Paine:

Peter Linebaugh's  Introduction to Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice:  http://hydrarchy.blogspot.com/2009/09/introduction-to-thomas-paines-common.html

Tom Paine was a worker and commoner. He spoke and wrote from a particular experience, that of an English artisan at the onset of industrialization. He was, too, a planetary revolutionary—indeed, he helped give meaning to the term—and as such his writing is hugely significant for the twenty-first century. If we were to compare him to any contemporary figure, it would be Che Guevara. He asserted aspiration, possibility, the unheard of. He breathed the warmth of human agency to frigid hierarchies of power. The phrase “world revolutionary” might have several meanings—a sailor of the seven seas, a scientist of the universal mind, a philosophe in the republic of letters, a journeyman on the move.  

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books?currentPage=all 

... his uncompromising condemnation of all the world’s religions. In “The Age of Reason,” published in 1794 and 1795, Paine wrote, “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” Theodore Roosevelt once called Paine a “filthy little atheist,” but Paine did believe in God; he just didn’t believe in the Bible or the Koran or the Torah; these he considered hearsay, lies, fables, and frauds that served to wreak havoc with humanity while hiding the beauty of God’s creation, the evidence for which was everywhere obvious in “the universe we behold.” 

In “The Age of Reason,” Paine offered his own creed:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. 

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. 

But . . . I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. 

“Paine’s religious opinions were those of three-fourths of the men of letters of the last age,” Joel Barlow observed, probably overstating the case only slightly. Paine’s views were hardly original; what was new was his audience. While other Enlightenment writers wrote for one another, Paine wrote, as always, for everyone. His contemporaries believed that radical philosophical speculation—especially critiques of religion—was to be shared only with men of education (and, it was assumed, judgment). The poor could not be trusted with such notions; freed of church-based morality, they would run amok. Paine disagreed, profoundly. To say that he was vilified for doing this is to miss the point. He was destroyed.

Mark Twain once said, “It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read ‘The Age of Reason.’ ” But that didn’t mean it wasn’t read. In 1797 alone, a single Philadelphia printer sold a hundred thousand copies. In Britain, sales of “The Age of Reason” outpaced even those of “Rights of Man,” though, since it was banned as blasphemous, it’s impossible to know how many copies were sold. The London printer Richard Carlile, who called his bookstore the Temple of Reason, was fined a thousand pounds for publishing it, and sentenced to two years in jail. (During an earlier trial on similar charges, Carlile had read aloud from “Rights of Man,” a ploy that allowed him to publish it again, as a courtroom transcript.) 

After Carlile’s wife fell into the trap of selling “The Age of Reason” to a government agent posing as a bookstore browser, she—and her newborn baby—followed her husband to prison. Eventually, in order to avoid exposing anyone inside the bookstore to further prosecution, there appeared in the Temple of Reason an “invisible shopman,” a machine into which customers could drop coins and take out a book, about which Collins writes, “It is sobering to think that the freedom of the press once depended upon a mechanism now used to vend Mars bars.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016crbo_books#ixzz1qAbMGaVv 

Barrington Moore, Jr, ca. 1985:

http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/moore86.pdf 



Authority and Inequality under Capitalism
and  Socialism


THE   TA N N E R   LECTURES  O N  HU M A N   VALUES 


Delivered  at 
Brasenose College, Oxford University 
May  16, 17, 2 3 ,  and 24,  1985

'No bourgeoisie, no heterogeneity'

The other Moore's law | http://www.economist.com/node/13063306


'What is it about the middle class that influences politics? To oversimplify, its crucial feature is heterogeneity. Compared with the poor and the rich, the middle class contains a greater range of interests. It covers a wide range of occupations: software engineers, shopkeepers, teachers and all the manifestations of economic complexity. 


'Because of this variety, the middle class is driven by a wider range of concerns than either the poor—whose main worry is the need for more money—or the elite, who concentrate on defending their political or economic position. The middle class is not a narrow special-interest group in the same way. 


'Other things being equal, any group in the middle should act as a moderating influence on social conflicts. By definition, a growing middle class will reduce income inequality because it will moderate the stark divide between rich elite and rural poor that is often a source of conflict in emerging markets.  


'In sum, the middle class acts as a buffer. Sometimes it allies itself with the poor, sometimes with the rich. That does not guarantee the emergence of democracy, but the presence of a large, varied middle class does make democracy more attractive than if a country is dominated by just two classes. 


'Such a large, varied middle class encourages new policies, often (though not always) more liberal ones. To oversimplify again: the characteristic political demand of the poor is for transfers. They want a new well in the village or electricity for the slums. This encourages a politics of patronage. The characteristic political demand of the middle class is for things like property rights and a stable economic policy. This tends to give rise to a politics of accountability, if not necessarily democracy. 


'Because the middle class contains so many competing interests, patronage politics—handing out goodies to a favoured few—can end up hurting as many members of the group as it helps, so it becomes less tempting.'

Chomsky: A rare pic, smoking pipe

ca. 1969 

Universal Man

Noam Chomsky: Meet the universal man - opinion - 19 March 2012 - New Scientist

Why can everyone learn Portuguese? Are some aspects of our nature unknowable? Can you imagine Richard Nixon as a radical? Is Twitter a trivialiser? New Scientist takes a whistle-stop tour of our modern intellectual landscape in the company of Noam Chomsky

See gallery: "Chomsky's life in pictures"

Let's start with the idea that everyone connects you with from the 1950s and 60s - a "universal grammar" underlying all languages. How is that idea holding up in 2012?
It's virtually a truism. There are people who misunderstand the term but I can't deal with that. It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

But there are critics such as Daniel Everett, who says the language of the Amazonian people he worked with seems to challenge important aspects of universal grammar.
It can't be true. These people are genetically identical to all other humans with regard to language. They can learn Portuguese perfectly easily, just as Portuguese children do. So they have the same universal grammar the rest of us have. What Everett claims is that the resources of the language do not permit the use of the principles of universal grammar.

