In the comments thread for my previous post on Heidegger and the Nazis, Tex raises the parallel issue of Sartre’s adherence to the Stalinist French Communist Party and Gummo Trotsky the archetypal example of Plato’s admiration for Sparta. I had something to say about these points in my review of Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics published a while ago in the AFR Review section.A couple of quotes relevant to the debate

Plato travelled repeatedly to the Greek colony of Syracuse, in the hope of convincing its young ruler Dionysius to adopt, and perhaps to implement, his philosophical and political ideas. As might have been anticipated, and Plato claims to have foreseen, Dionysius wanted little more than the gloss that would come from having such an eminent court philosopher and had no intention of modifying his tyrannical rule.The story of Plato’s travels to Syracuse is the central metaphor for Mark Lilla’s study of the political follies and crimes of European intellectuals. The most direct link is to the life and career of Martin Heidegger …

A fascinating contrast might have been offered at this point by a study of philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser who by very different routes became, and remained, orthodox Stalinists. Lilla briefly mentions, but does not illuminate, the paradox that Sartre, the self-conscious heir of the Dreyfusard tradition of resistance to oppression ended up as a servant of one of the most oppressive regimes of all time.
The difficulty for Lilla’s theme of ‘the reckless mind’, when applied to the left, is that two very different types of people have ended up as Communists. First, there are those for whom the central appeal was the cartharsis of a revolutionary smashing of the existing order. This was essentially the same appeal offered by the Nazis, and many of this type changed sides when the mandate of Heaven appeared to shift from one totalitarian party to the other.
On the other hand, there were large numbers of liberals and social democrats who were dissatisfied with the obvious failings of their own countries and accepted, at face value, the claims of the Soviet Union to be a peace-loving, democratic and socially just alternative society. Beatrice and Sydney Webb are prime examples of this sort of ‘fellow-traveler’.
The fellow-travelers may fairly be accused of gullibility and wishful thinking in their assessment of the Soviet Union, but this does not imply that their own ideas contained the seeds of totalitarianism. In fact, unlike the Nazi sympathisers discussed by Lilla, the vast majority of fellow-travelers, including those who took the formal step of joining the Communist Party, ultimately realised they had been deceived. Some repudiated their previous views entirely and became, in the American parlance, neoconservatives. Others simply accepted they had made a mistaken judgement, and adopted a more skeptical view of life, while retaining their old ideals.

Sartre is, I think, an intermediate case. I don’t think his existentialist philosophy was really consistent with any form of political Marxism, but on various occasions he distorted his philosophical arguments to generate politically correct conclusions.

In another take on the debate, Don Arthur says “Meanwhile John Quiggin is trying to pick a fight with somebody willing to defend Martin Heidegger. Don’t look at me.”
Actually, I picked Heidegger because, as a person, he’s generally agreed to be indefensible, but as a thinker, he’s widely regarded as having important and valuable things to say. He therefore raises in a sharp fashion the general question of the validity of arguments ad hominem and, conversely, arguments from authority. As I argue, I don’t think the idea that the arguments of a political theorist or philosopher can be treated in isolation from their life and work as a whole is, in general, sustainable.

Salman Rushdie articulates my main concerns about the Iraq debate, but naturlaly more eloquently than I could ever do

I, among others, have remained unconvinced by President Bush’s Iraqi grand design. But as I listen to Iraqi voices describing the numberless atrocities of the Saddam years, then I am bound to say that if, as now seems possible, the US and the United Nations do agree on a new Iraq resolution; and if inspectors do return, and, as is probable, Saddam gets up to his old obstructionist tricks again; or if Iraq refuses to accept the new UN resolution; then the rest of the world must stop sitting on its hands and join the Americans in ridding the world of this vile despot and his cohorts.

It should, however, be said and said loudly that the primary justification for regime change in Iraq is the dreadful and prolonged suffering of the Iraqi people, and that the remote possibility of a future attack on America by Iraqi weapons is of secondary importance.

A war of liberation might just be one worth fighting. The war that America is currently trying to justify is not.

I can only say, I agree with everything above, and with nearly everything in Rushdie’s article.

