Discussions on Economics, Philosophy and Politics with Professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger.Read more here:
www.robertounger.net
“We Drown Our Sorrows In Consumption”
The European: Do you still see the nation state as the locus of these institutional experiments?
Unger: Despite the idea that the nation state is passé, it remains the main focus of innovation and power in the world. The problem with European society is they have not created institutions that internalize the impulse to change. With the way things are organized, transformation continues to depend on crisis. Throughout the 20th century the only way they have been able to change is by slaughtering one another. When they’re at peace they go to sleep and drown their sorrows in consumption, in a depressive materialism. Sleepy democracies in which no one wants to sacrifice anything, no one believes very much in anything except for extremists on the left and the right. This is a disaster. The centrist technocrats, the cold calculators, all like Europe. Everyone who is young, restless, and rebellious is opposed to the European project. The power to shape the forms of economic and social life is increasingly centralized in the bureaucratic apparatus and the definition of social entitlements and endowments is delegated to the local national authorities. It ought to be exactly the opposite. The primary responsibility of the union is to ensure the capability and endowments of its citizens so that they can raise a storm of experimentation and try things differently and try this and try that.
Read the entire interview with The European here.
The Trouble with Economics
Economics, the most influential social science, suffers from flaws that limit its insight and compromise its authority. The narrowness and shallowness of its contributions to the debate about the recent economic crisis and the subsequent weak recovery have made these flaws manifest.
Watch the full video of this lecture here
Post four in my series on the relationship between the United States and Left.
How can a community survive the full creative expression of its individual members?
This faith in self-construction goes together in the contemporary religion of humanity with a faith in human solidarity. At its extreme limit, it is the visionary conviction, belied but not destroyed by the terrors of ordinary social life, that all men and woman are bound together by an indivisible circle of love. In its more prosaic form, it is the historical insight that the practical benefits of social life all arise from cooperation and connection.
That form of cooperation will be most productive that is least bound by the restraints of any established scheme of social division and hierarchy and that is most successful in moderating the tension between the imperatives of cooperation and innovation. Every innovation — technical, organizational, or ideological — jeopardizes the present system of cooperation because it threatens to upset the social regime of rights and expectations in which cooperative relations are embedded. We should prefer the way of organizing cooperation that minimizes this tension. It will generally be one that makes the endowments and equipments of individual independent of the accidents of their birth as well as the particulars of their position; that rejects all the social and cultural predetermination of how people can work together; and that encourages the spread of an experimentalist impulse, harnessing confrontation with the unexpected to create the new.
The most valuable form of connection will enable people to diminish the price of dependence and depersonalization that we must pay for engagement with others. Self-construction depends on connection, and connection threatens to entangle us in toils of subjugation and to rob us of the very distinction that we can develop only thanks to it. There is a conflict between the enabling conditions of self-affirmation. To diminish that conflict is to become freer and greater, not by living apart but by living together while deepening the experience of self-possession.
Misusing Keynes
What did Keynes really teach? The influence of vulgar Keynesianism on academic orthodoxy as well as on practical discourse has been so great that it threatens to obscure the distinctive core of Keynes’s developed economic theory. Fortunately, the theory is unencumbered by the toy mathematics that has served so much subsequent economic theorizing as a surrogate for causal explanation. I interpret this theory as organized around nine propositions. The first three propositions have to do with the themes intimately connected in Keynes’s ideas of money, uncertainty, and illusion.
Watch the full video of this lecture here
Post three in my series on the relationship between the United States and Left.
How do you design a social structure that accommodates the need for a “permanent rebellion” against its own present form?
No institutional and imaginative ordering of social life accommodates all our strivings. The next best thing to such an all-inclusive order is the recombination of experimental pluralism — different directions — with experimental self-correction — each direction subject to the condition that is ease with its own revision.
The aim is the creation of a self that is less the plaything of accidental circumstance and the puppet of a compulsive social routine; a more godlike self. Such a self is able to imagine and to accept other selves as the context-transcending agents they all really are. It can experience a form of empowerment untainted by the exercise of oppression and by the illusions of pre-eminence. To this end, society must equip the individual — every individual — with the educational and economic instruments he needs to lift himself up and make himself more godlike.
The “religion of humanity” that makes up the historical aspiration of the Left begins with the premise that we possess an infinite capacity within us to transcend the forms of the world we inhabit:
The religion of humanity presents the self as transcendent over context: incapable of being contained within any limited mental or social structure. Not satisfied occasionally to rebel, it wants to fashion a principle that makes rebellion permanent, and renders it internal to social life, in the form of ongoing experimental remaking.
The United States and the Left
In this 9th chapter of my book The Left Alternative, I argue that “no country identifies more completely” with that “religion of humanity” “at the center of the historical aspirations of the Left,” than the United States.
What is this “religion of humanity” and how is it engendered in United States, a nation that is said to have no living Left at all? Over the next few posts I will lay out the argument presented in the book.
If, as a result of the overthrow, the transformation, and the self-transformation, we come to have more life right now, we may be more at risk of being overtaken and paralyzed by the sentiment of life than we have been, or could be, by the fear of death and the vertigo of groundlessness…
…Are we then to be chained, in the manner from which the philosophers of the overcoming of the world wanted to free us, to the wheel of desire, to the treadmill of longing, satiation, boredom, restlessness, and further struggle and, in the realm of perception of the manifest world, to the oscillation between seeing and starring?
