LETTERS FROM THE EDITOR,

An Offer I Can’t Refuse
Walter A. Davis 

Statement of Purpose on Assuming the Position of Editor in Chief at MWCNews

     The Amerika envisioned by Bush and Co. is bad enough.  But two other factors define the gravity of our situation.  First the sheer amount of what one must learn in order to become a politically responsible citizen today. Second, the ideological paralysis that prevents us from carrying out that task creatively,i.e., from thinking in the new ways that our historical situation demands.   The second is the determining factor.  For we can read everything and as long as we remain tied to the same old ideological assumptions and guarantees it will all be wasted effort. We’ll end up repeating the same tired dogmas and solutions, in new and flashier language no doubt, but with the same foreordained results.

      The biggest problem about our ideological blindness is our blindness to it.

That is the heretical idea I want to offer as my opening gesture in taking on the position of Editor in Chief at MWCNews.   The Left today (a term that for our purposes ranges from classical Marxism to the various left liberal parties and movements throughout the world) is just as badly in need of critique as the right.  Perhaps even more so. What we need perhaps is no less than a crisis in all of our assumptions and beliefs followed by a genuine revolution in our thought. [1]  In less grandiose terms, perhaps the primary discovery we need to make is of all the ways that we are bound ideologically to assumptions and guarantees –for example: the inevitability of historical progress, the belief that good will ultimately prevail, the assumption that most injustices can be eliminated by the passing of the appropriate Constitutional or International Laws -- that have two deleterious results: (a) they blind us to our historical situation (b) by limiting the diagnoses we can make of it.  Shaking off the shackles of long held beliefs, however, is the  bracing process through which new ways of thinking and acting emerge.  Having said this I fear that my words may have cost me many members of the very audience I want to reach.  I am a person of the Left and I’m willing to go all the way with that commitment.  But I’ve also become convinced that I can best serve it by developing a critique of the ideologies and dogmas that stand in the way of our work.  Republicans aren’t the only party with an eleventh commandment.  But it is time we all broke ours by realizing that we need to think in new ways.  Call my effort a lover’s quarrel, if you will, and as such, an act of love toward all of those whom I sometimes will alienate or offend through my effort to show that we need to make some fundamental changes in our thought.  (A friend cautions me that anything over 1,000 words seldom gets red on the Net.  Jacques Ellul critique of technology remains relevant. The new technologies of electronic communication are in the process of transforming our relationship to Time—and thereby to our own consciousness and to our ability to think.  As a former Luddite, my hope remains for readers who will go against the grain.  In that spirit my appeal: I offer you here not 1 but close to 6,000 words.  I hope you’ll find them worth your time.)

      Inevitably my contribution to that endeavor will be shaped by the limits of the theoretical framework I bring to it.  That limitation informs the appeal I want to make here to all readers of MWCNews to join me in an effort to flesh out what will, I hope, become our shared purpose: to cast off old paradigms, to expand our thought by creating dialogues that will be based on our willingness to challenge any and all received dogmas of the left as together we teach one another what we’ve failed to think and know.  Thereby the comforts of leftist ideologies will perhaps give way to the only kind of inquiry that is truly exciting: the kind in which we learn  the most important lesson about our ideas; namely, all the ways in which they are weak or groundless.  I’m even naïve enough to believe that we will learn something even more valuable in the process.  Namely, how the limits of our thought are a function of a deeper limit, which is determined by all that we’ve refused to confront—about ourselves and our experience.  Thought, after all, is most vital when it has a psychological and existential impact on us. But having said that I fear I’ve become too theoretical.  And so let me here lay my cards on the table in hopes of drawing you into a high-stakes poker game where the ultimate pot is History.  Yes, I know, one should never give up one’s ace in the hole, but there also comes a time, doesn’t there, when each of us must go “all in,” risking everything, because the cost of not doing so is too great?  The News section of MWCNews gives us daily evidence that we live in such a time.

      Here, then, is the hand I’ll be playing.  I recently completed the third book in what constitutes a trilogy dedicated to developing a new theory of history and, specifically, how to understand our present situation. [2] A single thread or thesis unites the three books: to comprehend our historical situation we must bring together or synthesize three “disciplines” or activities—politics, psychoanalysis and theatre (or culture in general)—by rethinking all three.  Again, my goal here is to be as brief and non-theoretical as possible.  Here, then, is a summary statement on each of the three categories and the necessary or dialectical relationship whereby they define and deepen one another.