I’ve been wasting time looking at interesting metablogs and here’s what i found.
Kuroshinhas a classification of bloggers. There’s another one, based on D&D character types at the Blogger Bestiary. But my favorite is an addition to the Kuroshin list, posted here
Research Blogger (Reblogger)
Percentage of blogger population: 1.634%
Hours spent blogging: 10/week (varies heavily with approaching deadlines)
Habitat: Typically found at a desk somewhere in an university department, often sharing a room with other students, although quite a few are known to also blog from home. Rebloggers however also travel and take the opportunity to blog from other universities and conference venues.
Average Age: MA level Rebloggers in their early twenties, while PhD Rebloggers are approaching their thirties with alarming speed.
Favorite hangout: Air-L
Last Book Read: Postmodernism: A Reader.
Favorite Offline Activities: Movies and books.
Mode of Dress: Casually, although this varies with geographic location: the northern countries displaying a much shabbier appearance than more southern countries.
If taxonomy isn’t your thing, Google Fight lets you find which keywords get the most mentions in Google. For example, Hell (8.4 million) beats out Paradise (3.8 million) and Instapundit(55000) edges out “Andrew Sullivan” (51 000). Of course, I tried a few contests of my own, but I’m not telling you the results. Pick your own favorite pundits/bloggers and let them duke it out!
And here’s a site where people list weird search requests and comment. Most are obscene, but here’s a clean one:
Search: I want a duck with islamic words written in it
Response: Huh?
Boilerplate: Discuss the search request found in Al-Muhajabah’s log files on 11/3/02; 11:15:10 PM.

In 1933, the famous German philosopher Martin Heidegger was appointed as rector of Freiburg University by the Nazis.He took a prominent role in the persecution of Jewish academics, including his own mentor Edmund Husserl. What if any implications does this sorry episode have for judgements about Heidegger’s philosophy. One viewpoint, which has been argued recently by Jason Soon in the comments thread of this blog is that this kind of ‘moral’ failing has no implications for our assessment of a philosopher’s thought. I’ve written a lengthy response to this viewpoint, arguing that it can’t be sustained , at least in cases where the person concerned claimed to be acting consistently with their own philosophical views.
I argue that Jason’s position would prevent us from assessing any body of thought as a coherent whole. A complex philosophical or political proposition can’t be assessed in isolation – it’s necessary to examine both its underlying assumptions and its implications. Heidegger’s understanding of his own philosophical position led him to derive the implication “I should support the Nazis”. It seems clear that something is badly wrong in Heidegger’s thought, but it is not immediately obvious what is wrong. There are two possible responses. If you believe that at least some of Heidegger’s work contains valuable insights, you should try and isolate the problem, then salvage those points that are unaffected. If you are doubtful about the value of the entire enterprise, you are justified in concluding that the salvage job is unlikely to be worth the trouble.

Right on cue, Scott Burchill calls for the ‘disintegration’ of Indonesia saying

Canberra has reflexively accepted the sanctity and immutability of Indonesia’s boundaries, when recent experience suggests that the lines marked on political maps have a habit of being contested and redrawn.

Well, yes. In the last decade, boundaries have been contested in the former Soviet Union (Georgia and Azerbaijan), in PNG (Bougainville) in the Russian Federation (Chechnya) in the fomer Yugoslavia, in Israel/Palestine, in Kuwait (thanks to Saddam), Kashmir and quite a few other places. And, of course, the former Czechoslovakia broke into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
In a few of these cases, existing boundaries between components of a federal state have been converted into new national boundaries. In most cases, a great deal of blood has been shed without achieving anything.
So which model is more likely for a breakup of Indonesia – the Czechoslovak peaceful divorce or every other case of this kind in living memory?
The really striking thing about all this is that it’s only the principle that national boundaries are immutable and sacred that saved East Timor. Indonesia’s annexation violated this principle and was therefore never recognised except, to our shame, by Australia.
Argument’s like Burchill’s would be irresponsible at any time, but they could scarcely have been timed to do more damage to our national interests than right now. And by fuelling Indonesian suspicions about our ultimate objectives they reduce our capacity to take any positive steps to improve the situation in places like Aceh and Papua. As I’ve stressed repeatedly in recent posts, I’m totally opposed to political censorship, but that doesn’t stop me wishing some people knew when to shut up.
I searched Burchill’s piece carefully to find any hint that he sees the slightest difference between the current imperfectly democratic government in Indonesia and the Suharto dictatorship, but it’s clear that, like the Bourbons, he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Michael Moore seems to be an American version of Philip Adams – loved by his fans on the left, loathed by the right, and also a trifle gravitationally challenged (an occupational hazard of punditry, as I’ve mentioned before). I’ve had mixed feelings about the limited amount of his stuff that I’ve seen. Some was very funny, and some seemed a bit laboured. But I was impressed by a piece of his doing the Internet rounds that my son Leigh passed on to me a few days ago. It starts

“Yesterday, Larry Bennett, a 16-year old, was shot in the head after he was involved in a minor traffic accident. You probably didn’t hear about it because, well, how could he be dead if he wasn’t shot by The Sniper?
Yesterday, an unidentified woman was shot to death in her car in Fenton, MI. You probably didn’t hear about it because she had the misfortune of not being shot by The Sniper.”

