In my previous post I held up to ridicule Bilgrami's arrival
at a picture of values as properties in the world (including nature) via a dialectic that began with what seemed like a common sense distinction between intention and prediction partly in order to convey how commonsensical it should seem to say that values are in the world.
It is not common sense to think there are fairies at the bottom of the garden though it may be usual to tell children fairy stories.
And a first pass at the genealogical issues
the only 'genealogical' issues are as to who impregnated Mum. Was it a fairy? No. Then who the fuck cares?
I want to raise in this essay can be made by asking: why has this very natural way of thinking about values found so little place in the history of thought (and not just strictly philosophical thought in the narrow sense) about value in the last two or three hundred years?
The answer is because there was rapid economic and technological progress. It turned out the world was more exciting than fairy-land.
To answer this question would require one to get a sense of the very interesting genealogy of our current debates about naturalism,
they are debates between cretins. They exist because Universities are slow to sack useless Professors or to take an axe to worthless Departments.
and thereby to give a sense of the wider significance of that debate which today is, at best, only highly implicit, and, at worst, altogether missing, in the idiom and the arguments in which the debate is conducted. The answer to the question is to be found in one central strand in the intellectual and cultural history of the West in a phenomenon that can be traced, using a term that Weber put into currency and which McDowell too uses to describe it: ‘disenchantment’.
But Weber was stupid, ignorant and couldn't even fuck his own wife. She had some money and built up his reputation as a great savant after he popped his clogs.
The problem with 'enchantment' was that your granny might be burn at the stake as a witch.
For many centuries this natural way of thinking about values as being in the world that I have presented here within the secular terms of my more or less atheistic intellectual orientation, had its source in the presence of a divinity which was, in many a view, itself immanent in the world.
So, Bilgrami tried to be a good atheist but failed because he was too stupid.
And it is this source which was undermined in the modern period that Weber described with that term.
Then came the Bolshevik Revolution. Suddenly having a clergy or even an aristocracy didn't seem so bad. Religion is useful. It is rational to have useful beliefs. Think Newcombe's problem.
Anyway the chrematistics of 'regret minimization' involves investment in 'positional' but ontologically dysphoric goods- i.e. things which are 'not at home in this world' because most of us aren't or soon won't be.
This sort of point has, for sometime now—ever since Nietzsche’s slogan—been made by summoning the image of the ‘dead father’.
Nothing wrong with a dead daddy whom we cherish in our memory.
And it continues to be made in this way in the current revival of tired Victorian debates about the irrationality of belief in a God and in his creation of the universe in six days a few thousand years ago. It is common in the rhetoric wielded by those who speak and write today with scorn of such irrational beliefs, that they describe them in terms of one’s continuing immaturity, one’s persistence in an infantile reliance on a ‘father’, whose demise was registered by philosophers (Nietzsche, but Hegel before him) much more than a century ago, one’s abdication of responsibility and free agency in the humbling of oneself to an authority that is not intelligible to human concepts and scientific explanatory methods, concepts and methods hard won in a struggle towards progress and enlightenment, after centuries of obscurantism.
This is the sort of rhetoric that leaders of cults indulge in. The fact is, unless we are actually infants, our reliance on anyone or anything isn't infantile.
All this may be true enough, but there is something concealing about making the point in just this way since it impoverishes the notion of ‘disenchantment’ to one merely about loss of faith in God and his creation and his authority.
Because what we should really be worried about is loss of faith in fairies up our garden's bottom. That verges on homophobia.
What goes missing in this picture is the intellectual as well as cultural and political prehistory of the demise of such an authority figure.
The Church did have 'Fathers' and 'Mother Superior'. People who went to Church were mocked for not being proper adults. You should go to the Brothel, get Syphilis, and then watch your nose drop off.
Well before his demise, brought about I suppose by the scientific outlook that we all now admire and which is rightly recommended by the authors of the string of recent, somewhat tedious, books that have inveighed against such irrational belief, it was the metaphysics forming around the new science itself and nothing less than science which—far from registering his demise—proposed instead in the late seventeenth century, a quite different kind of fate for ‘the father’, a form of migration, an exile into inaccessibility from the visions of ordinary people to a place outside the universe, from where in the more familiar image of the clock winder, he first set and then kept an inert universe in motion.
