<< Leftists
should take responsibility for making sure that we don't reinforce the
ideology of personal responsibility, _especially at present_. It really
doesn't matter what you think of responsibility in this or that individual
case, merits of various moral philosophies, etc. Responsible leftists of
anti-determinist persuasions should responsibly exercise self-restraint and
try the hardest not to air their opinions in the bourgeois public sphere at
least.
So apparently we shouldn't try to say things we think are true if they are likely to be misinterpreted. We should say things that are false but useful, at least in public. If you believe this, of course, it is counterproductive to say that you do think this and announce it as your strategy, since then anyone who knows that this is what you think will assume that you are probably lying.
The view is deeply anti-democratic--it is a left wing version, or purports to be a left wing version, of Leo Strauss's idea that there is a hidden philosophical truth (there is no God, morality is arbitrary) that is too dangerous to be set loose amongst the hoi poloi; only the enlightened elite can safely know it. They hint at it, Strauss thought, in subtle silences in their philosophical writings which are too hard fot the masses to get at, while announcing to the world that relativism, etc. are bad and there is an objective Truth.
It is also deeply arrogant in another way. It assumes that we know what is useful without discussing it. But I am a Millean about this: I think that what is useful only emerges in the vigorous debate about what's true, and in various experiments in living and acting. Or as a contemporary of Mill put it, Man must prove the truth, the reality and this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. I would say, even at the risk of being misunderstood.
Finally, the view is just dumb. There is nothing you can say that cannot be misinterpreted or, if it gains any currency at all, that the powers that be will not attempt, with some success tto press into their service.
>Your individual opinions, however subtle & interesting they may be,
should count for nothing in comparison to the effects of the ideology of
personal responsibility on the War on Crime, attacks on social programs,
etc. Unless you irresponsibly think that the right to publish your
opinions is more important than the greater good for the working class. >>
I guess I am just a bourgeois liberal, then. Or maybe I think that free debate, including airiing and developing my ideas about what is true, however erroneous, will advance the workers' cause more than any lies I might tell on the guess that it would have that effect. Lenin unfashoinably said that Marxism is omnipotent because it is true. In that case, it has nothing to fear from the truth, or attemots to find the truth.
--jks