I don't know. What I know is that we can lash out, get ad hominem, drag the level of debate to the ground here and there, just as we can get into bouts of righteous despair and complain about the low level of debate. But PEN-L remains useful. Skewed demographics and all, it's still a gauge of the sentiment and worldview of people in the left. And it's not a mere echo. It recombines ideas and the recombination sometimes leads -- by chance if you wish -- to better ideas.
Note to Carrol: Both PEN-L and its individual members exist. Both the left and the leftists exists. Both the DP and its individual candidates exist. Both the "step in the real movement" and the "program" stating the "final goal" exist. Both the universe and the galaxies, the solar systems and the planets exist. I'll push it further. Marvin Minsky claimed that the mind was an emerging property of entities that in and by themselves are mindless, when interacting in certain ways. The mind doesn't exist without the mindless entities. The mindless entities do not generate the mind if they don't interact in certain ways. Still, both the mind and the mindless entities that generate it exist. Oparin conjectured that life was the emerging property of entities that are in and by themselves lifeless (aminoacids, nucleic acids), when organized in certain ways. Life and the lifeless entities that organized in a certain manner generate life exist. Yes, Chairman Mao claimed that: "Imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers." But, in practice, he was so impressed by the strength of those paper tigers that he invited their representative to visit China. Imperialism and reactionaries are paper tigers in the sense that their power is much less solid than it appears at first sight, once you pause and think deep about it. But their power is real nonetheless. Like all social power (wealth, money, capital, political power, sex appeal, powers of persuasion), it is held together by social behaviors conditioned by social structures that are hardened or objective only in the *social* sense. That is, they are produced and reproduced by people with design and will, people who -- partially but increasingly -- try to conceive those social structures in their heads before they give them physical forms. Social objectivity is a peculiar type of objectivity to be distinguished from the objectivity of physical objects, whose hardness also (in a certain sense) vanishes into thin air when you pause and think about its deeper structures. Ask the physicists. Social objectivity can unravel unannounced when people's collective beliefs in the permanence of said social structures shift. And the shifts in collective beliefs can be precipitated by tiny, molecular changes, where even the choices made by a single individual can pack a big punch. In turn, that doesn't mean that the choices of individuals are the only or even the essential causes of these ideological shifts, since the shifts are *always* prepared by long, gradual social processes, sometimes unnoticed, processes that (again) partly at least embody or objectify the designs of people -- e.g. organizers, organic intellectuals, even leftists having endless discussions and conducting sandbox politics. Marx wrote: "Once the inner connection of things has been exposed, the theoretical belief in the eternal necessity of the existing conditions collapses, even before the collapse happens in practice." This is a very powerful idea. I call it the Marxist epiphany, from epi (outside) and phaneia (appearance), the inside of reality revealing itself outwardly. Very Hegelian. We still need to distinguish between (1) the collapse of the belief in the eternal necessity of the existing conditions and (2) the collapse of the actual existing conditions. Because they are not one and the same thing. All political structures, all social structures in general, are empty shells in that trivial sense. Their objectivity is social. By the way, that includes any type of hard-core "Leninist" organization with the most Jesuitic or "Bolshevik" discipline febrile minds might contemplate. The idea that the DP, the RP, the Left, GE, and the NBA don't exist, have no membership, no policies, no internal structure, because they don't meet Carrol's or Shane's or Julio's arbitrary criteria of what a "true" party, "true" company, or "true" sport association should be, is silly. Yes, the candidates are real, have a corporeal existence. But the political vehicles that make it possible for them to get elected to the most influential positions of command in the richest and most powerful country on earth and in history, those political vehicles are also real. They are not empty shells in 2 or 3 dimensions. (Shane: 2-dimensional objects can have an inside as well.) They have an existence, not only during an electoral process. And if they did, so what? Elections also matter. Electoral politics is the surface of the political life in a country like this, but surfaces also exist. Consider the surface of your dinner table. It exists. It's hard to the touch, even though the molecules and atoms that make it up are not really solid. They look solid and feel solid only because our senses are too rough to see how porous they truly are. Still, if you bang your head on them, they will feel real solid to you. The hardness is not real, and yet it is. Back to the initial point of this senseless reflection. PEN-L is what we make of it. If the frequent posters don't get you what you the lurker want. Don't just get out of lurkdom to complain. Take responsibility and lead by example. Take over. Overthrow the regulars. Lift the intellectual standards of the list with your own posts. Again, the list is not a mere empty shell. It does exist. It's the emergent property (humble or haughty) of our interactions. In support of Doyle, I'll say that sensible conclusions conclusions may emerge if you try and synthesize (critically) the senseless opinions of its list members. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