Bilgrami is of Muslim heritage. Islam has a God outside Time and Space and a sophisticated occassionalist metaphysics. But it leaves room for mysticism of a marvellous kind. Djinns exist but this doesn't mean you have to believe in fairies.
The plain fact is Islam has a more logical and coherent theology than Christianity.
And much more than his ‘death’, it is this exile and deracination of God from the world of matter and nature (and therefore from human community and perception) that reveals what is meant by ‘disenchantment’.
One may affirm a Deus Absconditus without giving up a belief in fairies and sprites and witches and warlocks. But what is better yet is to do useful stuff or, at the very least, to be entertaining.
There is no Latin expression such as “Deus Deracinus” to express the thought that needs expounding here. The expression for the God exiled by the ideologues of the Royal Society in England in the wake of the developments in science around Newton in the late seventeenth century is “Deus Absconditus,”
From Isaiah. Aquinas and then Luther gave it currency
which may convey to the English speaker a fugitive fleeing rather than what I want to stress—the idea that it is from the roots of nature and ordinary perceptible life that God was removed.
I think Bilgrami is getting at 'mechanistic' natural science which held that the only acceptable explanations of things involved Rude Goldberg type machines. No 'action at a distance' or teleology of the Aristotelian type should be permitted.
‘Racine’ or roots is the right description of his immanence in a conception of a sacralized universe, from which he was torn away by the exile to which the metaphysical outlook of early modern science (aligned with thoroughly mundane interests) ushered him.
There were such Gnostic and mystical notions two thousand years ago. Tzimtzum in Kabbalah is an example. Essentially, poets and saints saw that anything said of man in his relation to God might be said of God in relation to man. God exiles his people but, in a sense, God is exiled from his creation. I long for the g.f to cook me a nice 'full English' but suggest that her longing to do so is frustrated that she worries I'll have a fucking heart attack if ate my fill of bacon butties. She suggests to me that I get a fucking job. You want a full English? Earn some money and gorge yourself to death.
Even so “Conditus” which literally means “put away for safeguarding,”
No. It means build or conceal. Abscondo means to cover or conceal.
(with the “abs-” reinforcing the “awayness,” of where God is safely placed) conveys something about the question I want to raise. What I want to ask is: why should the authority figure need safeguarding in an inaccessibility?
He didn't. This was merely a poetic way of speaking. Mummy wails that baby has hidden himself from her and that she utterly desolate though she can see his chubby form is quaking with suppressed laughter from his hiding place behind the curtain. Lots of peeps love God because babies and Mummies and mountains and rivers exist. They complain that he is far when he is near. But we often clutch wifey and complain she is abandoning us though she says she is only going to the kitchen to fix us breakfast. We feel this is unjust. She should kindly send herself to the kitchen while remaining cuddled with us.
What dangers lay in his immanence, in his availability to the visionary temperaments of all those who inhabit his world?
Sodomy? Moses saw God's hindquarters. Does 'visionary temperament' make one gay for God?
And why should the scientific establishment of Early Modernity seek this safekeeping in exile, for ‘a father’ whom its successor in late, more mature, modernity would properly describe as “dead”?
Clearly it was because some latter day Moses might try to sodomize the Deity. The Scientific Establishment, back then, was totes homophobic.
These genealogical questions are crucial to the analysis I want to present about the wider significance of the debates around naturalism, first, because an answer to them would show that the ‘scientific rationality’ which is so insistently extolled by these attacks on religious belief today, did not emerge whole all at once, but also because the answer reveals that—even if we allow it to be a gradual outcome of a triumphantly progressive intellectual history—to focus merely on the end-point of that history as an ideal of rationality towards which we have sequentially and cumulatively progressed and converged in a long struggle against obscurantism, is to give oneself an air of spurious innocence.
