Frank clarifies: “Oh, and the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand…”

So, we’ve got all of Europe, and apparently the British colonies where the majority of the population are now the descendents of the colonists.

What about Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, etc.? Are these part of the “West”? Why or why not?

Dan Dare suggests: “My answer would be that the West is those countries that have a Christian heritage. That includes recently secularized societies like Europe. But I would perhaps also include at the fringes, Russia and Latin America.”

I don’t get it. Why would “Russia” and “Latin America” be “at the fringes” under the explication you’ve given so far? Russia and Latin America are certainly countries that have a Christian (or “Judaeo-Christian”) heritage, if anyone at all does.

However, I’m a bit afraid that this explication might rule out too much or too little, given what people normally mean. For example, Albania and Bosnia-Hercegovina have been majority Muslim countries for centuries. But it’s hard to conceive of any reason, short of ad hockery, to exclude them from “the West” while including Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, etc.

Dan goes on: “I might be tempted to include societies that were based on Classical Roman and Greek models even if they were not Christian, but no such thing exists any more. (Unless one means the modern “pagan” West). This recognises that “the West” has classical as well as JudeoChristian roots.”

There are two different claims you could be making here:

1. Classical pagan thought and culture is counted as part of “the West” as we know it today.

But if that’s what you mean, then what sort of argument could you give that Jewish thought and culture is more closely related to classical pagan thought and culture than it is to Islam, such as to group Jewish thought and culture, and classical pagan thought and culture, together while leaving Islam as an outlier?

1. “The West” as we know it today has continuities with, and roots in, the classical pagan thought and culture, but classical pagan thought and culture are not, properly, counted as part of “the West” as we know it today.

If this is what you mean, then things become a bit clearer. But you’d have trouble convincing, say, Averroes or Avicenna or al-Farabi that classical pagan thought and culture is the exclusive property of Christendom.

So, since I continue to be puzzled, let me add a bit to my original dumb question. The new dumb question is: “What is ‘the West’—and on what basis do you determine whether a society is part of ‘the West’ or not?”

I have a basic, stupid question here.

To wit: what is “the West”? What societies does it include and over what time periods?

Thanks, arcane, for good comments. The stuff on education (i.e., actually on topic) will have to wait for a moment, because it is very late and I have virtual miles to go before I sleep. But I would like to remark quickly on this:

“There isn’t a doubt in anybody’s mind that Bismarck was right-wing, …”

Indeed. There’s no doubt in my mind, either. That’s why I said: “These are ideas that come from a recognizable Right-wing source—they are straight out of the educational playbook of the Kaiser’s Prussia. But that just goes to show that not all Right-wing ideas are conservative ideas.”

The fact that Bismarck was clearly a man of the Right is immaterial unless conservatism, as a historical tradition of thought and practice, is identical with the Right. Which it’s not—although the two often overlap. Conservatism and Rightism are distinct (though linked) in their historical origins, in their theoretical preoccupations, and in their

Case in point: it would be hard for anyone to seriously defend the claim that Nazism was not a movement of the Right. (You can point out that it claimed to be a form of socialism; true, but that only shows that there is Right-wing socialism.) But it would also be hard for anoyone to seriously defend the claim that Nazism was a conservative movement; it was a movement devoted to radical reconstruction of the whole society, and indeed the whole world, from the standpoint of a apocalyptic conception of racial struggle and a messianic notion of racial purity. Now, the Second Reich was very far from being that; but it was also very far from being “conservative” in any meaningful sense; it was a Right-wing regime which pioneered nearly every piece of “progressive” government policy and waged an ongoing war against traditional institutions in the name of creating a new Kultur in the image of the new Prussian State.

I’ll have something to say on actual educational issues soon. Cheers.

“Yes, and I still support abolishing it. Either though you ignored the context that I wrote that in, are vouchers and testing not conservative proposals?”

Depends on what you take the content of conservatism to be, I suppose. If your aim is strictly limited government and a federal republic rather than a national bureaucracy, then no, these aren’t conservative proposals.

Vouchers aren’t the main focus of my concern here—although I will say that they amount to extending government money—and thus, government control—over private schools as well as state schools. There are good arguments to be made on both sides for whether the benefits to school competition still outweigh the costs in increased bureaucratic control and homogenization, but it certainly seems to me that the further away from local communities you place the locus of control (like, say, in the federal Department of Education) the worse it looks.

