Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > There are two assumptions absolutely fundamental to left politics, and
> > if those assumptions are false, then leftists deserve every stray
> > epithet that anyone has ever applied to them.
> >
> > The people of nation X are intelligent.
> >
> > The people of nation X are well-intentioned.
> >
> > End of argument. We go on from there.
>
> Do you mean all "people"?
>
Some day I want to explore more exactly where Ted & I agree, and where we disagree.
Here I will just note that, potentially, we might disagree on whether
"people," a cross-class or non-class term, was indeed the correct term
for me to use. I'll let it be for now though.
>
> If true, this account of rationality and irrationality has important
> implications for a "left politics." It's inconsistent with any and all
> moralistic judgments.
I agree that indeed moralistic judgments are impermissable. (I also agree in advance that empirically all of us, including me, keep falling into them. That does not mean they should not be resisted.) Whether or not my grounds would be the same as Ted's I will leave for another day. I think the conclusion itself can be defended on merely pragmatic grounds. Moralistic judgments almost always fuck up the works. :-)
(The possibility occurs to me, though I couldn't develop or defend it just now, that conspiracy theories may usually contain moralistic preconceptions.)
> It's also inconsistent with authoritarian
> practices.
Agreed in principle, but in particular instances it may be extermely difficult to specify the application of the principle.
> It conceives ideal human relations as wholly relations of
> rational persuasion and its method of resolving resistance to direct
> methods of rational persuasion is itself wholly a method of rational
> persuasion (i.e. the idea of coercing individuals into a relation of
> mutual recognition or into a psychoanalytic relation is
> self-contradictory). A certain kind of mind, however, does tend to see
> coercive intent everywhere and will be resistant to logical arguments
> of this kind. Paradoxically, this kind of mind also tends to be
> logocentric.
Whoo! I started on a post the other day, which I may at least partly complete some time in the next month or so, specifically focusing on this concept of the "rational" -- which is, I think, a highly debatable and often obscure concept.
Carrol
>
> Ted
>
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