freediver wrote on Jun 17
th, 2014 at 12:24pm:
You are preaching intellectually bankrupt spineless apologetics. You have attempted to give it legitimacy by associating it with the views of the great thinkers of the enlightenment, as well as Mandela and Gandhi. You have failed.
Yes, but we spineless apologists would specify how. We'd have a marking criteria and go through each point and say how. Your Freeedom to criticize anything you don't like without saying why is a different model of assessment. Alas, we don't have that freedom.
Quote:I still don't see anything about not criticising, or not being free to criticise what you don't like.
We apologists have a lot of theories about that. Here's one about Gandhi and the great thinkers of the enlightenment:
Quote:Karuna Mantena: Action and Criticism in Gandhian Satyagraha - Debleena Biswas.
In her lecture on Gandhian satyagraha this Monday, political theorist Karuna Mantena set out to show M.K. Gandhi’s political thought as a form of transformative action focused on relations between the individual and the collective. Satyagraha,which is often associated with non-violent protest but means something along the lines of “truth-force” in English, emerged less as an epistemological inquiry into truth and more as a mode of “connected” action which seeks to actuate truth by shaping political relations.
Mantena began by examining social criticism in general, and Gandhi’s mode in particular, from the standpoint of Michael Walzer’s Interpretation and Social Criticism (1993). Gandhi’s mode is not “neo-Kantian”: that is, it does not involve the detached and dispassionate outlook of a critic intent on solving problems who speaks from an allegedly objective and universal position by assuming that his or her reasoned criticism will be acceptable to all. Nor does Gandhi occupy a Marxist externalist standpoint that sets out to demonstrate truth, unmask others’ views and, as a corollary, dehumanize its opponents. A politically effective criticism, Mantena argued, is one that addresses its public as equals, under shared conditions. Gandhi’s satyagraha strives to achieve this efficacy by taking the passions and the heart into account in politics. Reform is not sought through coercion but through active participation and persuasion.
For Mantena, Gandhi is a “connected critic” because of the stance he adopted. As a critic of the British Empire, he self-consciously presented himself as a loyal British subject who demanded that the empire make good on its promise to provide political equality and protection for all the subjects and, thus, an end to racial discrimination. Despite the extra-legality of some of his methods, he demonstrated a deep respect for the law in his civil disobedience. Second, as a critic of radical and extremist forms of Indian nationalism, Gandhi acknowledged the unhappiness of militant nationalists but believed their elitist methods, which excluded India’s peasant millions, would achieve merely a change of masters, not a change of rule. Finally, as a critic of inequality in the Hindu social order, in his disputes with Hindu orthodoxy, Gandhi claimed to be the most orthodox of all. According to Mantena’s interpretation of Gandhi, such criticism belongs resolutely to the plane of action and not to the plane of contemplation.
...
In response to Lauren Goodlad’s question about Mantena’s larger project and the future of the political “realism” she had outlined, Mantena spoke of the need to situate Gandhi within a tradition of non-violent action, and the need to map what is lost and gained between Gandhi’s ideas of localized non-violent action linked to politics in his time and the generalized non-violent action we see now which is often really the political power of the masses. Her response to a reading of Gandhi as an epistemological anarchist skeptical of truth claims acknowledged that non-violence has its anarchist moments but emphasized that Gandhi would have preferred moderation in both means and ends. The “necessary thing” in politics must be set against efficacy. If there is a myth of our time it is not that we do not do enough but that we are not sufficiently self-constrained.
Quote:Success is defined as cooperating with the opponent to meet a just end that the opponent is unwittingly obstructing.
Muslims are not unwittingly opposing freedom and democracy. They are consciously hostile to it.
And Ghandiji had a lot to say about that. Still, you're trying to divert the topic back to the Muselman again.
Sorry, FD, you'll need to open up a new thread to discuss them.
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