Andrew Taggart
>The task of public philosophy
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| Trey Speegle @ The Morning News/ |
Andrew Taggart on the value of public philosophy to left politics @ New Public Thinking.
On Sunday, February 13, I received an email to this effect:
I enjoyed reading your recent essay [“In the Land of Bloombergia,” Counterpunch, 9 February 2011] critiquing the critique of your Mayor Bloomberg. I have much the same thoughts when I read a lot of left critiques of our cultural and political elites. It usually doesn’t take creative genius to perceive that these elites are morally and intellectually bankrupt, whereas it would take some real inspiration to propose something original that we all could do about it.
After running through a list of failures from healthcare reform to the War on Terror to the “corporate welfare scheme,” the writer concludes on a Leninist note, asking “what we can DO about such things.”
The final question resonates on two levels. Like most of us, he is exasperated by what little has been done since the end of the Cold War to fundamentally change the world order, and his words, like ours, are laced with a touch of fatalism as if to say that there is not much that can be done. It feels as if the war against capitalism and statism has been lost on both fronts and as if, in our obsessive criticisms of the status quo, we were expressing—interminably, Sisyphusianly—our sense of collective trauma as well as our acute feeling of resentment.
But there is a second way of interpreting his question. On this construal, his utterance is an accusation, in Kantian terms “a tribunal of reason.” Radical leftist politics, he seems to be asking, what have you done for us lately? But in asking that leftist politics say what it has or has not done to improve our political situation, he is demanding that it give an account of itself.
>All morality is of its very nature godless
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| Anna Fox @ Exit/ |
Andrew Taggart considers our post-religious sensibilities @ Butterflies & Wheels.
I admire Richard Holloway for his courage. Here is a religious man who, from 1986-2000, was Bishop of Edinburgh; a man of virtue concerned with his neighbor, with social justice, and with the common good; and, not the least, a contemplative man who somewhere along the way lost his faith but not his desire for transcendence. I don’t know when his doubts became so substantial that they compelled him to leave the Anglican Church, but I imagine that the decision came only after the crisis had become too acute to ignore and too great to bear.
What brought on this crisis, one that emerged, no doubt, over the course of many years only to reach critical mass in the past decade, was the feeling that traditional religion had lost its grip on the modern world together with the sense that the general account offered by evolution could no longer be denied.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The loss of traditional religion is still movingly recorded in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” a poem with which Holloway is all too familiar. Here, the speaker describes his experience of walking into a church and of finding that this hallowed space, a space that had once been suffused with life, meaning, and community, has since been abandoned. And what does he do? He goes through the motions, taking off his hat, signing the guest book, and intoning “Here endeth” too loudly. Is this a museum, a tomb, a ruin? And what does he wonder? Only how we’ll get on after the rituals that in previous epochs had bound us together have ceased to be practiced. He sees that this life-world has lost its sense; that the people have gone elsewhere (but where have they gone?); that the church, for millennia a symbol of communion and love, is now but a relic of another world, one dimly remembered yet still vaguely felt.
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