The whole article is here

While the consequences of the Monash shootings are still giving rise to near-daily news stories in Australia, the similar, but twice as deadly, shootings in Arizona have already been consigned to the archives in the US (so has Bali, but that’s another story). As this piece from Salon shows, even the sniper attacks have had no real impact on the US debate on gun policy.

I’m reading Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. It’s the first in his Cairo trilogy, and contributed to his winning the Nobel Prize. I read it a few years back, and didn’t get around to the rest of the trilogy, but I think this is a good time to restart. The book is set during WWI, and the Australian occupying forces are presented very unfavorably, but I suspect accurately. If you remember the scene in Gallipoli where one of the Aussies smashes up the shop of a merchant he accuses of cheating him, then sheepishly realises he’s in the wrong shop, you’ll have the general picture. This book was first published in 1956, so it gives a very minor indication of the length of cultural memory in this part of the world. Of course, the Australians play only a minor and mainly offstage role – the book is basically about the life of a purdah-bound woman and her family.
I also went to see the Albert Namatjira exhibition at the National Gallery. I didn’t make it to the concurrent Blue Poles and Big Americans exhibitions – I’ve seen much more of the latter than of Namatjira, which says something. Namatjira and Jackson Pollock were almost exact contemporaries in both birth and death, and both were brought undone by alcohol, but there the similarities end. Pollock was the last gasp of modernism in art – he not only talked the talk of the tortured Romantic genius, but walked the walk as well. Of course, there are still ‘shocking’ and ‘confronting’ works like those in the Sensation exhibition that didn’t make it here, but this is just going through the motions. Most of the works were presold to the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising agency who then set about stirring up the obligatory furore in order to boost the sale prices for their clients/contract employees.
Namatjira is another story. He brought the 19th century obsession with light and form to Central Australia, and produced some startling insights, but by the 1950s no serious art critic wanted to know about applying old-style representational art to a new landscape. Now that modernism is finally past a joke, he may get some of the recognition he deserves. The same applies to botanical illustrator Ellis Rowan, on at the National Library.
Finally, on Friday, I went to the Merry Muse folk club to hear Tyneside singer Bob Fox with a mixture of modern and traditional folk – a great night with some excellent support acts. It’s one of the best clubs I’ve been to at a time when folk music is increasingly focused on mega-festivals like Woodford. Canberra readers who are interested can contact the organiser, Bill Arnett at bandb@effect.net.au.

Update Idly following the links on Jason’s blog, I came to 2blowhards.com which I imagined would be a particularly ranting warblog. Instead, it’s a feast of cultural comment, leading me to this story of British culture minister, Kim Howells, denouncing the entrants for the Turner Prize. He posted a note on the comments board “If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost,” the note read. “It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit.” Three cheers for Kim!
Revealingly as regards the current status of art, Reuters posted this story under the category “Oddly Enough – Weird, Funny and Strange News Stories”

I’ve added various bloggers and ploggers to the list on the left and created a new ‘cultural and satirical’ category. I’d particularly like to welcome Gary Sauer-Thompson. He has lengthy and interesting posts, including an application of deconstruction to one of my posts on postmodernism, but hasn’t yet learned to do permalinks, or even reliable hyperlinks. So you just have to check his page regularly.
If anyone has been misclassified, or missed out altogether, please get in touch. Broadly speaking, I try to link to any Australian blogger I’m willing to engage in discussion and debate, or who’s willing to engage me in a civilised fashion.

Only those (like me) with a close interest in the US economic scene will want to read all of this piece by Daniel Gross on the travails of SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt But this quote should interest everybody.

Pitt lacks the attribute most beneficial to a businessperson turned government official: go-to-hell money. In the private sector, having enough cash in the bank tends to liberate you to speak your mind. …. Sure, Pitt may have made $3 million a year as a partner at his old law firm. But that’s not big money. (Emphasis added)

A society where $3 million a year is ‘not big money’ is one where corruption among public officials is more-or-less inevitable.

Gummo Trotsky reports that, in addition to her previous achievements in the field of misquotation and distortion, Janet Albrechtsen has achieved Internet fame as a purveyor of urban myth, with a listing on the famous snopes.com website. Why do Australian bloggers compulsively link to Mark Steyn when we have Janet right here at home?