On Sun, 15 Apr 2001 17:32:17 -0400 Kelley Walker
<kelley at interpactinc.com> writes:
> At 04:49 PM 4/15/01 -0400, Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
> >Now a days he of course gets away with writing the crappiest
> shlock.
> >For a critique of a shlock op-ed piece that Wolfe wrote for the New
> York
> >Times shortly after the Columbine massacre see
> >(http://world.std.com/~twc/currents.htm#On the Supposed
> Inscrutability of
> >Evil)
> >by my friend Thomas W. Clark.
> >
> >Jim F.
>
> this isn't so much to defend wolfe as to suggest that there isn't
> much of a
> critique here. i don't know what wolfe wrote but i do agree that
> sometimes
> sociology can't explain why two kids shot up a bunch of other kids.
The text of Wolfe's op-ed piece can be found on the web at: (http://sobek.colorado.edu/~glenn/media/nyt/502d.html).
> and we
> especially can't know with media warped information. _that_
> wouldn't be
> any sort of appropriate sociological analysis in the first place.
> instead,
> the best we can actually do with columbine, short of investigating
> ourself,
> is analyze the media representations of the event.
And why shouldn't it and similar episodes be subjects for sociological investigation? Undoubtedly, the analysis of media representations of the event, particularly the ways that it is constructed and reconstructed ideologically is a legitimate topic for inquiry. But for sociologists to throw their hands up and say that they can't investigate the events themselves, because it is too hard looks to me like a confession of failure on their part.
>
> in short: critique: where's the beef.
>
> as for wolfe, he may well mean by evil that there is simply a
> fundamental
> core of opacity of human action and social events that we can't get
> behind.
> it is inexplicable.
This is what Wolfe wrote at the end of his piece:
"Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people because of their perverse belief that athletes and blacks were to blame for their unhappiness. We ourselves should not try to find an explanation for all of life's mysteries. Not everything requires a sociological analysis. The evil that was Columbine was not about franchise outlets, cell phones or cliques. It was about evil. "
To me at any rate, this looks like the kind of stuff you might expect to hear from a preacher on a Sunday morning rather than from a social scientist. What is Wolfe doing but reviving the notion of original sin and presenting us with a reified notion of evil that is said to be inherently beyond the reach of a scientific or rational understanding. If that we start out with such assumptions then not too surprisingly then we are not going to arrive at a rational, scientific understanding of such events as school massacres but doing so is just throwing up roadblocks on the path of inquiry, to paraphrase C.S. Peirce.
> but there is much that we can do something
> about. if
> the pomos have much to say at all it is this: the impulse to mastery
> can
> lead to a kind of velvet-gloved despotism.
I am sorry to say that reading that kind of argument makes me feel like vomiting. What it is, is a brief against science and the rational comprehension of the world including the social world. There are a lot of things that I don't agree with Jim Heartfield on but on one thing I am in agreement with him and that the current rush by our intellectuals away from an Enlightenment confidence in reason and science is a sign of cultural degeneracy.
>there is no need for
> resignation and to suggest that Columbine is not amenable to
> sociological
> analysis is simply to acknowledge human fallibility and the limits
> of
> reason. for my money, a stance that acknowledges that is a far
> sight
> better than one that imagines that we can know all. we can't.
Unfortunately that is exactly what Wolfe seems to have been arguing. He has not only abandoned Marxism but has defected from any sort of adherence to an Enlightenment rationalism (also manifested in his recent writings on religion). Anyway I am curious about what you mean by the "limits of reason" anyway. If you mean that any scientific analysis will have its limits in terms of comprehensiveness and depth of explanation then I have no quarrel. If you mean that our attempts at posing scientific explanations for phenomena will necessarily face limitations from the inadequacies of our data sets then I have no quarrel but I get the feeling that you are asserting something rather different.
>
>
> what is clear to me, of course, is that alan wolfe is a defector and
> thus a
> traitor and so deserving of our wrath, even if that means we call
> things
> critique when, in fact, they are not.
I'd suggest that Wolfe is not merely a traitor to Marxism but more generally to Enlightenment rationalism in favor of an unarticulated mystical worldview that can easily serve a reactionary agenda.
Jim F.
>
>
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