The Clash of Civilizations and the Fate of Man

I have been preoccupied with the book for over a decade now. In my defense, what I am about to complete has no relation to the idea of the original book; I wrote several books before I realized what I wanted to say. When you read the book you will see why: the forces standing in the way of that realization are most formidable. 

The partial title of the book is the The Clash of Civilizations and the Fate of Man. I am withholding two keywords from the title as surprise, but even without them you know I will not offend you with some variation of Huntingtonian nonsense.

The website CLASHOFCIVILIZATIONS.COM is awaiting my input to go live. I have lost track of the number of times I promised the designers to get them the needed content, but even that part is now ready. When the site is live you will be directed there. The posts here will be transferred there as archive material. 

Meanwhile, by way of getting back to blog writing I will occasionally post a short entry. If you detect a sharpening of tone and message consider it the natural consequence of examining the quite serious subject of man’s fate.

The New Site is Coming

 A new site is in the works to accommodate the new book. It will be up some time in May.

Nasser's Latest Book

My latest book is mostly complete. It took well over a decade to write it. But the subject matter and the content, I trust, will explain and justify the time spent. Will be back with details.

The Only Man in the World Who Knows What Really Went Wrong at JPMorgan Chase

If you were following Nasser's blog and have missed his commentaries, I just posted a conversation with him on my blog. Thought you might want to know.

A Note to Friends and Readers

That the posts on this blog have become spotty and less frequent goes without saying. That is because it has become impossible for Nasser to write, if you take “impossible” in its practical and not literal sense.

The fourth and final volume of Speculative Capital is just one impediment. Nasser is determined to complete the manuscript this year. But the manuscript keeps changing. Nasser says that is indicative of a dialectical process. That may be. But rewrites take time, leaving little room for much else.

I realized it was time to take the subject head on after three more translations of Hegel’s Logic arrived at our doorsteps. One was the 700+ page The Science of Logic from Cambridge University, translated by Prof. George di Giovanni of McGill. His opening sentence in the translator’s 70-page introduction says: “Writing an introduction to a translation of Hegel’s Logic is an even more formidable task than the translation itself”. You get the idea.

The other was Henry Stuart Marcan’s 1912 book with the friendly title Doctrine of Formal Logic, Being a Translation of the First Section of the Subjunctive Logic. More than a third of the book’s 300 pages is the translator’s introduction.

The third book was Hegel: Three Studies, translated by Shierry Nicholsen from Theodor Adorno’s 1963 book in German. Adorno writes:

The way in which Hegel’s great systematic works, especially the Science of Logic, resist understanding are qualitatively different from those of other infamous texts. With Hegel the task is not to simply ascertain, through intellectual effort and careful examination of the wording, a meaning of whose existence one has no doubt. Rather, at many points the meaning itself is uncertain, and no hermeneutic art has yet established it indisputably.

No one who reads these books on the sideline and during breaks from his other responsibilities will have much free time. Adab– that Farsi word for politeness, concern and respect – demanded that the blog’s friends and readers were informed.

Why, you may ask, this bookish interest in Hegel from a student of economics/finance in the midst of an economic/financial crisis?

Hegel’s dialectics is the account of the movement of thought in search of Truth. Do not be alarmed by that word. It has a technical meaning that will become clear in Vol. 4. The point is that the compulsion of thought constantly drives the mind to higher phases in search of more satisfying answers. In practical terms, that means going to the root of the problems. And that is the aim of Vol. 4: to go to the root of the problems in economics and finance, beyond incidental tales of events and characters. Hence, the need for the author to master Hegel.

But I must warn you against drawing conclusions about the readability of Vol. 4 by “associating” it with Hegel’s “infamous” texts.

Hegel wrote that “self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness”. The “other” of Hegel’s western philosophy is Jalaludin Rumi’s Eastern philosophy. Hegel’s Western scholars are deprived of the “other”, hence their confusion and difficulties in reading him. Nasser knows them both and thus, indisputably. That translates to a penetration of thought and clarity of writing that is unparalleled.

As proof of that assertion and as a prelude to the book’s release, I have decided to adopt ideas from the manuscript and present them in a new blog called Dialectics of Social Change. I do not have Nasser’s encyclopedic knowledge in economics, finance and politics. But I know his Theory of Speculative Capital and his writing style; I have edited his books. So my writing should offer some continuity of style and content – and keep the bench warm until the man himself returns.

The first entry is ‘No Country for Old Man’. Channel hopping one evening while waiting for Nasser to go to a dinner party, I paused on a movie that was in progress. Nasser came in and recognized the movie. A long conversation that followed on the way and continued during the dinner is the basis for the post.

See what I mean by the inability of the mind to rest on the untruth – its compulsion to seek progressively higher stages of truth.

Sarina Saber

The Saga of Viktor Orban and Hungarian Democracy

I rarely write “follows ups”. Events I discuss on this blog are driven by the irresistible hand of speculative capital, so their outcomes tend to be preordained. Still, on a snowy weekend in New York I thought to take a break from work and give you an update on Viktor Orban’s saga. The information from the Financial Times is in my fingertips and there might be an educational angle to the story. You know Viktor Orban of Hungary, don’t you, from the previous posts here and here.

Pressure mounts on Hungary (Wed, Jan 18)

A simmering battle between Brussels and Budapest intensified yesterday when the European Union’s executive branch ruled that three new Hungarian laws violate EU treaties and began legal proceedings to overturn the measures, one of which officials believe threatens the independence of Hungary’s central bank.

The heightened tensions came as the government of prime minister Viktor Orban continues to seek aid from the EU and the International Monetary Fund. Brussels has said it is unwilling to support such aid until Mr Orban revises the central bank law, which gives the prime minister increased power to appoint senior management at the bank.

