Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought by David Myers

I mentioned the book last night on my show but perhaps my choice of music for the segment was not the most artful.

According to Princeton University Press:

Nineteenth-century European thought, especially in Germany, was increasingly dominated by a new historicist impulse to situate every event, person, or text in its particular context. At odds with the transcendent claims of philosophy and — more significantly — theology, historicism came to be attacked by its critics for reducing human experience to a series of disconnected moments, each of which was the product of decidedly mundane, rather than sacred, origins. By the late nineteenth century and into the Weimar period, historicism was seen by many as a grinding force that corroded social values and was emblematic of modern society’s gravest ills. Resisting History examines the backlash against historicism, focusing on four major Jewish thinkers. David Myers situates these thinkers in proximity to leading Protestant thinkers of the time, but argues that German Jews and Christians shared a complex cultural and discursive world best understood in terms of exchange and adaptation rather than influence.

After examining the growing dominance of the new historicist thinking in the nineteenth century, the book analyzes the critical responses of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and Isaac Breuer. For this fascinating and diverse quartet of thinkers, historicism posed a stark challenge to the ongoing vitality of Judaism in the modern world. And yet, as they set out to dilute or eliminate its destructive tendencies, these thinkers often made recourse to the very tools and methods of historicism. In doing so, they demonstrated the utter inescapability of historicism in modern culture, whether approached from a Christian or Jewish perspective.

Alan: “The idea that you can present the philosophical and theological objections to historicism by the four german-jewish scholars who Myers chose to examine, while enjoying a raucous hoe-down, may prove a tad optimistic Luke …. maybe you should run the idea past your sponsor first.”

LF: “I am glad you are there!”

Alan: “No worries mate …. a bit of banjo and fiddle to accompany Myers insights into jewish intellectual history …. it’s a mistake anyone could make.”

LF: “What would be the correct royalty free music to use as a bed for discussion of historicism?”

Alan: “There isn’t one Luke …. possibly in a sensitive, creative pair of hands, a bit of suitably esoteric german classical music of the period, could be woven into the narrative ….. to help illustrate why Myers places Rosenzweig into the context of “theological anti-historicism” as opposed to the “philosophical anti-historicism” of Heidegger …. but given your efforts to date I don’t hold out much hope.”

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The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge and Presuppositions

Here are some highlights from this 2013 book:

* The logical positivists had no objections to even the most extreme forms of sociological reductionism, if it was applied to morals. For them, the fact – value distinction was a fire-wall that prevented sociological reductionism from reaching science.

* The present use of the concept of practices and its variants reflects the disappearance of the fire-wall between fact and value and the demise of evolutionism of the Marxian variety.

* The political theorists and historians of the nineteenth century had more to say about concepts in the ‘practices’ family than either the social theorists or philosophers. This was the era of constitutionalism and a time when the failure of transplanted democratic forms to thrive was part of the common experience of Continental intellectuals. Taine’s reflections on the subject used the image of the rooting of a tree, and concluded that the tree of democracy would not root in soil that was not prepared by appropriate traditions. The idea was central to the celebration of the British constitution and the tracing of Anglo-Saxon origins of political and legal institutions, such as the common law. The aficionados of Anglo-Saxon origins wrote as though a millennia of experience with the ‘moot’ was a precondition for a free political order. Some of this thinking came close to a more disturbing mysticism of race and blood, a mysticism to which the Germans later succumbed. But the constitutionalists had a point – underlined by the two world wars of the twentieth century as well as the repeated failure of attempts to build liberal constitutional regimes in nineteenth-century Europe – Democratic forms placed on non-democratic political cultures produced dangerous results.

* Hobbes said that ‘manners maketh man’. Pascal varied an aphorism of Cicero to the effect that ‘custom is second nature’ with the remark that perhaps ‘nature itself is but a first custom’. The language is instructive. Each of them was aware of the fact of ingrained human differences in tastes, dispositions and the like – ‘second nature’ – that were not the products of a universal human ‘first nature’.

* What separates us from the Romans is not merely the rules, criteria, means of assessment and the like which they employed and we do not, but the skills necessary to apply all these in the Romans’ way. Both these skills and the criteria and principles are constitutive of the Roman way. They are what make the Romans’ sense of the world different from our own. Our powers of persuasion and explanation, it seems, stop at the borders of our own localities. It is our shared practices that enable us to be persuaded and persuade, to be explainers, or to justify and have the justifications accepted.

