Monthly Muse: 8/2023
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the August 2023 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
My essay this month on Handful of Earth was simply entitled “Why Free Speech?” This was not a question I expected to ask, but my recent attendance at a conference dedicated to the theme of freedom of speech prompted some serious self-reflection and self-critique. While the answer to the question “why free speech?” may seem obvious, my reflections this past month have convinced me otherwise. If you haven’t read the essay yet, you can do so here.
Beyond the topic of free speech, I’ve been thinking about how it is often the most seemingly “obvious,” “straightforward,” or “self-evident” answers—answers that almost appear embedded in questions themselves—that present the thorniest philosophical, historical, and political problems. In fact, much of ruling class ideology relies precisely on framing very specific answers to perennial questions as eternal truths: Technological progress is inevitable, school is the only way to get an education, science is the ultimate arbiter of fact and fiction. These are but some of the accepted answers provided to deceptively difficult questions in America and, increasingly, the world.
I do believe in certain eternal truths. But these truths are more often than not found in the existence of various perennial problems, not in one highly particular “solution” to any such problem. On this topic, one reader recently shared the following passage with me from Gurcharan Das’ book, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma:
The Allies behaved no better than Krishna in the terror bombing of Dresden, Hamburg and other German cities in World War II. They had a clear intention of killing German civilians in order to destroy Nazi morale, hoping that this would lead Nazi Germany to surrender. In doing so, they clearly violated the “just war” doctrine. Yet they were not hauled up before any Nuremberg court, which only judged Nazi war criminals after the war. This is because the Allies were victors and only losers are tried for war crimes.
The Mahabharata faces this dilemma squarely. What if good persons, who have excellent reasons to wage a war, can only win it by unfair means? In that case, how can one think of them as “good persons”?
This passage calls into question the tidy narrative of good and evil surrounding World War II. It also provides a justification of sorts for reading the “classics” (broadly conceived), like the Mahabharata. These sorts of texts instill a certain humility in the contemporary reader. For all of our scientific and technological progress, many enduring questions are not easily amenable to mechanistic or managerial answers. If anything, science and technology have rendered these perennial problems even more difficult to solve since the stakes (nuclear annihilation, among others) are higher than ever before.
This Monthly Muse may appear a bit removed from recent issues of concern on Handful of Earth. However, I do think it connects back to the topic of free speech and classical liberalism. While I addressed the role of American war-making in shaping global attitudes toward the rhetoric of civil liberties in my recent essay, contradictions within the classical liberal justification for free speech can be found even closer to home. The historical record attests to the fact that today’s “free societies” are indebted to forms of revolutionary struggle which hardly conformed to the liberal norms of “civil discourse” and “due process.” Look no further than the American and French Revolutions to unveil the bloody historical predecessors of “individual rights” at home and the “rules-based order” abroad.
The upshot? Perhaps liberal societies are not as liberal as they seem. If we are willing to accept this fact, it begs the question: How can we separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, within liberal societies and their professed value systems? And have all “liberal values” grown from liberalism itself, or might their roots lie elsewhere?
Provocation
“Consciousness is the opposite of indifference, of blindness, blankness. Promoting consciousness involves the general dissemination of the concept that each of us is part of a universal action and interaction, that poles are somewhat connected, that there are material causes for trauma, vertigo, degenerative disease. Connections, connections, cause and effect, clarity on their relation and interrelations, the connection with the past, continuity, flow, movement, the awareness that nothing, nothing remains the same for long. And it follows that if a thing is not building, it is certainly decaying—that life is revolution—and that the world will die if we don’t read and act out its imperatives. Not on its own will it die, but rather because the forces of reaction have created imbalances that will kill it: ‘The seeds of its own destruction.’ Our destruction too—in the epoch of the Bomb, the nerve gases, the massive precipitation of industrial wastes.
“Consciousness is knowledge, recognition, foresight; common experience and perception; sensibility, alertness, mindfulness. It stirs the senses, the blood; it exposes and suggests; it will objectify, enrage, direct. There are no positive formulas for a thing so complex. We have guidelines only to help us with its growth. This means that after we are done with our books, they must be put aside; and the search for method will depend on observations, correct analyses, creativity and seizing the time.”
—George Jackson, Blood in My Eye