Cognitive Resonance

There are people who will say that democracy is neither an intelligent nor a fair system, and that those who have the money are also the best rulers. But I say, first, that what is meant by the demos, or people, is the whole State, whereas an oligarchy is only a section of the State; and I say next that though the rich are the best people for looking after money, the best counsellors are the intelligent, and that it is the many who are best at listening to the different arguments and judging between them. And all alike, whether taken all together or as separate classes, have equal rights in a democracy. An oligarchy, on the other hand, certainly gives the many their share of dangers, but when it comes to the good things of life not only claims the largest share, but goes off with the whole lot. And this is what the rich men and the young men among you are aiming at; but in a great city these things are beyond your reach. What fools you are! In fact the stupidest of all the Hellenes I know, if you do not realize that your aims are evil, and the biggest criminals if you do realize this and still have the face to proceed with them.

--Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, VI.39-40

If now isn't the time to refuse the naturalization of capitalism and the ideological insistence on its benevolent and civilizing character, then there never will be a time.

--Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, the Dead, and the Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945 (5)

One of the problems with the term ["Westernization"] is that it skirts the heart of the issue: the globalizing reaches of capitalism, a set of processes dominated (though never entirely controlled) by multinational corporations [sic], many of which are not based in the United States. Upon closer inspection, the problem is not merely cultural, as Westernization suggests, but political and economic. Many go so far as to speak of "cultural imperialism." The idea of cultural imperialism is that U.S. domination of globalizing processes leads native peoples to abandon their traditional cultural practices to consume Hollywood movies and McDonald's fries. In this understanding, globalization engulfs the local. It is important, however, to remember that globalization does not only happen to people; it happens by people. Global capital requires national governments to pave its way--through state repression of labor organizing activities, for example, as was the case in Taiwan. Taiwan's export-substitution strategy of economic national development made the "Made in Taiwan" label ubiquitous in North America. Global capitalism did not simply arrive on Taiwan's shores and engulf the island; Taiwan actively courted and absorbed global capitalism into its fold. Its clamoring for admission to the World Trade Organization is a case in point. Nor did multinational capitalists simply swallow Taiwan once on shore. Corporations were forced to localize their practices in order to wrest labor away from Taiwanese family farms and enterprises. Taiwan having transformed itself from a poor agrarian country to a wealthy industrialized one, the next wave of multinational corporations sought the island out not for its labor but for its consumers. Corporations like McDonald's and Coca-Cola had to localize, tailoring their business practices, goods, services, and marketing strategies for the Taiwan market.

--Bonnie Adrian, Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan's Bridal Industry, 11 (citations omitted; emphases original)

In his essay "Politics and Man in the Contemporary World," Maruyama [Masao] drew on the experience of Martin Niemöller, a German pastor and eventual prisoner of the Nazi regime. Niemöller crystallized his experience--the transformation of equanimity into opposition as Nazi attacks came closer and closer to the church--into two stark injunctions. First, Principis obsta: "Resist the beginning"; second, Finem respice: "Consider the end." Niemöller's own awakening had come too late to prevent the evil that so seared his conscience. Ultimately, then, as Simone Weil thought, we may fail. Her example, however, and Niemöller's and Nanbara's, and Hasegawa's, shows us that we are bound, whatever the result, to continue our attempts to think through our condition. The alternative--to cease thinking altogether--permits no other choice.

--Andrew E. Barshay, State and Intellectual in Imperial Japan: The Public Man in Crisis (xx)

Administrators preoccupied with the alliance between the university and global capital are nearly indifferent to the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Now that capitalism has reached beyond the stage of nation-statism, its dependence on the nation-based academic disciplines is perceived, as has already been mentioned, to be less strategic by the university administrators as well as students, academic managers, and consumers. Those who are in the humanities, on the other hand, are preoccupied with cultural studies, identity politics, and postcolonial studies, as if oblivious to the real crisis of the humanities in the university, their erasure. They determinedly avoid facing the crucial issues of the ongoing exploitation of the poor and the powerless of the world. The question to be asked now is, Can civilization afford to discard the practice of self-criticism, if that is what the humanities are largely to be concerned with?

--Masao Miyoshi, "The University and the 'Global Economy'," in Japan After Japan (61)

Taught to read and write inside the stories of Christian salvation history and technoscientific progress, I am neither heretic, infidel, nor Jew, but I am a marked woman informed by those literacies as well as by those given to me by birth and education. Shaped as an insider and an outsider to the hegemonic powers and discourses of my European and North American legacies, I remember that anti-Semitism and misogyny intensified in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution of early modern Europe, that racism and colonialism flourished in the traveling habits of the cosmopolitan Enlightenment, and that the intensified misery of billions of men and women seems organically rooted in the freedoms of transnational capitalism and technoscience. But I also remember the dreams and achievements of contingent freedoms, situated knowledges, and relief of suffering that are inextricable from this contaminated triple historical heritage. I remain a child of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and technoscience. My modest witness cannot ever be simply oppositional. Rather, s/he is suspicious, implicated, knowing, ignorant, worried, and hopeful. Inside the net of stories, agencies, and instruments that constitute technoscience, s/he is committed to learning how to avoid both the narratives and realities of the Net that threaten her world at the end of the Second Christian Millennium. S/he is seeking to learn and practice the mixed literacies and differential consciousness that are more faithful to the way the world, including the world of technoscience, actually works.

--Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.
FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (2-3)

Let no one forget modernity's appalling wounds--the achievement of economies of scale in officially sanctioned slaughter, the induced hatreds and ignorance, the profligate and systematic waste (and neglect) of human skills and good faith. It is an open question whether they can be healed by modern people, using the instruments of modernity alone. Perhaps these instruments--of production in all spheres, but especially the institutions and technologies of communication and representative democracy--will someday be surpassed in a postmodern revolution that enhances "local humanities," cushions societies against the vicissitudes of the market, and discloses a new form of political community beyond the simultaneously integrative and atomizing force of the contemporary state. Perhaps, one must always hope.
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The modern world, therefore, makes two contradictory promises to those who live in it. First, its fundamental processes--processes specific to itself--can be grasped via abstraction, but second, once so grasped these processes assume license to rule over those who created them. Thus the "contract" at the heart of modernity is not only between people, that is, a matter of institutional arrangements, but also between people and their own ideas. Abstraction is leviathan.

--Andrew E. Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions (6, 9)

In 1098 Crusader destruction of the Syrian town of Ma'arra had been accompanied by acknowledged acts of Frankish cannibalism. Graphically described in the chronicle of Radulph of Caen (he admits that "In Ma'arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled"), they were later "justified" in a letter sent to the Pope by the Christian commander, who blamed the lapse on extreme hunger. Needless to say, this excuse was dismissed by Arab historians who continued to describe their bloodthirsty enemies as eaters not only of people, but, what was worse, even of dogs, considered the uncleanest of species (Maalouf, 1984: 39-40).

--Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (107)