Re: "rise of china" and wst

What a fun day on wsn.  Well worth three posts :).  Ismail:  why so 
despairing?  The last two years have seen a lot of momentum shift to the 
left--Seattle, Porto Allegro, now the march on Mexico City.  Just because the 
scelortic old left finally gave up the ghost hardly means everything is lost. 
 Your pessimism would be more appropriate five years ago.  Randall Collins, 
hardly a great radical (although well worth reading!) said it well several 
years ago when analyzing the fall of the Soviet Union--enthusiasm and 
antagonism toward capitalism come and go.  Already, it seems clear that the 
waning of enthusiasm he anticipated has come true...  The fact that the 
Chinese worship Western (or even American) ways has nothing much to do with 
anything.  Americans used to (many still do) worship Britain.    Doesn't mean 
that when the opportunity/necessity arose, the Americans didn't push aside 
the British and take over...

Boris--I like Unthinking--I'm not much for testing hypotheses controlling for 
the dependent variable blah blah blah...  but even the most contingent 
oriented historical accounts still account for things in terms of cause and 
effect--otherwise, one just has a string of this happened that happened. Some 
postmodernists might approve of this sort of thing, but I find it 
uninteresting. Hardly what Wallerstein does in practice--in contrast to many 
voluntaristic marxists, for example, Wallerstein emphasizes just how limited 
the real choices available to people like Lenin actually were, and why they 
made the choices they did.   And if an arbitrary and ultimately controllable 
human 'free will' is tossed into the picture, why not toss in a dozen other 
physical forces outside the realm of cause and effect?  Even if we are 
entering a period in which all the rules are off--a claim I find completely 
unconvincing, but let's allow it.  Those of us making choices will do so 
based on our (historically conditioned) ability to understand the world and 
our (historically conditioned) ability to act on that knowledge.  The impact 
of our actions will depend on a set of forces that will be outside our 
vision, because its unimaginable we can understanding everything at once.  I 
always got the feeling that Wallerstein was using all the talk about chaos 
and such to cheat these limits on human action.   Any knowledge we produce 
becomes part of that we can (and ultimately will) draw on to understand, 
there is no real out for moral responsibility, and I appreciate the goal of 
Wallerstein as you laid it out.

RH--I'm sorry I don't have time to read the Dennett book--what are the 
varieties of free will worth wanting?

Steven Sherman