That's conceivable. You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like "and" that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: they would just pick it up as they would standard English. At some point, the child would discover the resources are so limited you can't say very much, but that doesn't say anything about universal grammar, or about language acquisition. Actually, I doubt very much that a language like that could exist.

Ideas about human nature naturally crop up in your work. It's a fuzzy term, so what do you mean by it?
To me it's just like bee nature. Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature. We don't know very much about it except in a few domains. We know a lot about how the digestive system develops, that's part of human nature. We know some things about the visual system. With regard to cognitive systems, the systems are more complex and difficult to investigate, so less is known. But something is. Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.

In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable.
That's a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists... and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

If human nature is relatively fixed, as you argue, how do we achieve social and political change?
Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it. With language, for example, we have very good evidence that for the last 50,000 years there has been no evolution. That is a reflection of the fact that our basic capacities have not evolved.

So within a realistic time frame there is not going to be any change in human nature. But human nature allows many different options and the choice among those options can change, and it has. So there are striking changes, even in our own lifetime, of what we accept as tolerable. Take something like women's rights: if you go back not so many years women were basically regarded as property. That's a sign of the expansion of our moral spheres. So sure, human nature remains the same but a lot of things can change.

Sticking with social and political change, what is going on with climate-change denial in the US?
The Republican party now has its catechism of things you have to repeat in lockstep, kind of like the old Communist party. One of them is denying climate change.

Why is it happening?
It happens that there's a huge propaganda offensive carried out by the major business lobbies, the energy associations and so on. It's no secret, they're trying to convince people that the science is unreliable, that it's a liberal hoax. Those who want to be funded by business and energy associations and so on might be led into repeating this catechism. Or maybe they actually believe it.

The Republican-dominated House of Representatives is now dismantling measures of control over environmental destruction that were instituted by Richard Nixon. That shows you how far to the right they have gone. Today Nixon would be a flaming radical and Dwight D. Eisenhower would be off the spectrum. Even Ronald Reagan would be on the left somewhere. These are interesting, important things happening in the richest and most powerful country in the world that we should be very much concerned about.

The media has been one of your big interests over the years. Are new and social media really changing the way we do things?
I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I'm kind of out of the Stone Age, I don't use any of these things and don't know a lot about them, but they are doubtless effective. For example, Occupy Wall Street could not have developed like it did without social media.

Are they affecting other things very much?
I think that is open to question. For one thing, by their very nature they have to be fairly superficial, there isn't a lot you can say in a tweet or even an internet post. Almost by necessity, I think it is going to lead, or has led, to some superficiality. So like most technology, there is an upside and a downside.

You argue that the US is in political and economic decline. Is that also true of the intellectual and scientific worlds?
Well, there are some who do claim that, but I'm not convinced. For example, if you look at the journal Science, the editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts has a series of editorials in which he is deploring the way science is taught in the US. In the federally funded schools and the universities people are being taught factoids; they are taught the periodic table to memorise when they do not understand what it is about. Alberts says this totally misleads people about the nature of science and that it is driving kids away from science. If what he is describing does overwhelm the education system it will presumably lead to a decline in scientific competence and capacity as well.

Looking back on your long career, if you were to start all over again would you still choose to study language?
When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

In the 1950s, there was a serious attempt to address the core problems of language and it was immediately discovered that everything was a problem and we did not understand a thing. Now a great deal has been learned and we understand a lot more about the nature of language. The contemporary field is still very exciting. It is a living field. If you're teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

Profile

For over 50 years, Noam Chomsky has studied linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has global reputations as a linguist (key book, Syntactic Structures) and for political analysis/activism (key book, Manufacturing Consent). His new book, The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray, will be published in April (Cambridge University Press)

The US national-security state: Why it grows and grows

'In the realm of foreign policy, Barack Obama has learned what every modern president eventually does: despite the dangers, the emergencies, the intractable disagreements, and the life-and-death risks, international affairs naturally claim an ever-growing share of a president’s attention and enthusiasm. On the world stage, he represents an entire mighty country, not one perhaps-embattled party. International figures may be frustrating to deal with—Karzai, Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu in their different ways—but usually they can’t totally thwart or undermine him the way a Mitch McConnell or a Roger Ailes can. He can think big thoughts and announce big plans without seeing them immediately picked apart or ridiculed. And he can dare to devise a long-term strategy, like Obama’s with China, knowing that the tools for carrying it out—in the military, the diplomatic corps, the intelligence agencies, and the rest of the national-security apparatus—are within his line of command.

'It is no wonder that the “national-security state” in all its aspects has continued to grow throughout the decades since the beginning of World War II. Defense budgets, intelligence and surveillance networks, private military contractors, irregular forms of war: these and other executive-branch tools of international power work like a ratchet. Some presidents rapidly increase them in times of emergency, as George W. Bush did after the 9/11 attacks. No president scales them back. Thus the imbalance continues to grow between international efforts, where a president has an ever greater array of tools and weapons, and the frustrating domestic arena. Despite having run on his opposition to the Iraq War and overseen the formal U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, Barack Obama has, if anything, expanded the range of executive military power, from his unilateral (and mainly successful) decision to intervene in Libya to his expansion of drone attacks.

'Think of the contrast with domestic affairs, especially economic management ...'

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/obama-explained/8874/3/