The “Good God, man,” though, is directed towards the notion that the federal power-grab through mandated “testing” is somehow a conservative notion. What “testing” means is a massive and unprecedented takeover of education by the federal government through Department of Education testing mandates. That is what Bush promised and that is what he delivered. Today the federal education bureaucracy is more powerful, exercises more centralized control over local school districts, and has a budget heading for the roof. You may say John Kerry would be just as bad or worse; fine, but no-one is claiming John Kerry is a conservative.

These are ideas that come from a recognizable Right-wing source—they are straight out of the educational playbook of the Kaiser’s Prussia. But that just goes to show that not all Right-wing ideas are conservative ideas. If you still think that these proposals are a good idea, fine; there are arguments to be made for them. But there are no arguments to be made for describing them as conservative proposals.

arcane said: “In it are great conservative proposals, such as conducting mandatory testing programs to increase school accountability and voucher programs so that lower income families can get their children out of failing public schools.”

Good God, man, since when is a massive federal takeover of the educational system through Department of Ed testing mandates a conservative proposal? Wasn’t it conservatives who were pushing for the Department of Education to be abolished not ten years ago?

“I was skeptical simply because it seemed to me that the characteristics of the Russian “personality” were crystallized as early as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (or perhaps Peter the Great), that is, the appeal of autocracy and the strong man.”

People say this about Russia and its history all the time, but I don’t get it at all. Didn’t ordinary Russians rebel against the Czar repeatedly? Didn’t they even sort of contemplate a revolution at some point?

Weren’t most of the repressive measures of Soviet Communism directed against internal opposition to the centralization of the Party during the Civil War and post-Civil War period? Wasn’t there an extensive dissident movement? Didn’t the regime finally collapse internally in the face of such opposition?

Russian history is a terribly sad story, but it seems to me that there are much better explanations for that than blaming the victims or their “national character”…

I’m a bit puzzled by the tack taken by several defenders of philosophy in this thread. For example:

Rikurzhen: “At its best, analytical philosophy relies on falsification, permits empirical solutions, and enjoys a marketplace of ideas.”

Steve: “Philosophy does have a role to play in science.”

Frank: “Philosophy such as his does more, by way of lucid logical processes informed by the current state of scientific knowledge, to discredit theism, or creationism than mere data-crunching. A truly philosophy-averse “scientist” is little more than a technician.”

Steve: “I agree with you to an extent and had outlined some ways I think philosophy is useful.”

It’s not that I necessarily disagree with claims such as these; but I wonder whether they really get at the underlying issue. There may very well be good reasons to think that philosophy is, in some ways, useful to empirical science. But does an intellectual discipline need to be useful to empirical science to be worth pursuing? If so, Jesus, why?

gc: “how can you teach mathematics if you believe that 1 = 1 has the same truth value as 1 = 2?”

I don’t know, but Derrida didn’t believe this or argue for it. Nowhere in Derrida’s writing does he challenge the notion of truth as applied within discursive domains—among them mathematics. What he takes himself to be challenging is an uncritical metaphysical account of what our traffic in truth, plain meanings of words, etc. amounts to. As Derrida himself puts it in Limited Inc.:

“[T]he value of truth … is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. … [W]ithin interpretive contexts … that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competance, criteria of discussion and of consensus. … I take into account and believe that it is necessary to account for this stability [of interpretive contexts], as well as for all the norms, rules, contractual possibilities, that depend upon it. But … to account for a certain stability … is precisely not to speak of eternity or of absolute solidity; it is to take into account a historicity, a nonnaturalness, of ethics, of politics, of institutionality, etc. … I say that there is no stability that is absolute, eternal, intangible, natural, etc. But that is implied in the very concept of stability. A stability is not an immutability; it is by definition always destabilizable.”

Derrida is not a truth-nihilist. There are deep, fundamental problems with his philosophy and his method, but this is not among them. If lit crit popularizers, or unsympathetic critics, have tried to make Derrida into one, that is their problem, not his. For an excellent overview of what Derrida is (and isn’t) doing, and some of the interpretive and philosophical problems involved with reference to contemporary Analytic philosophy, I recommend Martin Stone’s “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” anthologized in THE NEW WITTGENSTEIN (eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read).

gc suggests the following analogy: “Gould is to evolution … as … Freud is to psychiatry … as … Marx is to economics”

This gives significantly too much in the way of props to mainstream “quantitative” psychiatry and economics. Marx and Freud both have significant advantages over the status quo in psychiatry and economics—which is not a sign of their virtues, but rather of the fields’ vices.

“I don’t think one can ever really have too much quantitative thought in a field.”

What if it’s not a quantitative field?