Bilgrami thinks that some guys in the Seventeenth Century exiled God for fear he might be buggered by a visionary. Then some other guys- Hegel and Nietzsche- discovered this exiled God was dead. Scientific rationality triumphed- which is why the Brits took over from the Grand Moghul and Bilgrami's Daddy ended up a Judge rather than a guy who had plenty of fairies up his garden's bottom. Whitey gives itself an air of spurious innocence but it is totes homophobic. It shouldn't have exiled God even if that meant some visionary tried to get gay with Him. Also, even if God is dead, fuck did you cunts do to the fairies?
Narratives of progress have been much under attack for some time for their self-congratulatory triumphalism,
Whitey pretends to be sooooo smart and is constantly gassing on about having invented motor cats and jet planes. But who do you think powers those cars and planes? Invisible fairies! Whitey won't tell you so but Bilgrami, a Rhodes Scholar, has been able to figure things out for himself.
but I think it is arguable that things are methodologically much worse than that. They are wrong—at any rate, deeply limited—on, and by, their own terms. In general, a sequence, especially when it is consecutively narrativized and dialectically and cumulatively conceived, as progressive ideals are bound to conceive it, cannot have started from the beginning of thought and culture itself.
Why not? We know that there is a sequence to our own thoughts though we can't trace it all the way back to the very first thoughts we had as babies. Yet that's where they must have started.
If a sequence is to aspire to conceptual and cultural significance (as the very idea of progress suggests) it cannot have its beginnings at the very beginning of conceptual and cultural life.
Einstein's autobiography would have had 'conceptual and cultural significance' even though nobody would expect him to give much insight into his thoughts much before the age of five. Yet he may illuminate those thoughts by saying 'I recall my father talking about electricity though I no longer remember what he said'. We can then do some research and get a picture of the sort of things the child might have heard and we can then speculate how this affected the trajectory of his later thought.
That would trivialize things—evacuate the notion of sequence of any of the substance and significance that progressivist narrative aspires to.
Nonsense! A progressivist narrative doesn't need to begin 'ab ovo'. It can start 'in medias res'. All it has to do is demonstrate a 'secular trend' over a long enough period.
It cannot be that we have been converging on the significant end-point from the random inceptions of our intellectual and cultural existence.
Yes it can if the 'fitness landscape' has been changing in a specific way for a specific period for an identifiable cause- e.g. the agricultural revolution or the use of fossil fuel to generate first steam power and then electricity.
One assumes rather that there were many strands at the outset, endless false leads, but then at some point (what I am calling the beginning of the progressivist trajectory) we got set on a path, which we think of as the right path, from which point on the idea of cumulative steps towards a broadly specifiable end began to make sense, a path of convergence towards that end.
No. There were many paths and there remained many paths save where competition for scarce resources extinguished some 'genealogies' while causing 'learned' or 'mimetic' changes in others. Indians are still different from Europeans or Japanese people. But there is no 'Indian mathematics' or 'Japanese mathematics' different from European mathematics. One type of maths and one type of notation has won out and become universal. But this is 'replacement' more than it is convergence. The fact is once vastly more mathematicians were being trained in India and Japan, the cheapest and most efficient way to do so was using the European model.
Accumulation and convergence, then, don’t start at the beginning of thought, but rather they start at some juncture that we think of as the start onto a right path.
No. Some neural paths get pruned or repurposed. Also people who do stupid shit die or don't contribute to the gene pool. Doing useful stuff promotes reproductive success.
This has many implications for intellectual historiography, some of them highly critical. Just to give you one example, I think it implies a real difficulty for philosophers such as Hilary Putnam when they say that scientific realism is true because it is the only explanation of the fact that there is a convergence in scientific theories—-that is to say, the posits of science must be real because it is only their reality which would explain the cumulative nature of the claims of scientific theories over time.
But that convergence is on the basis of utility. Science costs a lot of money and so there is pressure on Scientists to do useful stuff. But this means adopting sensible ideas and methods.
India pays some money to keep Ayurveda alive but, currently, there are twice as many 'allopathic' doctors. As India gets richer the disparity will increase. Even the mahacrackpot gave up Ayurveda because his body simply wasn't strong enough to cope with its remedies.
