Santorum comes and kills our birds in Iowa

“Mr. Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, has logged more miles in Iowa than any of his rivals. He went pheasant hunting on Monday in central Iowa and invited reporters along to talk afterward.”

Go home, Santorum. I don’t want you killing pheasants in Iowa.

“moral imperative”

Romney may be saying this just for campaigning purposes, but it’s still worth talking about it:

“It is a moral imperative for America to stop spending more money than we take in,” Mr. Romney says in the ad, which will be running when he arrives in Iowa on Tuesday for a bus tour and an orchestrated blitz of appearances by surrogates leading up to the caucuses on Jan. 3.

No. There is nothing “immoral” about spending more than you take in. This practice has a name: investment. Did I spend more than I took in while studying for my various degrees? Of course I did. And it might actually have been “immoral” not to do that, since my entire future depended on it.

Moralization of the deficit is one of America’s political problems, in my opinion. Then again, moralizing just about anything is one of the characteristic American national traits. It’s not always a bad thing, but quite often it is.

Ross Perot moralized the deficit in 1992, and then we all watched as Bill Clinton and a strong economy simply eliminated the deficit in nearly comical fashion within a couple of years.

As for the debt, last I checked, the U.S. debt as a percentage of GDP is actually quite a bit lower than it’s been under many previous Presidents, including Reagan. Debt/deficit hysteria is simply a convenient tool for those who think it’s “immoral” for the government to tax and spend.

on the laziness of comparing object-oriented philosophy with Leibniz

Tarde, who is really very Leibnizian, reminded me of some of the reasons why the comparison is not an especially good one.

For Tarde as for Leibniz, what’s real is the very tiny. “Aggregates” are nothing real. This is the polar opposite of object-oriented philosophy, for which objects can be equally real at all levels of scale.

Another difference is that, despite the shared conception of windowless substances, Leibniz’s monads gain their specificity from their relations with other things, even though these relations are put there by God. Tarde handles this point by simply denying the lack of windows and claiming that all monads are in direct relation with all others. Object-oriented philosophy, by contrast, has a completely non-relational conception of objects: windowless monads whose reality is not determined by any sort of mirroring.

There is also the more obvious point that object-oriented philosophy has no commitment to this being the “best of all possible worlds.” And furthermore, there is no special ontological role accorded to God in this philosophy. If God exists, then it’s just as one extremely powerful entity among others, not as one that is able to circumvent ontological limitations that pertain to all other entities. For instance, in any object-oriented theology, God would have to relate to objects indirectly just like everything else.

some paradoxes of Tarde

I just reread Monadology and Sociology, this time in the re.press English version, HERE. The book is even weirder than I remembered.

Here’s one paradox about Tarde. On the one hand, he’s known as the guy who thinks that there are societies everywhere– societies of atoms, chemicals, and stars. And not just metaphorically, since he thinks there is mind in everything.

But on the other hand, this “everything” isn’t as wide as it might sound because in the end, Tarde is the ultimate undermining reducer. All that really exists are infinitesimally tiny monads, just as in Leibniz. Tarde doesn’t like “aggregates” any more than Leibniz does. He is too faithful to his great model in this respect.

So, there really isn’t any concept of emergence in Tarde. There’s no table, just countless infinitesimals forming a society that acts as a table– kind of like a panpsychist version of Peter van Inwagen.

Yet at the same time Tarde doesn’t think that the infinitesimals can immediately jump up and form complex unities. There has to be a slow evolutionary process of societies, with one leading to another.

This is a problem. Without emergent entities at a series of lower levels, it’s not clear to me why the infinitesimal monads couldn’t jump from the Stone Age to Manhattan in an instant. Why the langorous process of evolution in between? After all, for Tarde Manhattan is not made of buildings, because buildings do not strictly speaking exist. For Tarde Manhattan is not made of a historical legacy of smaller preceding cities, because for Tarde smaller cities don’t really exist any more than Manhattan itself exists. Manhattan is nothing but a society of infinitesimals, the only reality there is.

Even in the case of humans, he doesn’t think we are an emergent reality formed of evolutionary or physical elements. He thinks that we too are a society of infinitesimals, but dominated by one central monad (but even the sun has a dominant central monad, he says) that functions as a kind of “soul” and is then happy after personal death to go back to independent life and not have the responsibility of governing the subordinate monads in any person anymore. This part is like Leibniz but more secular, since there is no talk in this work at least of judgment for the dominant monad after death.

The other main paradox of Tarde is the one faced by all relational ontologies. In one sense he proclaims a world made of individual units, which he finds to be on the rise everywhere in the science of the 1890’s– a resurgence of the atomic theory in chemistry, and the rise of cellular theory in biology.

But in another sense, he ends the “windowless” concept of monads found in Leibniz, and turns everything into a relational Blend-o-Rama. He claims that these relations can shift over time and become stronger or weaker, yet it is not at all clear how this can happen when he says that there is always already action at a distance of all things on all things. Despite the repeated citations of Newton as an authority, Tarde never really explains how everything can be related to everything else yet some things are more related than others. This is a common problem found in relationist ontologies, and many find such ontologies so appealing that they tend to act like this isn’t a real problem. But it’s a bigger problem than Tarde realizes.

That said, he’s a wonderful writer, and this book will get your imagination all fired up. I find personally that the book becomes better as it goes along, so stay patient and you’ll really enjoy the last 30 pages or so.

I’m in the midst of writing a brief 3,000-word piece on Monadology and Sociology for an anthology.

new issue of continent is available

HERE. It contains an interview with Badiou, along with other goodies.

The entire magazine is free for all readers, and thus anyone who can afford it is also invited to make a small contribution, HERE. Just made a contribution myself.

The March issue will contain my review of Garcia’s book. I don’t yet know what the review will say, because I’ve barely gotten started. But it’s off to a good start.

Garcia’s book at last

Fresh back to the hotel from a book-hunting trip. Took four tries to find this, but finally located it on the “new arrivals” table at the Gibert Joseph on the Blvd St.-Michel (still one more copy there in case you’re in Paris and looking for it, though the shops over in St.-Germain-des-Prés are out of stock, and Vrin was still closed today– but presumably has it).

Only had a a quick look at the introduction so far, but it looks promising. This will have to wait another week for a serious read, because I (like many others in his vast circle of friends) promised Latour to have a look at his final Modes d’existence manuscript, and that’s a time-sensitive task due to a publication deadline.

surely will be able to get the book today

I’m so eager to see a French variant on an object-based approach (I’m referring to Garcia’s Forme et objet, of course). But my efforts to obtain a copy have so far been little less than cursed.

Today ought to be the day when I finally obtain a copy. I don’t think the French really have anything like “Boxing Day,” and this is now Monday, so the bookstores ought to be open, right? I have to go over to that part of the city on other business anyway, so I’ll soon find out.

Alaa Abd El-Fattah released

The wrongly imprisoned Egyptian blogger has been released for now. HERE.

Christmas present for Morton

The Tokyo Quartet with Oscar the Grouch:

French ads

Tried to get Bartók going on YouTube and found myself strangely entranced by the preliminary advertisement, though I loathe ads and almost always skip them. But this one was special and I kept it going without clicking “skip.”

About 20 seconds in, the actors started speaking, and I realized it was a French ad; YouTube ads must be localized.

And damn, the French do advertising so well, just as they do design so well. The aesthetic quality of these ads is remarkable.