* The literary critic Stanley Fish is a gold-mine of Durkheimian usages, all of which are probably unconscious…

* The crucial ’empirical’ fact of the anomalous persistence of traditions, mores and the like, for example, is usually understood to be explained by the persistence of the tacit or hidden part. Two aspects of this fact may be distinguished. One is the apparent imperviousness of attitudes, values and the like to governmental action or conscious modification. ‘Stateways cannot change folkways’, according to the slogan of Sumner, a slogan strikingly supported by the re-emergence of traditional patterns in Eastern European countries after a half-century of suppression under communist rule. The second is that patterns of conduct can be observed to persist in radically different environments and historical settings linked only by the facts of common inheritance. Even quite specific patterns of private conduct, for example, may persist for centuries among persons with a common ethnic or regional genealogy. David Hackett Fischer gives examples of such ‘folkways’ in his study of the persistence of the local cultures of particular English counties in American communities of emigrants over centuries.1 These patterns of conduct are not the part of any explicit ideology, and indeed the explicit religious ideologies of the persons who exhibit these patterns of conduct have changed far more radically than the conduct itself. This suggests that there is a secret or hidden pathway by which these patterns are transmitted, and a hidden level which is the substrate in which the patterns inhere. The same sorts of anomalies arise in other contexts, such as the persistence of national scientific styles after emigration.2 This kind of persistence does not require any hypothesis about transmission, but it does support the idea that there are common cultural ‘frames’ even in science that scientists carry with them throughout their lives.

* What sort of identity – sameness – is at stake in claims about the persistence of tradition? One can find startling cases of ‘persistence’, such as the fact that the daughters of the Chinese communist leader Deng Xiaoping, elderly and unable to speak intelligibly, claimed to understand him and therefore to be his authoritative interpreters, just as in the imperial past daughters of senile and incoherent emperors made the same claims. The reversion to pre-war patterns of political argumentation and bureaucratic intrigue in the post communist states of Eastern Europe is equally striking. Alan Macfarlane has made claims about the persistence of English individualism from the times of the Germanic tribes described by Tacitus to the present.3

* In the case of Deng’s daughters, one might invoke Thomas Wolfe’s dictum that people in the same profession tend to be the same the world over, and note that Woodrow Wilson’s wife performed the same function at his deathbed, absent any Chinese traditions.

* Norms are ‘societal’; Sitten inhere in a Volk. Lawyer and judge are ‘social’ rather than natural categories. And in the case of other insufficiencies analogous to those that arise in relation to the law, the same pattern holds. The knowledge in question is localized to some group. In the closely related case of constitutions, the problem takes the following form: written constitutions, or written abridgements of unwritten constitutions, have different results when they are enacted in states which have ‘different political traditions’ or in which people have different habits of dealing with one another as citizens – therefore written constitutions are insufficient in practice and insufficient to explain political diversity.

* But to grant the existence of such things as Weltanschauungen, tacit knowledge, Sitte with causal powers, paradigms and so forth is to create an epistemic and explanatory problem for the social theorist. What sorts of objects are these? How can they be known, how can their causal properties be assessed, and how do they change? These are just the beginnings – the more we look into the answers, the more questions arise. How do these peculiar things get from one person to another? Where are they located? How does the same thing get ‘reproduced’ in different people? What sort of sameness or identity is at stake here? Does the sameness necessary for speaking historically of the identity of ‘traditions’, for example, correspond to some sameness-preserving feature of the transmission or acquisition of a tradition?

* We may distinguish two general strategies in dealing with the problem of making inferences about practices in the tradition of social theory. One view, best exemplified in Weber, is to reason about unconscious aspects of action on more or less strict analogy to the conscious forms of the same things that are available to the individual. Thus the Protestant believer whose habits and emotional responses to pleasure and indulgence are formed in the inchoate emotional experiences of early childhood is to be understood in terms of the explicit doctrines of Calvin.

[LF: I wonder what Max Weber would think of African protestants practicing Calvinism? Or modern northern Europeans of no religion acting the same way he saw Calvinists acting.]

* It would be, on this account, impossible to bemoan the supposed fact that modern people lack a tradition, as Macintyre does, or claim that the British have a political tradition and the Americans, Germans or some other group do not.

[LF: America is a state but Americans are not a nation.]

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Sociology Responds To Fascism

Highlights from this 1992 book:

* Sociologists were not notably successful in understanding fascism in the interwar era, much less in educating the public about the subject, and sociologists served the Nazi regimes just as other scholars did. The history of their service has been shrouded in misimpressions which have gradually been dispelled. Many of the leading figures in postwar German sociology who lived through the Nazi period knew a great deal about the role of sociology under the Nazis and did nothing to correct the misimpressions.

* The members of the Frankfurt School scarcely discussed the topic of Nazism (or indeed Italian fascism) before their
departure from Germany. They had the most limited sort of edifying impact on their non-fascist hosts prior to the war itself…. When they arrived in the United States, the members of the Frankfurt School held to their faith in the historical inevitability of revolution and the idea that Germany represented the world-historical future.

* Sociologists participated in the Nazi order in large numbers and for the same kinds of reasons as sociologists participate in schemes of subsidized scholarship today. If anything, the Nazis were modernizers of sociology: they brought the machinery of subsidized scholarship and publication in empirical sociology and substantive research significantly closer to present models of research subsidy and relations with the state.5

* The idea of an edifying sociology, one that serves to instruct the public, fared no better in the face of fascism. The romantic notion of reweaving a social order destroyed by impersonality, shared by Tōnnies, Durkheim, and many others, such as Spann, contributed, however indirectly, to the climate of opinion in which fascism took hold.