What is the difficulty with this that I have in mind? It is this. Here too, the fact is that these converging and cumulative trends have not existed since the beginning of theorizing about nature.
Fuck theorizing. It was utility which drove 'convergence' and 'cumulative' progress.
In fact Putnam would be the first to say that it is only sometime in the seventeenth century
when utility triumphed. A country which did stupid shit started to decline and ended up being carved up by those of its neighbours which concentrated on doing smart and useful things. Holland was a Spanish Hapsburg colony. But the wealth of the Indies permitted Spain to do stupid shit while the Dutch concentrated on useful stuff. Soon the Dutch were kicking Spanish ass.
that we were set on the right path in science and from then on there has been a convergence that is best explained by the corresponding reality of what the converging scientific theories posit. But now a question arises. What makes it the case that that is when we were set on the right path?
Utility. Turks were great fighters but their savants were doing stupid shit while smelly White peeps in cold countries went in for utilitarian studies which would enable them to grow rich through oceanic trade.
What is the notion of rightness, here? If we have an answer to this last question
we do. It is utility and the fact that land is scarce and if you do stupid shit sooner or later smart peeps turn up and establish their Raj over you.
(about what makes the path the right path at that starting point),
the starting point is only important if the process is 'hysteresis laden' or 'path dependent'. But economics is 'ergodic'. You look around and see what the smartest peeps are doing and you imitate them. If you have economies of scope and scale and people who will work their butts off so as to have nice food to eat and nice clothes to wear and money to pay for good skools to which they can send their kids, then- like China you can pull 700 million people out of extreme poverty over the span of 3 decades. Who knows? China may overtake the US in per capita income in Vivek Ramaswamy's life-time.
then that notion of rightness would already have established scientific realism and we don’t need to wheel in scientific realism to explain the subsequent convergence.
Bilgrami doesn't get that the fitness landscape determines what is utile and utility determines which way we should go. This may mean junking our heritage as unfit for purposes. If the fairies at the bottom of the garden can't help us pay the fucking mortgage then can go fuck themselves.
Well, my subject is not scientific realism, so I give this example only to display the more general point that accounts of our rationality that stress our sequential development and progress towards a hard-won end, cannot then just focus on the end-point and avoid the importance of the beginning of the sequence, which, may have the greater power to illuminate than its end or even the sequence itself.
We don't know what the end-point of Science will be. Maybe we emigrate to a nicer dimension where there is no scarcity and thus utility doesn't matter.
If you wanted a slogan for what I have been saying, it is: No teleology without genealogy!
But, Darwin's point, like that of Newton, is that there's no fucking teleology. This doesn't mean we can't extrapolate from existing trends. But that is merely inductive reasoning.
And, as I have said earlier, my own reason for stressing the Early Modern origins of our late modernity’s proud embrace of scientific rationality, is to make us less complacent about the ideal that we have embraced by uncovering in its genealogy the thick accretions to it that have had large implications for politics and culture.
But politics is stupid shit. Only Econ and Defence strategy matters. As for culture, Netflix is good enough for me.
Let me turn to these now and say more specifically why a scientific establishment of Early Modernity would have found it convenient to put away ‘the father’ in a safekeeping away from the visionary access of ordinary people.My explanation is better.
There are three things to observe at the very outset about this exile of the ‘father’ for some two hundred years until Nietzsche announced his demise.
But the fucker had syphilis and went insane!
First, intellectual history of the Early Modern period records that there was a remarkable amount of dissent and very explicit dissent
there was a fucking Civil War! Thankfully a sensible Dutchman took the throne. He was followed by deeply boring Germans. England concentrated on getting rich though no doubt Anglicans hated the ranting Dissenters and the superstitious Papists and so forth.
against the notions that produced the exile, dissent by a remarkable group of intellectuals, who were most vocal first in England and the Netherlands and then elsewhere in Europe.
The wrote books and published pamphlets at a time when such things had a market.
