I am responding to a post by Alan Rudy, sent under the subject line, "second bill of rights" on Mon, Oct. 5:
Alan wrote: Carrol, progressives only believe in the certainty of progress if everyone follows their expert lead... think Paul Ehrlich. I think liberals don't believe, they hope. In both cases, however, their is the politics of apocalypse. Follow us or its all going to hell...
My response. (The whole of Alan's post is of great interest, but I focus here on just this passage.)
Yes. But notice such an either/or _doees_ claim the existence of a clear path to a desirable future, and it is assumed that only human error and/or human obduracy in evil can swerve us from the known path. And notice that the response to me, as I predicted, would show a fundamental inability to grasp Contingency: the alternative to Certain Progress is Certain Regress. Utter incomprehension of the fact that We Do Not Know the Future. We cannot reliabley predict even the rough outlines of the future. Trivial example: When I asked the opothamologist at the Low Vixion center at the University of Iowa whether he could estimate the rate at which my macular degeneration would worsen he replied, quite correctly, that that would be pure crystal-ball gazing. It can't be done. And in the area in which Doug really is an expert, financial markets, he quite consistently refuses to predict the future and mocks those who do. Yet stock markets are simplicity itself in comparison to human political and social history. And there he proposes that the course the left should follow is running candidates in local elections to build up slowly over a lengthy period of time! He is willing to predict that local candidates elected this year will still be in office 10 years from now when more local candidates elsewhere have been elected, and that none of these local "left" politicians will have changed their minds over the next several decades. What can one call that but bizarre. (He does not explicitly make these claims, but if they are false his strategy is empty.)
It is that abyss of non-knowledge that terrifies the Liberal/Progressive in the dark hours of the night and requires a soporific to gain the bliss of knowldegeable sleep. "Whatever." The juvenile dismissing of what he/she cannot understand.
Since Doug has seen a focus on contingency as "fatalism" we can clarify these questions with a digression through ancient Greece, aided by Ezra Pound's translation of the Women of Trachis - a translation made just as he was well into what was supposed to be the grand conclusion of the Cantos, an Earthly Paradise. At the end of that poem, however, among the fragments of the uncompleted final Cantos, is the line, "I cannot make it cohere," followed a page or two later by, "It coheres, alright / But I cannot make it cohere." (Quoted from memory.) Turning to the Women of Trachis, one early reviewer (I don't remember who), noted that Pound's translation grasped very well _one_ aspect of Sophocles' play, while failing to grasp certain other aspects. (This is a common complaint of _all_ translation from the ancient Greek; perhaps all translation.) Anyhow, the aspect Pound did capture also captures the radical _rejection_ of contingency by various forms of "fatalism." (There is no decent modern English word to capture what is meant by "fate" in cultures for which that concept was important.)
The Women of Trachis recounts the death of Herakles, killed by a poisoned shirt given to him by his wife under the impression that the ointment on it, given her by a dying Centaur, was a love potion. In his final agonies Herakles wishes only to get his hand on his wife to tear her limb from limb until his son explains hwo she was tricked. Then he notes that his father's oracle had foretold that no living man would kill him, and that has come about: it is a dead centaur who ills him. Also an oracle had foretold that after this last labor, from which he was returning, he would find rest. That too is true, since there is no labor among the dead. And in Pound's ALL CAPS, he proclaims:
Come at it that way, my boy,
WHAT SPLENDORUR
IT ALL COHERES (From memory - can't locate the book just now)
_Moira_ (portion, share, destiny, "fate") was central to the Greek consciusness just because they hated above all that the world should not be intelligible, make sense. (That it was painful they knew and could accept; but that it was senseless was too much.) The concept of "fate," then, was grasped as giving meaning, coherence, intelligibility to the world, a shield against the horror of contingency. In the last three centruies, in which the world (or, to beging with, a few spots in the West) were plunged into the hrrible chaos & meaningless ness of capitalism, PROGRESS has come to serve the same purpose that Moira had served for the Greeks. It gives meaning to actions otherwise meaningless.
Progress (or Progress/Regress) then serve the same purpose for modern liberals as Fate (Moira) served for the ancient Greeks. It is a concept (held blindly in each instance) that gives order to the chaos of human experience and fends off the horror of contingency.
There is, of course, no more cetainty of regress than of progress. To an extent, the future is open. What a focus on contingency tells us is simply that we cannot project the present into the future; that was the error of Beernstein against which Luxemburge polemicized: that movement constrained by present possibility leads anywhere. It does not.
I don't know. Perhaps Doug really cannot grasp intellectually the concept of contingency, and can only see it as a polar opposite of "Progress," and thereby identifies contingency as just another name for Regress. It is sad not to understand opposing views; it leads to really naïve statements, such as a recent one by Doug:
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On Oct 9, 2009, at 10:54 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> My guess is that computers in trucks are
part of the deskilling of
> that
> occupation.
Which fits in with the Model of Regress, right?
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No. It would fit the "model" of Progress as well as Regress. (And I don't understand the use of the term "model" herre.) In fact, I thought that almost all Marxists, of all varieties, took it for granted that there was and always had been a consistent drive by capitalists to deskill labor. I wonder if Doug believes if Huberman operated according to a "Model of Regress." As I said, it is sad when someone simply cannot understand an opposing view. It sort of destroys any attempt to identify and debate what the differences are.
Carrol