A younger and dapper Derek Parfit, photographed by the late philosopher of mind Susan Hurley at Oxford in the 1980s.
Posts tagged history
Posted 1 year ago
…but it is harmful to overlook the fundamental identity of the social sciences with history, and to mutilate research into human affairs by remodeling the social sciences into deformed likenesses of physics.
Alan Donagan, “Historical Understanding and the History of Philosophy”
The writings on the philosophy of geography are pretty thin on the ground, but it seems that many approaches from the philosophy of history are relevant to the research I want to do. History and geography deal with the same conceptual schema in many cases: constraining structures, environmental and social conditions, agency, etc. Donagan’s work seems like a good place to start.
Posted 1 year ago
We may thus have no idea whether the existence of the Universe is on the whole good.
This ignorance, however, would have little practical importance. Our practical question is:
What ought we to do?
To answer this question, we don’t need to know either whether the past was worth it, or whether the whole of history will have been worth it. Suppose that the past was in itself so bad that, even if the future will be very good, human history will not have been worth it. If that were true, it would have been better if human beings had never existed. But that truth would have no practical implications. If the future would be worth it, we should not give up now.
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, p. 613-614
Posted 1 year ago
Let’s start by giving up a lot of BS about “principle.” There is no history of Democratic Party or liberal principle that Obama is betraying. FDR’s compromises to achieve Social Security and labor legislation abandoned African Americans with effects still strongly felt in our social order. No Democratic president was able to pass universal healthcare and all bargained away any chance of achieving it. It was FDR who gave J. Edgar Hoover the authority to spy on the Left, and JFK who gave him the same to spy on Martin Luther King.
Richard Flacks, “Beyond Barack Obama”
Posted 1 year ago
Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In 1798
In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed -“An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.
Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.
And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for signature, I think it’s safe to assume that the man in that chair had a pretty good grasp on what the framers had in mind.
Posted 1 year ago
… as early as its founding convention of 1866 the [National Labor Union] wrestled with the attempt to make black inclusion a reality, and by 1869 it had asked black delegates to form their own all-black organization. The result was the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU), whose 214 delegates gathered in Washing, choosing Isaac Myers as its president; Frederick Douglass headed the organization after 1872. ‘It is not without interest,’ historian Rayford W. Logan notes, ‘that the first large-scale exclusion of Negroes by private organizations in the postbellum period was the handiwork of organized labor.’
… The NLU’s solution of encouraging equality but not integration, urging the formation of separate black trade unions, ‘was a first halting note,’ according to W.E.B. Du Bois. ‘Negroes were welcomed to the labor movement, not because they were laborers but because they might be competitors in the market, and the logical conclusion was either to organize them or guard against their actual competition by other methods. It was to this latter alternative that white American labor almost unanimously turned.’ The recommendation of a specially formed NLU Committee on Negro Labor reveals the hamstrung quality of the members’ deliberations: ‘While we feel the importance of the subject, and realize the danger in the form of competition in mechanical Negro labor,’ the committeemen concluded, ‘yet we find the subject involved in so much mystery, and upon it so wide diversity of opinion amongst our members, we believe that it is inexpedient to take action on the subject.’ Du Bois cites the NLU’s failure to bridge the divide of race as a fatal misstep. Relegating the black worker to a role as a competitor and a prospective under-bidder’ and asking him, ‘when he appeared at conventions…to organize separately; that is, outside the real labor movement,’ was nothing less than ‘a contradiction of all sound labor policy.’