For the sake of focus, I will restrict myself to England. Second, there was absolutely nothing unscientific about these freethinkers or their dissent. They were themselves scientists, then of course called ‘natural philosophers’, fully on board with the new science and the Newtonian laws and all its basic notions, such as gravity, for instance. They were only objecting to the metaphysical outlook generated by official ideologues around the new science, who began to dominate the Royal Society, in which the much more complicated Newton of his private study was given a more orthodox public face by people such as Boyle and Samuel Clarke, a public move in which Newton himself acquiesced.
Being known as a Deist or something of that sort could mean the loss of your Fellowship or stipend or whatever. England also had tough anti-blasphemy laws.
And third, the metaphysical outlook of the dissenters was suppressed and the Royal Society ideologues won out and their metaphysics became the orthodoxy, not because of any superiority, either metaphysical or scientific, but because of carefully cultivated social and political factors, that is to say, alliances that the ‘Newtonians’ formed with different social groups such as the Anglicans and the commercial and mercantile interests of the time.
That's what mattered. But money is made by doing useful things and even more money can be made if only useful studies are promoted though no doubt a knowledge of classical literature made for a refinement of the vernacular just as sound Christian instruction tended to make for good character and a prudent outlook.
To put a very complex range of interweaving themes in the crudest summary, the dispute was at first sight about the very nature of nature and matter and,
useless. The first order discourse could be useful. The second order discourse was a waste of time.
relatedly therefore, about the role of the deity, and of the broad cultural and political implications of the different views on these metaphysical and religious concerns. The metaphysical picture that was promoted by the exile of ‘the father’ to a place outside the universe was that the world itself was, therefore, ‘brute’ and ‘inert’ and needed an external divine source for its motion.
Because trying to find a perpetual motion machine was a waste of time and money. Digging coal out of the ground and burning it could give you 'steam power'. This could make you a lot of money. Hoping that the water would get steamed if you said nasty things about its sex-life was a waste of time- which, for smart people, is also money.
In the dissenting picture, by contrast, matter was not brute and inert, but rather was shot through with an inner source of dynamism responsible for motion, that was itself divine.
Great! Why pay your utility bills if a nice river will kindly flow into your bath tub and then heat itself by thinking dirty thoughts?
For the dissenters, God and nature were not separable as in the official metaphysical picture that was growing around the new science, and John Toland, for instance, to take just one example among the active dissenting voices, openly wrote in terms he proclaimed to be ‘pantheistic’.
Toland was right about one thing. Newton's notion of inertia had been misunderstood and mistranslated. Still, he didn't make money though his books were influential. But Toland was very much on the side of 'disenchantment'. If the Church hierarchy is useless, then exorcisms are useless because there are no ghosts, demons or fairies at the bottom of the garden. If God is everywhere, then everywhere is boring and lacking in sprites and elves. Even the djinn are bound to be well behaved and as boring as fuck.
This metaphysical disagreement, however, was caught up in a range of wider implications. One was this: Some of the dissenters argued that it is only because one takes matter to be ‘brute’ and ‘stupid’, to use Newton’s own term, that one would find it appropriate to conquer it with nothing but profit and material wealth as ends, and thereby destroy it both as a natural and a human environment for one’s habitation.
Very true! The India Bilgrami fled was not a boring shithole because it was as poor as fuck. On the contrary it had lots of nice fairies because 'profit and material wealth' were considered vulgar 'ends' to pursue. True, if you happened to be the Socialist Prime Minister of a Secular Republic your family might suddenly become as rich as fuck- probably because fairies kept filling up your Swiss Bank Accounts.
In today’s terms, one might think that this point was a seventeenth century predecessor to our ecological concerns but though there certainly was an early instinct of that kind, it was embedded in a much more general point, a point really about how nature in an ancient and spiritually flourishing sense was being threatened and how therefore this was in turn threatening to our moral psychology of engagement with it, including the relations and engagement among ourselves as its inhabitants.
In 1716 Mary Hicks and her daughter- who was nine years old- were executed because they took off their stockings to cause a rain storm. A moral psychology which relies on 'enchantment' may have to witness the execution of little girls.
