By David Pan · Monday, January 16, 2023 Telos 201 (Winter 2022): Civilizational States and Liberal Empire is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 In concluding that “All political action has then in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good life, or of the good society,” Leo Strauss describes an essential link between power and values. Because the power to make decisions about our future cannot be separated from the fundamental goals and ultimate meaning of our lives, we cannot exercise power that would be divorced from some set of values. Even the narrowest understanding of self-interest must come to terms with one’s own mortality and the meaning of others for our own existence. Consequently, raw power does not exist, as it can only be exercised within some understanding of its purposes.
When we consider the way in which power functions on a global level, it will also be crucial to understand how a world order will reflect a particular way of structuring the relationship between values and power. Even the seemingly most egregious use of power can only take place within the framework of an attempt to realize values in the world, and realist accounts of global order must also recognize the importance of some ideology such as nationalism as a means of establishing political values. Accordingly, discussions of balance-of-power dynamics can only begin once great powers emerge as a consequence of the political will of certain peoples to understand themselves in a certain way. Based on such measures as GDP, population, and military spending, Russia does not rank particularly well in relation to countries such as Brazil and India, neither of which pretends to great power status. If Russia can be considered a great power today, it is primarily because of the goals and values that its government embodies. Values form the foundations of global order, and Russia only continues to project its power because it maintains a sense of the global reach of its values for determining order for others.
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By Florindo Volpacchio · Tuesday, November 15, 2022 Characterizing a concept as a goal is a misleading way to approach a critique. At best, it tries to imply a teleological argument. (I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether that is a play on words.) In actuality here, it subsumes the normative argument under its instrumental implementation. As I noted in my previous commentary, the real story is being lost within the prism of an abstract liberalism that refracts the spectrum of colors back into a singular light. So let’s look at that light.
What is the goal of affirmative action? That isn’t really made clear by its critics. Like most cases in these situations, it becomes an all-encompassing buzzword to connote some kind of progressive agenda that they believe infringes on civil liberties. What is made clear is that they don’t like what is alleged to be its methods, in the case before us, racial classifications. But is this really what’s it all about, Alfie? There lies the rub. Those advocates who are prosecuting affirmative action before the Court, and those who cheer them on, are arguing for a decision that allows the justifiable use of racial profiles to infiltrate the admissions game. But before we let loose the dialectic of enlightenment, let’s get the story straight.
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By David Pan · Tuesday, November 8, 2022 In his response to my post last week on affirmative action, Florindo Volpacchio emphasizes that the goal of affirmative action is “to recognize the social pathology of discrimination and inequality that privileged race and sexual identity to begin with.” It is certainly important to remember this history and its effects on present conditions, and Volpacchio rightly points out past injustices, including slavery and segregation. Yet those injustices are also clearly in the past. There are no longer any legally enforced forms of segregation and discrimination against Blacks, and the United States can be proud of the progress that has been made. But while Volpacchio seeks to judge affirmative action based on its symbolic intent, its practical effects cannot be ignored, especially as they perpetuate the type of discrimination based on race that they are meant to oppose. Since the history of racial injustice involved the categorization and differential treatment of people based on their race, the resistance to this history must reject such differential treatment and affirm the principle of equality before the law. Yet affirmative action re-establishes racial discrimination as a valid policy for college admissions and hiring. Though this policy favors Blacks today, this can only be done at the cost of disfavoring others, to the point where it disfavors Asian Americans in comparison to both Blacks and Whites. As Thomas Sowell has demonstrated through his careful and extensive research, the track record of worldwide attempts to engineer equality through a set of reverse discriminatory practices is in fact dismal, leading consistently to a skewing of benefits to the wealthier members of the groups they are meant to assist as well as to growing identity-based polarization and even civil war.
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By David Pan · Wednesday, November 2, 2022 After decades of contention, most observers agree that affirmative action in the form of racial preferences in college admissions will be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. There are indeed few arguments left to support it. A supermajority of Americans opposes it, with 74 percent of Americans, including 58 percent of Blacks, indicating in the most recent Pew Research poll that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. Racial preferences do not help the disadvantaged. As even a supporter of affirmative action writes: “Seventy-one percent of Harvard’s Black and Hispanic students come from wealthy backgrounds. A tiny fraction attended underperforming public high schools. First- and second-generation African immigrants, despite constituting only about 10 percent of the U.S. Black population, make up about 41 percent of all Black students in the Ivy League, and Black immigrants are wealthier and better educated than many native-born Black Americans.” As these statistics indicate, the racial categories do not correlate with disadvantaged status. They are even more problematic as a proxy for diversity. It is not clear why some markers of identity such as race and ethnicity should be considered significant for viewpoint diversity while others, such as religion, should not. Politically, university faculty have become much less diverse in terms of party affiliation over the last several decades of affirmative action policy, with a documented 11.5 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans at leading universities in 2016. Moreover, because the defense of affirmative action has become a marker of anti-racism, the university support for the policy has suppressed opposing viewpoints by branding them as racist or sexist and not worthy of discussion, thus further reducing viewpoint diversity by encouraging pervasive self-censorship.
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By David Pan · Monday, October 24, 2022 Volodymyr Zelensky has virtually single-handedly demonstrated the world-historical importance of sovereignty and its mechanisms. Before his courageous insistence on Ukrainian sovereignty, the world—including the United States, with its offer of a helicopter ride for Zelensky out of Kyiv—was already treating the Russian subjugation of Ukraine as a fait accompli and the continuation of business as usual. Russia was using in Ukraine the methods that it had already successfully practiced in Chechnya, Syria, and Belarus while the rest of the world stood by to allow such methods to become normalized. By taking his stand in Kyiv, Zelensky was declaring to the Ukrainian people and the rest of the world that Russia’s invasion was in fact not a normal action that had to be accepted. Suddenly, Russia’s years-long undermining of the idea of popular sovereignty in different parts of the world had been called out as a transgression, leading to global insights about recent history and our role in its development. The nations of Europe above all, but also the United States, have had to face the extent to which their energy policies were contributing to Russia’s reshaping of global norms. Zelensky has forced us to take a stand one way or the other in deciding the political shape of the world for the foreseeable future.
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By Telos Press · Monday, August 29, 2022 Forthcoming in Educational Philosophy and Theory is a collection of reviews of Timothy W. Luke’s recent book The Travails of Trumpification, published by Telos Press Publishing. Excerpts from the reviews appear below, and the full set of reviews can be read here (subscription required). Save 20% on the paperback edition of The Travails of Trumpification by purchasing it in our online store and using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout.
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