> Like I've said a hundred times now, the political and discursive
> atmosphere created by W is fearful and repressive. If he were
> replaced, the atmosphere would improve. And it'd be somewhat easier to
> organize unions.
Perhaps a politics aimed at this kind of change can be based on optimism of a rational kind.
“One must acknowledge that we do not see a triumph for cosmopolitanism right now in the United States, which seems increasingly indifferent to cosmopolitan goals and increasingly given over to a style of politics that does not focus on recognizing the equal humanity of the alien and the other; which seems increasingly hostile, too, to the intellectuals whom Kant saw as crucial to the production of such an enlightenment. We may well conjecture that were either Kant or Cicero or Marcus Aurelius to look at America they would see much that would distress them: not just the dominance of anger and aggression, but also an indifference to the well-being of the whole world that would make them think of America as one of the cut-off limbs of the world body that Marcus was so fond of describing in scathing and mordant language.
“Nor is it only in America that cosmopolitanism seems to be in grave jeopardy. The state of things in very many parts of the world gives reason for pessimism: when, 200 years after the publication of Kant’s hopeful treatise [“Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch”], we see so many regions falling prey to ethnic and religious and racial conflict; when we find that the very values of equity, personhood, and human rights that Kant defended, and indeed the Enlightenment itself, are derided in some quarters as mere ethnocentric vestiges of Western imperialism; when, in a general way, we see so much more hatred and aggression around us than respect and love.
“And yet we may agree with Kant here as well: certain postulates of practical reason, and therefore, certain hopes for at least a local and piecemeal sort of progress – even though they are not clearly supported by what we can observe – should be adopted because they appear necessary for our continued cultivation of our humanity, our constructive engagement in political life. Concerning this hope, Kant writes:
… however uncertain I may be and may remain as to whether we can hope for anything better for mankind, this uncertainty cannot detract from the maxim I have adopted, or from the necessity of assuming for practical purposes that human progress is possible.
“This hope for better things to come, without which an earnest desire to do something useful for the common good would never have inspired the human heart, has always influenced the activities of right-thinking people.”
The hope is, of course, a hope in and for reason. When as scholars, we turn to classical antiquity in order to bring its resources to our own political world, we would do better, I believe, to appropriate and follow this Stoic/Kantian tradition of cautious rational optimism than to look to ancient Athens for a paradigm of a politics that simply directs us, as Bernard Williams puts it, to contemplate the horrors. There are always too many horrors, and it is all too easy to contemplate them. But, as Kant and his Stoic mentors knew, it also possible to stop contemplating and to act, doing something useful for the common good.” (Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism” in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (eds.) Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, pp. 50-1)
Ted