* The ideal of an engaged sociology also fared poorly. As Weber says, to enter into politics is to contract with diabolical powers.

* The myth of sociology’s opposition to fascism and of the wisdom of sociology in the face of fascism deserves to die. But with it some other myths ought also to be undermined. The myth of sociology as a ‘legitimator’ whose services are much in demand ought simply to be forgotten. The idea that sociologists can be freed of responsibility for the consequences of their sociology ought also to be given up. There is nothing that assures that the effects of sociology will be progressive or constructive other than the definitional equation of ‘true’ sociology with the good. No sociology of the interwar era grasped fascism fully or produced an unambiguously ‘correct’ political recipe for dealing with it. The continuing dispute over the character of fascism and the interwar ‘fascist’ regimes suggests that these are inappropriately high standards for social science. But the failure to meet them indicates that the pretensions to political wisdom of social science are inappropriate as well.

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Information v Transformation

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Racial Revenge

From comments to Steve Sailer:

* If you recall the Brock Turner case, he was forcibly held against his will by two Swedes on bicycles. He was in the process of digitally penetrating a woman who at some point had lost consciousness.

Potential lessons from the eager hate mob in the media regarding Arbery are as follows:

– Just because A.A. was trespassing, you have no proof from a court of law that he did anything felonious inside the property. He could just be a curious well-wisher.

– Even if A.A. did commit a felony, citizens have no right to intervene, that is what we have police for

– A.A. had a right to use deadly force against his pursuers because they were trying to infringe on his right to bodily autonomy and free movement and may have felt threatened. This is the only explanation for excusing Arbery’s attempt to get the gun. A struggle for a weapon is always a deadly force situation.

Parallels for the Brock Turner case would go something like this:

– Just because Brock’s date was very drunk and possibly unconscious, she could have signed consent-to-have-drunk-sex forms at a previous and sober time. The Swedes had no proof from a court of law that Brock Turner was doing anything illegal. He could have been her husband and this is their kink. The Swedes had no clue.

– Even if Brock Turner kidnapped and drugged the victim who he was violently raping, the Swedes had no right to intervene. That’s what we have police for.

– At the moment the Swedes used physical force to infringe on Brock Turner’s free movement, Brock had the right to use deadly force against the cyclists because his rights were violated and he felt threatened.

Is that how the story was laid out in the media? Obviously not. The cycling Swedes were lauded as heroes. Why? Because Brock Turner is white, and Ahmoud Arbery was black.

* Black on Black crime is boringly routine, and receives little attention in the media unless one or both parties happen to be celebrities.

Black on White crime is seen as a dangerous and potentially volatile storyline to be downplayed as much as possible.

White on Black crime is seen as a precious resource to be magnified and sensationalized as much as possible, i.e. “hunting Black men.”

White self defense against Black perpetrators can easily be re-cast into White on Black crime, particularly when a White policeman is involved.

* Charlotte Allen: Look, I watched the video. I’m sure that Arbery, with his criminal record, was up to no good. He was spotted by the father and son at the construction site peering into a window of an unfinished house and maybe casing it for tools he could sell or whatever. Then he continues running down the road. So the father and son drive past him and decide to do a “citizen’s arrest.” They get out of the truck with their guns. The son positions himself in front of the truck to the left with his gun to stop Arbery as he jogs past the right of the truck while the father is up in the back of the truck with his own gun, presumably covering for the son. Arbery spots the son (and maybe the father, too), who’s in plain sight from a distance and crosses in front of the trunk, tries to wrest the gun out of the son’s hands and punches him. Then, it seems, the father (coming to the son’s defense) or the son, or both, shoot Arbery and kill him.

I’m sorry, but both father and son acted like idiots. A “citizen’s arrest” over someone casing a place and then jogging off? Really? Sure, Arbery might have been up to no good, but the only crime they actually saw committed was a minor trespass: stepping onto private property. Just for starters, how did they know Arbery wasn’t armed himself?

And frankly, if some rando non-cop with a gun trained on me tried to stop me on a public road by telling me I was “under arrest,” I’d say, “Eff you!” And I’d feel perfectly justified in punching him out and grabbing the gun, if I could. People are under no obligation to submit to being stopped by armed randos, “citizen’s arrest” or no “citizen’s arrest.” They’re entitled to fight back.

Again, I’m sure that Arbery was up to no good. And I’m not sure that either McMichael committed a crime–although manslaughter is a distinct possibility. But the two acted like morons. This was not the Trayvon Martin case: nighttime, on private property, peering into people’s homes, jumping Zimmerman to the ground. It was broad daylight on a public road.

Sure, Arbery was not the holy martyr that the press has made him out to be. But the McMichaels don’t deserve a lot of sympathy, either.

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