This last point is vital to the breadth of significance of the issues at stake, which were not about nature in a purely selfstanding sense. That is why the qualms expressed by the term ‘disenchantment of nature’ were not by any means merely ecological qualms. The ideal of enchantment was (and is) an ideal of an unalienated life (to use Marx’s later term), whether from nature or from one another as its inhabitants.
If you see fairies at the bottom of your garden, maybe you should see an 'alienist'- which was the old fashioned term for a shrink.
Marxism was and is an evil ideology when it isn't merely stupid and lazy. Run the fuck away from it.
Nature, itself, therefore was conceived in terms of its relations with its inhabitants and a history of those relations and a tradition that these engender in different societies, within which subjects engage with nature (broadly conceived in this way).
Do these engagements lead to sex? If not, maybe they aren't really engagements at all.
All this went into the understanding of ‘nature’ in what I have called the “ancient and spiritually flourishing sense” of that term.
No. The ancient and spiritual sense of Nature, or Prakriti, had nothing to do with agency, engagement, alienation or slitting the throat of the boss class.
Today, the most thoroughly and self-consciously secular sensibilities may recoil from the term ‘spiritually’, as I have just deployed it, though I must confess to finding myself feeling no such self-consciousness despite being a secularist, indeed an atheist.
But you are as stupid as shit. If you had any fucking self-consciousness you would shut the fuck up.
The real point has not much to do with the rhetoric. If one had no use for the word, if one insisted on having the point made with words that we today can summon with confidence and accept without qualm, it would do no great violence to the core of their thinking to say this: the dissenters thought of the world not as brute but as suffused with value.
Did the jizz on everything so as to suffuse it with 'engagement' or an Escort Agency or 'Enchantment'? I suppose so. Dissenters were randy buggers. No sheep's anus was safe when they were prowling around.
That they happened to think the source of such value was divine may not to be the deepest point of interest for us today.
More particularly if what gets us hard is the thought of all those nasty fairies up the garden's bottom.
We are much used to the lament that we have long been living in a world governed by overwhelmingly commercial motives.
Only if we are shitheads pretending to do 'Philosophy' or some other such shite. Still, stop paying the salaries of such lamenters and they will soon show that their motives are entirely mercenary.
What I have been trying to do is to trace this to its deepest conceptual sources
All them guys knew Latin and Greek- or at least they knew people who were very good at both. The deepest conceptual sources are beyond the ken of those of us who didn't have the Classics beaten into us at boarding skool.
and that is why the seventeenth century is so central to a proper understanding of this world.
Not in the view of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Indeed, this is a relatively recent academic availability cascade favoured by cretins like Chomsky.
Familiarly drawn connections and slogans, like “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism', are only the beginning of such a tracing.
They are silly. Capitalism just means financial markets allocate investment funds. This happens if no King or Commissar can confiscate wealth.
In his probing book, A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke says that “the experience of an impersonal outlook was empirically intensified in proportion as the rationale of the monetary motive gained greater authority.”
Which it could only do if you wouldn't get robbed.
This gives us a glimpse of the sources. As he says, one had to have an impersonal angle on the world to see it as the source of profit and gain, and vice versa.
Fuck off! You can see everything as highly personal and still understand that chopping down that nice forest and selling the timber will give you lots of shiny shiny silver.
But I have claimed that the sources go deeper. It is only when we see the world as Boyle and Newton did, as against the freethinkers and dissenters, that we understand further why there seemed no option but to stress this impersonality in our angle on the world. A desacralized world, to put it in the dissenting terms of that period, left us no other angle from which to view it, but an impersonal one.
Or a personal one. It doesn't matter if you think the elves of the forest will try to fuck you up if you chop it down. What matters is your knowledge that if you have money you can hire a guy who will faithfully report on the horrific manner in which he raped all those elves to death.
There could be no normative constraint coming upon us from a world that was brute.
Or one that was highly intelligent and sensitive and which would compose a very sad song about how cruel and insensitive we are being. Fuck we care about sad songs? Play gaangsta rap on the stereo of your sports car and drown that shit out.
It could not move us to engagement with it on its terms.
It can't even move us to shit on it.
