[FRA:] Russell Berman slobbers over traditionalism

[Ralph Dumain]

TELOS 139:
Intellectuals and Power
by Russell Berman

http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=190

Berman deserves to have the shit beat out of him 
for writing this hypocritical counter-enlightenment filth:

>Telos has recently discussed the question of 
>religion and politics; this issue continues with 
>the corollary: reason and politics. But religion 
>is not the only alternative to reason (nor are 
>religion and reason necessarily alternatives). 
>Another option is tradition. While expert reason 
>typically sees itself as superior to tradition 
>and convention, social life depends on inherited 
>cultural resources to sustain community and 
>allow for the very sort of transformations that 
>reason imagines but often inhibits. The 
>traditionalist nature of communities can have 
>more humane flexibility than the logicality of a 
>reason dependent on the violence of the state.
>
>Common sense is a third alternative to reason. 
>Whether intellectuals prove deficient in this 
>category because they have their heads in the 
>clouds (as Aristophanes suggested of Socrates) 
>or because they fall prey to their own 
>narratives of utopian reason­and there may not 
>be much difference between those two answers­it 
>is here that the theoretical abstractions of 
>conceptual reason collide with a facility for 
>everyday life. From the standpoint of theory, 
>common sense is merely unexamined opinion and 
>inefficient habit. Still, common sense also 
>implies practical capacities and ways of life, 
>which benefit from inherited experience, at odds 
>with the abstractions of planning and power. A 
>common sense, as commonly shared, comes close to 
>a democratic wisdom, in contrast to elite 
>narratives of reason. That particular argument 
>became important for this journal when, 
>appropriating criticisms of the role of 
>intellectuals in Soviet communism, Telos 
>transposed them as elements of an analysis of 
>bureaucratic western society in order to develop 
>accounts of a new class, opposed to traditions and community.