Weekly Update (September 8th to September 14th)

I feel like a had a mostly normal week for the first time in a while! It was nice and I got a lot of work done, but it was less relaxing than I had hoped sticking to a schedule would be. Life could stand to be less tiring, or I could just toughen up.

I have spent the week worrying about writing and trying to improve the way I do it. This has really become a routine for me and the amount of time I spend worrying about writing could probably be profitably replaced with more writing. The big worry this week has been around the notion of a first draft… I understand that the usual advice is that these are meant to be kind of shitty, but I have never really understood what this means. How quickly am I meant to get a first draft out? How do I even know when it’s done? Trying to figure this out is a pain and I am certain that I should have figured it out years ago.

Anyway, writing worries aside, I finished off David Marr’s Killing for Country earlier this week. As I said last weekend: it’s excellent. It must have been incredibly difficult for him to write. The political (and ethical) importance and utility of this sort of work can sometimes be overstated, but a hundred stories like this are probably going to be necessary in bringing about any sort of real change in this country. It’s awfully liberal of me to speak as though it’s a matter of individual stories, etc. rather than the balance of class forces, but I do think that these individual stories matter.

It’s also been worth my time reflecting on the book with the Hirst I read a few weeks back still floating around my mind. I think that the work Marr does shows that the violence of the frontier wars was recognised as shameful, even at the time. Hirst was right that it was inevitable (and seen as inevitable), but Marr’s work, I think, makes it bleedingly obvious that it was recognised by many people as brutal and wrong. This matters, not just from a moralising liberal’s perspective, because it tells us something about the way that political actors are able to justify their (in)action(s) and the way that this can be interpreted, later on, in the construction of a governing political ideology.

I doubt that this makes much sense, to really make the argument I’d need to start quoting the books… Unfortunately, I have not left myself enough time this Sunday afternoon to do so. But, in brief, condemnation that is kept silent, or that remains at a purely discursive level, out of ‘realist’ judgements of inevitability/self-servingness later becomes naturalised as the assumption that there was no recognition of the wrongness of an act. This makes the standard conservative critique (“you can’t judge the past by present standards”) seem more natural than it is. We need not judge the past by our standards (though, frankly, I think that we can) to identify the wrongness of a past act. A question for me is: How quickly does this naturalisation happen? And do we see it happening in real time today?

Philosophy-wise, I have still been working through Williams’s Unnatural Doubts. It is a slog, but it’s a very rewarding one. I have also been starting to dig into some of the specific literature on moral certainty, there’s an edited volume from 2023 that I’m going through. I do not find it particularly convincing yet. I think that it’s trying to sidestep some interesting, and difficult, questions and is attempting a sort of un-Wittgensteinian use of Wittgenstein. Which is fine. It’s just not compelling when Wittgenstein exegesis is meant to be what supports your argument.