All the term-making came from us. We could bring whatever terms we wished to such a world; and since we could only regard it impersonally, it being brute, the terms we brought in our actions upon it were just the terms that Burke describes as accompanying such impersonality, the terms of 'the monetary' motives for our actions.
We are welcome to try to convert trees to Scientology. Bushes on the other hand must be pissed on. Take it from me. They are all totes racist.
Thus it is, that the metaphysical issues regarding the world and nature, as they were debated around the new science, provide the deepest conceptual sources. But why, one might ask, should the fact of ‘the father’s exile to an external place as a clock winder have led to an understanding of the universe as wholly brute and altogether devoid of value?
I've answered that. Religious visionaries would keep trying to fuck God in the ass which is why he had to be sent to wind up some clock of the other. But this did not lead to anyone thing the world was devoid of value. Many trees exist which have not yet been converted to Scientology.
Why was it not possible to retain a world suffused with values that were intelligible to all who lived in it, despite the inaccessibility of the figure of the father?
Is it coz, lacking God to fuck in the ass, visionaries had turned their attention to fairies who, in consequence, were up the garden's bottom?
Why must value require a sacralized site for its station, without which it must be relegated to proxy, but hardly proximate, notions of desire or utility and gain?
Coz otherwise everybody would fuck it in the ass.
It might seem that these questions are anachronistic, suited only to our own time when we might conceivably (though perhaps not with much optimism) seek secular forms of re-enchanting the world.
by drinking beer in which quantum computing enabled nano-bots have been mixed. Then we piss on bushes which become sentient and acquire magical powers. That's one secular way or re-enchanting at least part of the world.
One cannot put them, at least not without strain and artificiality, to a period in which value was so pervasively considered to have a sacred source.
but only by a few nutters who liked writing pamphlets.
But even if we cannot put these questions to a world view which, by our modern lights, was constricted by impoverished conceptual options, we can ask a diagnostic question about what forces prevented the development of the idea that the world is enchanted with evaluative properties whose normative demands on us, even if now purely secular, move our first person point of view to a responsiveness into moral agency?
The force that prevented that stupid shit arose from the fact that Whitey, even back then, wasn't stupid or interested in only doing stupid shit.
The core of the diagnosis is that (an alternative and more secular) ideal of enchantment never took hold because
the fucking Capitalists bribed or intimidated everybody into desisting from thinking stupid or useless thoughts. Why were they so evil? The answer is that enchanted bushes would tell peeps to just slit the fucking throats of the boss class already.
there were too many powerful social forces that were complicit in keeping it out. The conceptual sources of disenchantment that we have traced are various but they were not miscellaneous. The diverse conceptual elements of religion, capital, nature, metaphysics, rationality, science, were tied together in a highly deliberate integration, that is to say in deliberately accruing worldly alliances.
This is still happening. Did you know that big Corporations use technology, not magic? Who do you think invents new stuff? Scientists! Even on this very campus there are Scientists who are hand in glove with the boss class! Talk to a bush sometime. It will tell you that you must immediately slit the throats of the boss class- and their evil henchmen, the scientists- otherwise everything will become disenchanted!
. In a word, a creation of the oligarchic basis for a statecraft
like that of the Republic of Venice or Genoa or Florence
needed to ensure the profitable extractive economies that were being generated effectively by and for the propertied classes.
as opposed to drunken hobos.
From the point of view of this emerging ideology around the new science, the idea that values to live by are available to the ordinary perceptions of a world we live in, would have the effect of demoting these privileged knowledges possessed by the elites to something more arcane, by making the sources of political morality much more democratic.
Why? There had been very successful oligarchies in the ancient and medieval world. What was the need to waste money on an 'ideology' for something that had always existed? Oligarchies in the past had succumbed to Imperial conquest. The only way to avert this was to be very good at fighting. Ideology didn't matter in the slightest. Greece had plenty of philosophers but succumbed to the more militaristic Romans.
Bilgrami, like most Indians, doesn't understand that the suffrage got extended till it became universal for a FISCAL reason. You elect people who get you to pay more in tax so as to permit investment in infrastructure and the type of public good which, soon enough, will make you more secure and more prosperous and thus able to pay even more in tax.
