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Welcome to Justice and Shame

 

 

   Society itself seems to be breaking apart. This blog will explore why and where we can look for ways to reconstruct our world. Our Blog title names two of the most important missing elements to a society that can be home to its members: justice and shame. In Plato's dialogue "Protagoras", the traveling teacher Protagoras debates Plato's anti-democratic hero Socrates and recounts how Zeus sent Hermes, messenger of the gods, to share out the various gifts and abilities to human beings. Most gifts, like being a good carpenter, or a doctor, were given to a few, since one doctor could heal many people, and one carpenter build houses for several families. But a sense of Justice, and a sense of Shame (sometimes translated as Right and Respect, or as Virtue and Consience - the Greek words are "aidos" and "dike") - those, Zeus tells Hermes, must be shared out equally to all. For civilization to exist, for there to be a society, all must have a sense of right and wrong, and must have a conscience that tells them when they should be ashamed of their actions or when some policy, or action by those in power, are dishonorable. 

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Is not our world today defined by a lack of elementary justice to those who are exploited, oppressed, excluded? Have we no shame today? Do we not see, all around us, the most basic loss of compassion, empathy, a sense of right and wrong by those who sneer at the very words "social justice"? Who gloat over the suffering of those different from them, or who think differently? Is this not one of the most perilous states of affairs imaginable? The Right today swings from utterly selfish and antisocial libertarian, to the antisocial investor unconcerned with the consequences of their actions, to out and out neo-Nazis.

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Yet, as a Left Wing blogger, I have no intention of letting off the hook those on the left, the center-left and the center, who have contributed mightily to the erosion of our sense of justice and of shame, of any sense of responsibility to those outside ourselves.  Certainly the Right, in both its openly selfish libertarian Ayn Rand-worshipping and its neo-Nazi White Supremacist versions is clearly become a present danger to society itself and most of its members, in the US and around the world. But it is also true that many on the left and center-left, and many leading intellectuals and artists, have advocated extreme versions of counter-cultural individualism, and an obsession with  transgressive actions and messaging as though these were in and of themselves forms of liberation, rather than other ways of being antisocial.  Often the result has been a fragmenting identity politics. Postmodernists, and, in  horrifying turn,  so-called posthumanists have taken pleasure in  eroding of any basis for social belonging and stability.  All this in a larger context of  neoliberal globalization, and of centrist and center-left worship of free trade.  A technocratic undermining of all democratic standards, expertise-worship, and a blatant and immoral leaving to the market and to corporate boards how to distribute the monetary and other rewards of society, have been the soil in which the nativist, racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic, in a word fascist Right has emerged. 

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In short, democratic principles and standards, the moral, ethical, and civil bases for belonging to a community or participating in a larger movement, and nearly all norms and institutions have now suffered decades of attack from all sides. We need a  renewal of, but just as importantly we need  an UPDATING OF AND REVITALIZATION WITH NEW CONTENT of classic republican principles of citizenship, social virtue, opposition to inequality, inherited status, wealth and power, and denial of all attempts to centralize power be it in government, the economy, businesses, organizations, educational institutions, the arts, or any other sphere of life and activity. 

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It is to such a an updating, renewal and revival of basic left and democratic values that I hope to contribute in these pages. 

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The viewpoint that readers and visitors will find in this blog space is very different from all of the above. Here, I intend NOT primarily critique or deconstruction, but RECONSTRUCTION, AFFIRMATION, AND NORMATIVE SUPPORT FOR DEMOCRACY, FOR SOCIALISM, FOR SOCIAL EQUALITY, AND FOR INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION. 

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I take the following principles and statements as axiomatic: 

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That, as Protagoras argued, everyone is capable of understanding justice and of using their conscience to understand right from wrong, what is honorable from what is shameful. 

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That, again following Protagoras, these abilities can be and need to be fostered, CULTIVATED, educated. 

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But as Karl Marx argued in his "Theses on Feurerbach", any attempt to improve society through education must answer the question "who will educate the educator?". In this spirit, I pretend to no status or standing, no intellectual superiority to anyone else, no moral or ethical superiority least of all. Rather, I will show how social struggles for justice, demands that we be ashamed of our dishonorable practices, movements for change, democracy itself as a way of life, art and culture, all provide materials for ordinary people, USING THEIR DAILY LIFE EXPERIENCE, to develop themselves to be fit citizens capable of self-government, of providing for justice, of acting and of making their countries and communities, act honorably instead of shamefully. 

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That democratic self-government , and republican principles of virtue and institutional accountability of those entrusted with power, are needed for ALL organized life, not just in the narrowly political sphere. And that therefore it is especially in our economic life, in the organization of corporations in particular, though not only, that we need to extend these principles and practices. 

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Finally, that along with democracy and republican values, we need to update, and make relevant to today, humanism. Not posthumanism or transhumanism, certainly not anti-humanism. Nor am I limiting myself to secular humanism, whatever that really means. Here I mean that humanism's potential was never remotely approached, let alone superceded, anymore than democracy's or republicanism's have been. A humanism that is NOT the product of Western colonialism, free of any racial, ethnic, class, regional, gender or other limitation is badly needed as a perspective today, just as democracy that is not limited by these factors is, just as republicanism is, just as  we today need social norms and institutions that work for everyone, not just a few. I will defend these principles in these pages, not relying on any one tradition, and without nostalgia, but showing their relevance to our struggles for justice, for equality, for the good life for everyone.

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Never before in history have ruling classes failed so utterly, so spectacularly, especially when compared with the material and cultural possibilities for making life rewarding and meaningful for all on our planet and in every society. Society is broken. Let's start talking about how to reconstruct it. 

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Steven Colatrella 

September 5, 2019