Another Bard professor has chimed in with the “damning with faint
praise” stance of Roger Berkowitz that I dealt with in a post
titled “Bard Professors attack Occupy Wall Street“. This time it
is Steven Mazie, a political science professor, who has a web-only
NY Times item titled “Rawls on Wall Street“.
Like Berkowitz, Mazie frets over the hatred that the protesters
have toward the rich:
Despite providing a remarkable venue for what Al Gore called a
“primal scream of democracy,” Occupy Wall Street is leveraged too
heavily on the rhetoric of rage rather than reciprocity. Rawls
would argue that Occupy is fully justified in its criticism of the
political and economic structures that propagate massive
concentrations of wealth; he saw the “basic structure” of society
as the “primary subject of justice.” But Rawls would lament the
tendency of the “99 percent” to misdirect their energies into
hatred of individuals in the 1 percent. He would have them save
their hostility for the policies and institutions that have
permitted only the wealthiest to enjoy significant gains from the
past two decades of economic growth.
Whenever I read this kind of sanctimonious nonsense, I feel like I
have wandered into Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” by
mistake, with its images of Madame LaFarge knitting away
furiously. Of course, when you stop and think about it, there’s
not much difference between John Rawls and Charles Dickens. This
kind of 19th century moralism is a lot easier to take when you are
reading a good story like “A Christmas Tale” but when served up by
a political science professor as advice to people who haven’t
worked in five years or so and who have lost their homes, it is
pretty objectionable.
John Rawls was a perfectly decent man, who despite his
British-style Victorian-era pieties was actually an American born
in Baltimore in 1921. In 1971 he came out with “A Theory of
Justice” that made the case for liberalism at the very moment its
reputation had become tarnished beyond repair after six years of
imperialist slaughter in Vietnam. The book was typically
“philosophical” in its abstraction-sodden prose. Four years
earlier I decided to drop out of the graduate philosophy program
at the New School and join the Trotskyist movement because
philosophy in general—and ethics in particular—was so out of touch
with what was going in the world. I had no idea who John Rawls was
at the time but had heard more or less the same song and dance
from Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason”.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/another-bard-professor-proffers-bad-advice-to-ows/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