Bilgrami thinks democracy is about rich and powerful people becoming ashamed of their greed and insensitivity and handing over their wealth and their power to the elected representatives of the poor, starving, masses who, as in fairy tales, are secretly helped by kindly fairies and elves and genies and such like. Sadly, due to Agency getting Alienated, Disenchantment occurs and so people can no longer see the fairies who are telling them to just cut the fucking throats of the boss class already. Incidentally, did you know that Amrika is actually very poor? Capitalists are 'manufacturing consent' that it is rich while India is poor. Only the fairies know the truth. That is why 'Scientists' have been paid to pretend they don't really exist.
Some of you desi brothers and sisters say to me 'Bilgrami Sahib, you are soooo clever. You got PhD and started teaching Whitey useless shit thus getting revenge for all the wealth Whitey drained from us. I want to tell you, I have no hatred of Whitey. I found out that first they colonized themselves by disenchanting some bushes and trees. Only after that they were coming to our shores.
... these mercantile, political, scientific, and religious alliances produced over time the mentality that justified the colonial conquest of distant lands. The justification was merely an extension of the ideas that I have outlined to colonized lands, which too were to be viewed as brute nature that was available for conquest and control—but only so long as one was able to portray the inhabitants of the colonized lands in infantilized terms, as a people who were as yet unprepared—by precisely a mental lack of such a notion of scientific rationality—to have the right attitudes towards nature and commerce and the statecraft that allows nature to be pursued for commercial gain.
Why portray the natives in infantilized terms? Why not wipe them out and bring in slaves? The only possible answer is that the natives will work for less money than it would cost to maintain a slave. But in that case poverty, caused by low productivity, is the reason you are in control of their territory. Just say so rather than pretend that they are cute little babies who need their nappy changed.
the very fact that Weber and Marx were able to mobilize terms such as ‘disenchantment’ and ‘commodification’ and ‘alienation’
proved they were as thick as shit. Did you know Weber was supposed to be an economist? Marx had a law degree. These nutters were useless in the field in which they had credentials. They both only gained importance because of the Bolshevik Revolution and the possibility that your time at Uni might be well spent giving yourself the alibi that you are a retarded 'fellow traveller' whose life might be spared when the boss class gets its throat slit alongside the 'right deviationists' and the 'left adventurists' and the 'bourgeois idealist' centrists and so forth.
at all against these thick notions of rationality makes absolutely clear—what I have tried to motivate in the first half of this paper –the deep connections that exist between value and agency and a certain conception of the perceptible world which we inhabit as agents.
These are the arbitrary imputations of an utterly useless tosser. The deep connection here is that between shitting and defecating and taking an almighty dump.
These are all terms that describe how our relations to the world were impoverished in ways that desolate us,
but do no harm to our bank account or Pension Fund and thus which we only pretend to find desolating
once we sever these deep connections in our conceptual and material lives.
I took a week off work when my beloved grandmother died. My boss was very understanding. Then I took another week off work when my other grandmother died. She was less understanding. I got the sack when my third grandmother died. What? Granny could have been a Lezza. Lots of people have two Mummies.
This was the wider significance of the disputation about naturalism in the Early Modern period that I have tried to excavate genealogically.
Bilgrami appears ignorant of the strong scientific interest in various supernatural phenomena through the ages. There was no real 'disputation about naturalism' in the early Modern Period. The same sorts of ideas existed then as had existed in Classical antiquity and which would reappear in the late Nineteenth Century. One could write about the Cambridge Platonists and the fourth dimension or Bishop Berkeley as a precursor to Mach and the early Einstein. The history of concepts requires wide reading and some knowledge of current 'Open problems' in STEM subjects. Brown monkeys should concentrate on blaming Whitey for extracting all Ind's fabled wealth through aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus. They should then queue up in an orderly fashion for some nice International Prize which gets awarded every so often to darkies from shithole countries. Sadly, under Modi, Indians may cease to qualify for intellectual affirmative action. This is the real reason we must oppose the BJP. Only Rahul Baba can restore our claim to being the veritable arsehole of the Turd World.
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