Philip Dray, There Is Power In A Union, pp. 81, 83-84 (via ziatroyano)
Posted 1 year ago
It’s my belief, though, that American political violence is a direct legacy of the American Revolution, for the patriots’ victory in that conflict proved to the American people that violence could achieve a positive end: independence and the creation of a new nation. It is a troubling, but inescapable, bequest that stems from the fact that our nation was born in violence, and it derives from the reality that violence has ever since become not only the device of criminals, but also of government and those who disagree with the government. Public officials who condone the use of torture in recent times should, by rights, give pause when they try to condemn the actions of Jared L. Loughner, Timothy McVeigh or the Unabomber. But, typically, our public servants see no contradiction, no hypocrisy, in advocating extreme political violence against our alleged enemies around the globe while condemning political violence when it is aimed against the government — or, more precisely, against them. In other words, political violence is legitimate when the government commits it; but it is appalling when individuals commit it against the government or its representatives. Political violence committed by individuals is explained by marginalizing those perpetrators as crackpots. Political violence committed by the government is justified as guaranteeing national security.
Posted 1 year ago
Some thoughts on thanksgiving.
Human culture has always adapted and changed holiday observances around to suit local preferences and changing circumstances. This is what enabled the creation of the holiday of Thanksgiving in the first place, as it allowed Americans to overlook the horrific past underlying its whole history, and turned it into a day of feasting (the Pilgrims were more likely to fast during the observance of a holiday). We must certainly acknowledge the history of the holiday, and also be mindful of the ways in which racism and violence has affected and continues to affect American Indians today if we are to have any understanding of the holiday at all.
I don’t think this necessarily precludes us from observing it. Given that holidays change over time, it’s not outside the scope of possibility that we can re-appropriate the holiday for more just ends. Naturally, reminding ourselves of the wrongdoings in America’s past and present should not happen only one day a year, but the fact that the holiday exists already and brings people together can be useful in promoting a more honest and socially just view of its history. I know the joke is that the mashed potatoes always go flying across the room when politics come up at the thanksgiving table, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to help our friends and family understand the holiday better. Sharing meals is an extremely important component of human culture everywhere in the world, and I think coming together over good food can be a powerful way of reaching people.
However, the practice of saying ‘I’m thankful for…’ needs a bit more critical examination. Obviously, I personally have an awful lot to be thankful for, but I can’t help but think that when I list these things at gatherings with friends and family I’m just reading a laundry list of the privilege I enjoy (and that I got merely through circumstances of my birth, much of it at the expense of others in the past). It’s not that I’m uncomfortable acknowledging and confronting that privilege, but rather that reciting it at the thanksgiving table makes it seem like I’m glad that I have it while others are hurt by it. We should all obviously acknowledge the good in our lives and be grateful for it, but I can’t help but hope there’s a better way of framing this gratitude that acknowledges the systemic injustices that prevent others from having an equal right and access to many of the things that I am grateful for and should be a right (food, shelter, education, to name a few). Outrage might have a role to play: we mustn’t merely be thankful for what we have, but also mad that the same things are actively, unnecessarily, and wrongly being denied to others.
If we are to continue observe the holiday at all, it ought to be in a more collectively self-critical way and in the service of more just ends. Otherwise, I fear, it’s just promoting the same ignorance that (in part) allowed its horrible history to happen in the first place.
Posted 1 year ago
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and
not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in
order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first
flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewilder-
ing mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose
of this or that particular map.
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis,
which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the
mapmaker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose
shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more
than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending
interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian
means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political
or racial or national or sexual.
Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in
the way a mapmaker’s technical interest is obvious (“This is a Mercator
projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you’d better use
a different projection”). No, it is presented as if all readers of history
had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability.
This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a
society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical
problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social, classes,
races, nations.
Howard Zinn (via zouave)
There’s been a lot of work by geographers about how selection in cartography also reflect ideological biases and are not merely technical. Zinn actually oversimplifies the role of the cartographer in society (which is pretty ironic, considering what he’s talking about)- mapping human society has been and always will be a political act. Maps can objective in one important sense, however: the information they convey is accessible to anyone who can read and interpret them. However, the choices of what get put on maps that represent people and human activity are never objective in the sense of being politically neutral, as they will always, by their very nature, show some things and hide others. Many historians of geography have explored the hidden and overt biases that shape the process of map-making. So the considerations Zinn so rightly points out here are just as important for cartographers as historians.
(Source: sociologic)
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