Indeed, we are. Or at least we are except to the extent that the enhancement of our experience of life, and of our awareness of others and of the world, changes the way in which we experience a dialectic inscribed in our constitution. It can change this dialectic, quite simply, by turning the treadmill into an ascent with respect to the only good we really have, life lived right now, although viewed in the light of the future.
— Roberto Unger, Tanner Lecture: The Religion of the FutureWe shall soon die and waste away and be forgotten, although we feel that we should not. We shall die without having understood what this strange world, and our brief time within it, are really about.
Our religion should begin in the recognition of these terrifying facts rather than in their denial, as religion traditionally has. It should arouse us to change society, culture, and ourselves so that we become – all of us, not just a happy few – bigger as well as more equal, and take for ourselves a larger part of the qualities we have attributed to God. It should therefore, as well, make us more willing to unprotect ourselves for the sake of bigness and of love. It should convince us to exchange serenity for searching.
Then, so long as we live we shall have a greater life, and draw further away from the idols but closer to one another, and be deathless, temporarily.
— Roberto Unger, Tanner Lecture: The Religion of the FutureIn the fifth part of my eight part series, I address the second of three major orientations in the spiritual history of humanity: the humanization of the world.
What we have is one another. Solidarity stands in the place of metaphysics. Nature is indifferent to our concerns. The sacred is our experience of personality and interpersonal encounter. Our best hope is to build a civilization, established on the basis of the obligations we owe each other, by virtue of the roles that we perform.
The most important instance of the humanization of the world is the teaching of Confucius and the tradition of Confucianism…
In this fourth video in my series on nihilism, I explore in depth the first of the three major spiritual directions I outlined previously: the overcoming of the world.
The hallmark of the “overcoming of the world” is the belief that under the appearance of distinction and of change, ultimate reality is both unified and timeless. By establishing contact with the one and changeless being, we can achieve a form of selflessness that is, at the same time, an exercise of self-possession.
There have been two main variants of the overcoming of the world considered as a metaphysical view. One variant is radical: it denies altogether the reality of phenomenal distinction and of temporal change. The sole major example in the history of Western philosophy, has been the philosophy of Schopenhauer…
The metaphysic of the overcoming of the world may at first seem incompatible with the teachings of modern science. Yet there is much in the scientific discoveries of the recent past that might inspire a recovery and reinterpretation of this metaphysical conception. No idea has been more central or more revolutionary in the science of the 20th century than the idea that the universe has a history. The natural kinds or distinctions among things that now exist, once did not exist, and at some time int he future will no longer exist. At those times in the past or in the future, the distinction between the laws of nature and the states of affairs that they govern, ceases to hold. On such a view, the distinctions are transient and shallow, but only because time is radically real and permanent. This is a version of the overcoming in the world that seems never to have been expressed in philosophy, East or West…
There are three major objections to this spiritual approach…The third, and the most important, [is] that it promises a state of being that it is unable to deliver. By devaluing the reality of the historical world, and of all the projects we undertake within it, it narrows the scene of our actions and our experience. It drives us back into ourselves. Under the pretense of emancipation, it delivers us to our terrors and to our obsessions. We cannot become free by deciding to be small.
In this third part of my eight part series on nihilism, I discuss three major orientations in the world history of religion:
- The Overcoming of the World: the belief that the experience of distinction and of change is illusory, that true reality is both unified and hidden. My example: Classical Buddhism.
- The Humanization of the World: the belief that society exists in a meaningless natural void, and yet, within this void, we can create meaning by building a civilization that bears the imprint of our humanity. My example: Confucianism.
- The Struggle with the World: the belief that we can and should embark on a trajectory of ascent within the world we experience, that we should struggle to be more godlike. My examples: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the modern secular projects of emancipation, like democracy, liberalism and socialism, and the cultural program of emancipation, Romanticism
I end with this remark:
One of the three directions, the struggle with the world, in its secular form, of the projects of political and personal emancipation, has set the whole world on fire for over two centuries. It has aroused in the heart of ordinary humanity the hope of greatness, the desire to expand our share in the attributes of the divine. This arousal is the point of departure for a new religious revolution in history.
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In this second part of my eight part series on nihilism, I discuss four fundamental flaws in the human condition:
- Mortality: “although we experience an unlimited fecundity, nature has decreed our death”
- Groundlessness: “we are unable to grasp the solution to the enigma of existence”
- Insatiability: “we demand the infinite from the only thing we have around us, the finite”
- Susceptibility to belittlement: “we feel that we share in the nature of the divine and the infinite, but our lives are wasted in a series of petty compromises, a carapace of routine and surrender begins to form around each of us, as a result of which, we die many little deaths”
This is the first in a series of eight videos about major orientations in the history of philosophy from the standpoint of their bearing on the confrontation with nihilism.
In this video we ask:
- What is religion?
- What is philosophy?
- What is nihilism?
Let me know your thoughts!
- Roberto
Starting today I’ll start releasing some of my videos on philosophy, economics, and politics.
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Enjoy!