Who, then, should appoint the senior management at the central bank of a country?

Orban fights shy of battle with EU critics (Thu, Jan 19)

In a hastily arranged visit to Strasbourg, Viktor Orban sought to reassure critics that the sweeping reforms by his government since its landslide election victory in 2010 were in line with European principles... The EU’s executive arm on Tuesday announced it was taking legal actions against Hungary to reverse measures it believed could compromise the independence of the central bank and judiciary among others.

Landslide victory. Reversing local law. Central bank independence. European values.

European values!

Hungary’s leader ready to back down in EU dispute (Fri, Jan 20)

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister, appeared to back down on a key issue in the country’s dispute with the European Union, increasing market optimism that talks could soon start on a financial support package. Mr Orban told a radio station he was prepared to drop a planned merger of the country’s central bank and financial markets regulator, which had raised concerns over the independence of the central bank... “It is important to accept that there appears to have been a complete turnaround, even a U-turn, in terms of the attitude of the Hungarian administration – and right to the top,” said Tim Ash, head of emerging markets research at RBS.

Game, set, match, then, you say?

Not at all.

Game, perhaps. But set and match are yet to be played. Therein lies the educational aspect of the story that I mentioned.

Yesterday, after the prime minister’s U-turn, Paul Krugman of the New York Times had a guest post titled Hungary, Misunderstood? If you click on it here, you will see it is quite a post, dense with data, graphs, text and obscure references that, unless you are a student of Hungarian history, you would neither know or care about.

What is more, if you search Krugman’s blog for “Hungary”, you will find 10 posts. Here is the page in question. One relatively sympathetic article is from August 10, 2011. The rest, progressively critical, including Hungary’s “hair raising” march towards dictatorship, begin in December 2011.

Why is this man who cannot properly pronounce the name of the capital city of Hungary so suddenly interested in that relatively small country? What gives?

A partial answer is that Krugman is the attack dog of neo-liberalism. He hears the whistle and off he goes. The attacks he leveled on the opponents of NAFTA who said that the treaty would result in destruction of jobs in the US would make Rush Limbaugh blush.

But it is not a matter of one attack dog only. Today, two days after the matter seemed all but settled, came the editorial in the New York Times. Titled Hungary’s Lurch Backward it went for the jugular from the opening sentence: “The soothing words of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, do little to counter his government’s assault on the independence of Hungary’s press, judiciary and central bank”.

It ended by saying:

Unimpressed by Mr. Orban’s facile promises, the majority parties in the European Parliament now want governmental leaders to consider invoking a clause of the E.U. treaty that would strip Hungary of some voting rights if Mr. Orban continued to flout European law. Europe’s powers to nudge Hungary back from authoritarianism are limited. But to its credit, it has begun wielding them.

If you are not Hungarian and ordinarily do not follow the affairs of the country, I say keep Viktor Orban’s name in the back of your mind. My guess is that you will see it again – and never in a positive light. In fact, that is how you will only hear of his name – until you hear of it no more.

And as a tribute to Hungarians everywhere, get a copy of Marai’s Casanova in Bolzano. Whether you read it on a gloomy winter day in New York or under sunshine in Sao Paulo, you will see it is the most adult, and therefore the most touching, love story ever written!

On the Theory of Knowledge

In yesterday’s post on the EU, I mentioned en passant the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban and his demonization in the west after he got between capital and its quest for high rate of returns.

Today, the New York Times had a front page article in the business section on Hungary. Hungary, Once a Star, Loses Its Shine, was the heading. If you can, read the whole piece here. If you read yesterday’s post, you will smile in many places and can even anticipate what is coming next. I was not kidding about the tiresome predictability of the news. Look at this paragraph:

To some critics, the biggest problem with the Hungarian economy is Mr. Orban himself …Backed by a two-thirds majority in Parliament, Mr. Orban has passed a flurry of laws that have concentrated power in his hands, weakened competing institutions like the central bank and alienated international lenders as well as an increasing number of Hungarians.

No doubt one of those alienated Hungarians is George Soros.

Note also the reference to “competing institutions”. The Times considers Hungary’s central bank as a competing institution with the government. I could not have said it better myself.

I have a soft spot for Hungarians because of Sandor Marai. His Casanova in Bolzano is the most adult and thus, the most touching, love story I have read. But this is not about Hungary. Rather, I want to make a point about what you know and how you know.

From the short Times paragraph above, we see that Orban has two-thirds majority in the parliament. That is more than you could say for Cameron, Merkel or Sarkozy. Yet, try as you might, you will not find a single article in English anywhere – newspapers or otherwise – explaining Orban’s point of view and his rationale for submitting those laws to the parliament. Nada. Zilch.

There is no centralized command and control center for these media outlets. How could it be that they all say the same thing as if on cue?

Which brings me to Michael Burleigh.

I don’t know who Michael Burleigh is. He must be a piece of shit, judging from where he writes and what he writes. I stumbled upon his writing following news links in relation with the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist. Here is what he wrote:

They [Iranian nuclear scientists] work for a regime that has explicitly threatened Israel (and by implication many ambient Palestinians) with such a weapon. I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes, men who live in the real world rather than a laboratory or philosophy seminar

I am not concerned with the lie about Iran having nuclear weapons or threatening others with them. Nor do I care about his use of the word "unforgiving". Unless he knows the assassins, he could not possibly know their motive.

What fired me up, though, was his put-down of men studying philosophy. I am one such man, constantly brushing up on my Rumi, Kant and Hegel to use in the upcoming Vol. 4.

The above mentioned shit thinks philosophy has no relation to real life. He is right so far as what he has in mind is philosophy as taught at Harvard and Yale. But real philosophy is real, sufficiently real, in fact, as to be unsettling. You will see.