Dialectic Deadlock

“Without contradiction there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, war and peace, love and hate: they are all necessary parts of the human condition.”                                                                                  -William Blake

Notwithstanding the closing promise of the last post—to return at last to the participatory web—I think that it's necessary to cut the President some slack first.  Not so much because he's earned it; rather, because we tend to credit our leaders with more credit and blame than they deserve. In fact, the larger and more natural world wide web—the collective opinion or zeitgeist—is what actually moves change (and, much more often, resists it).  Inasmuch as the electronic web has dissolved much of the latency of information transfer it has the power to accelerate change; but, inasmuch as the information being transferred conveys no new consensus, nothing really happens no matter how much attention is paid by how many how fast. In other words, unless and until a pervasive new "zeitgeist" emerges, new directions inspire little movement and no leader can synthesize one alone.

"Synthesize" turns out to be a key word here. In a long-ago post, I channeled the timeless wisdom of W.G.F. Hegel. At a time when philosophers were like rock stars, Hegel was at the top of the charts; and, his widely-played dialectic was later used to lay foundations for Communism, Nazism and who knows what other `isms that, doubtless, roll Hegel in his grave.  But, at it's essence, Hegelian Logic tells history in the timeless context of unending confrontation and struggle: a thesis is opposed by and antithesis and, eventually, both merge into a "synthesis" that collapses the best of both positions into a new one.  The synthesis then becomes a new thesis in an unending triadic dialectic. But the somewhat simpler point of this post is what Hegel called the actualization: the dialectic process that ripens only at its own natural pace.  Just as Lincoln did not, and could not have, emancipated the slaves (before or after the broader sweep of the Civil War), just as Roosevelt, Napoleon or Hitler could not have done what they did under any different circumstances that they found, Obama cannot unilaterally synthesize a transformational direction.

Maybe I'm letting him off a little easy; and, maybe we're better off not embarking on "new directions" before their time anyway?

For example: if he had the power (and his Democrat backers held a gun to his head for, say, a new energy policy), doubtless we'd get something only the greenies really loved. And, just has these same renewable wet dreams have helped wreck the Spanish economy, a pile of dis-economic public spending on windmills and such would surely shove us the rest of the way off the recessionary cliff as well. Similar catastrophes would attend even small majorities pushing the public as whole in directions not embraced by most. Witness the Affordable Health (a.k.a., Obamcare) Act.  And, as pointed out in a recent post, even though Obama might like to join us in a conclusive debate on Leftist vs. Conservative policies, we're evidently not quite ready to even consider a new New Deal.

Once again, I'm not suggesting that all this often-painfully-slow progress is either good or bad, only natural.  Then again, when the change comes, when ignition occurs, it can often seem blindlingly fast to those not engaged in the dialectic debate.  And, in our time, the web can accelerate time!

"What is real is rational; and what is rational is [sooner or later] real"                                                                                         -G.W.F. Hegel

  

Comments

[ronnie]

I really don't see this as even a backhanded compliment, much less fair and balanced, to coin a much abused phrase.

And where the web could certainly be used as a tool to stimulate intellectual debate, in most instants it is used today only as a tool for slander and to stimulate the braying equus asinus.

[Shag]

Doug....I had difficulty getting past your first paragraph. WTF are you saying or trying to say in plain English? I'm sorry, but you are not communicating your views....at least to someone of different stature such as myself.

[Doug]

C'mon JJ, you're false modesty is killing me. The message of this entire post is along the lines of it's the situation that makes the man (more than vice-versa). Thus, until there's a general concensus on a new direction (even a subconscious "zeitgeist") emerges, no leader can "synthesize" one. Obama made his plight all the worse: by promising so much "Change."

[Shag]

D,

I'm retired, aging and lazy....with a couple glasses of vino. Modesty....not false.... I'm at a point where if something takes too much effort to 'get', I lose interest.

Like I say....lazy.

I do like reading SilverBulleis though. Keep at it.....

[Doug]

Well, JJ, you're as intellectually honest as ever; and there's more to said for that than pedantic scrawling

[supra shoes]

let's join our hands together to stop this kind of wrong doings. It may risk lives in the future if we just let them continue.