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Against persuasion

Tuesday, November 30, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

Particularly since reading What is Talmud?, I have been thinking about the goals of conversation. As often happens with me, my initial impetus in thinking through this issue stems from annoyance: I’m always very annoyed when someone proposes abandoning a conversation because persuasion is unlikely, particularly when they cite the problem of incommensurable presuppositions. Those kinds of declarations always weirdly instrumentalize conversation, which is an activity that I enjoy for its own sake. It’s fun to talk about ideas, to come up with new ways to defend or explain ideas, to hear new criticisms — or at least it can be, when people aren’t uptight and don’t take a challenge to their statements as a personal insult. My ideal of a night out is sitting around a table with people shooting the shit, and that’s the way I approach blog conversations, at least when I’m at my best. I have no idea why it would occur to me that such a night out would be more fun or more worthwhile if only I could get someone to have the same ideas as me.

The emphasis on persuasion seems to me to err in at least two ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in nit-picking. 6 Comments »

Citation style

Wednesday, September 22, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

I was a TA in the English department in college, and most of my efforts were devoted to correcting grammar, punctuation, and citation style for freshman comp, with the professor providing the actual overall grade. After several years of this, I came to be regarded as the foremost authority on documentation styles on campus — for instance, when the department chair called my citations into question on my honors thesis, literally everyone else in the room said I couldn’t have gotten it wrong. That was a proud moment, akin to when the office manager at the chiropractor’s office where I worked after graduated told me that I was the best data entry clerk she had ever met.

That experience has produced two results:

  1. I have very firm opinions about citation styles.
  2. I realize that it’s an issue not many people pay close attention to.

I would like to discuss these points in turn. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in nit-picking. 12 Comments »

Justifiable Inequality

Thursday, January 28, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

In a co-authored Comment Is Free piece, Phillip Blond and John Milbank aver that we need the right kind of inequality. We can reportedly achieve this by carrying out a synthesis of traditional Tory and Leftist ideals, which would allow us to distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable inequality. The unjustifiable kind is based in race prejudice or in the nihilistic application of skill in socially useless activities such as investment banking — surely we can all agree on that. The justifiable kind is a form of class privilege that serves as “a way of providing the appropriate resources for the wielding of power linked to virtue. By virtue we mean here a combination of talent, fitness for a specific social role, and a moral exercise of that role for the benefit of wider society.”

Presumably we are to believe that there is some way of implementing this political program, despite the fact that no qualified judge of what is justified or unjustified equality seems to exist — unless we’re to imagine Rowan Williams or, probably even better, Benedict XVI handing down these moral recommendations — nor does actual existing class privilege serve to equip leaders for the exercise of virtue in public life as far as I can tell. The gesture is the same as with “Catholic social teaching”: bring together elements of left and right in some unprecedented mixture to prove your brilliance and ability to think “outside the box,” and provide no concrete means to get to this supposed utopia other than hoping that people’s hearts change and they suddenly start doing the right thing. It’s a pose, not a program, and its only possible concrete effect can be to support the right wing.

Overall, the article reminds me of a quote from the Communist Manifesto that I’ve used before in this connection: “Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.”

Posted in Milbank, nit-picking, politics of the absurd, You make a good point, but aren't you actually completely wrong?. 8 Comments »