (since in our practice we never dispense with the true/false distinction anyway), we wouldn't be having the current 'debates' here. Alas, they are not Machiavellian and are often quite moralistic -- for instance, their call to dispense with the 'regime of truth' is couched in a moralistic language -- in their rhetoric (unsupported by the premises of their philosophy).

On the question of hegemony and consent, Gramsci (who closely studied Machiavelli) is far superior to postmodernists.


>>What should compel our assent to Angela's or postmodernists' dogmatic
>>assertions supported by neither evidence nor arguments?
>
>Guns? Hey, it worked for Uncle Joe!

If postmodernists thought that 'guns,' not discourse, had been the main problem of 'Stalinism,' again, we wouldn't be having the 'debates' here. In fact, postmodernists had paid more attention to the 'violence of discourse' than the exercise of brute force.

Besides, even 'Uncle Joe' at the height of his power could only make use of, not dismiss as irrelevant, the true explanations of causal powers in science. Otherwise, how did the USSR ever industrialize?

Yoshie



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