#70: Humanism, Socialism, and Cultures

Back in the 1990s, it was common to speak of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. While I certainly agree that such a clash exists, I prefer to think it a clash of “cultures,” rather than “civilizations.” And by a “culture,” I mean a population that shares a set of defining values and beliefs so strongly held as to make its members deny even the evidence of their senses rather than relinquish them. But, in addition, I think that framing the problem as a clash of two cultures is simplistic; in point of fact, there are three cultures involved.

Strictly speaking, “the West” should denote the culture we more precisely call “Judaeo-Christian,” but today’s West is actually more complex than that. Today’s West also includes a culture that was born much more recently in the European 17^th and 18^th centuries, the so-called “Age of Reason” or “Enlightenment”, and which was hijacked at the time of the French Revolution in 1789 into what was to morph eventually into Marx’s Communism and Lenin’s Socialism.

Yes, yes, I know that it is usually assumed that the Enlightenment was actually a progressive evolution of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but I would argue that this view swims against a tide of contrary evidence. As I have mentioned in several earlier posts, the two hundred years that preceded the French Revolution involved an ever increasing rejection of Judaeo-Christian culture, a rejection in favour of the doctrine known as “Humanism” in which tradition and revealed authority were to be replaced by human reason. In retrospect, while the philosophes, as the dilettantes of the 18^th c. called themselves, were on the flaky side, they were still democratic in their impulses. This ended with the Revolution. But the main point to make here is that a movement within a society that rejects everything about the culture within which it occurs cannot be called a “development” of that culture. If it is anything, it is a new culture attempting to replace the old one.

During the French Revolution, the aristocracy and middle class were subjected to mass murder, the Church and the Clergy were violently rejected, new forms of personal address were introduced, new uniforms were introduced, and even a new calendar was introduced. The intent was to utterly erase the prior culture, the ancien regime. This revolutionary expression of the Enlightenment continued to spawn more revolutions through the 19^th century and was finally given a pseudo-scientific form by Karl Marx in 1848 (The Communist Manifesto) and 1867 (Kapital).

While the emphasis on unaided human reason began with the burgeoning science of the early 17^th century, it was not until Marx’s work that “reason” was incarnated as “science,” albeit pseudo-science, when applied to social and political issues. It is in late 19^th century Socialism that we see clearly for the first time the new Post-Revolution culture. For a portrayal of this new bleak, colorless, textureless utopian dream, see Nicolai Chernyshevsky’s influential novel What Is To Be Done (1863); not coincidentally, Lenin gave his communist programme the same title in 1903 (14 years before the Bolshevik revolution of Oct 1917!).

It is illuminating to mirror the progress from roughly 1625 to 1789 with the progress from the February Revolution of 1917 to the October Revolution of that year. The February revolution was a genuine and spontaneous workers’ revolution with democratic objectives of self-governing “soviets” (workers’ councils). It lasted only until October, when it was forcibly hijacked by the Bolsheviks, who turned it quickly into a murderous dictatorship. Similarly, though over a far longer time span, the “humanist” revolution lasted until 1789, when it was hijacked by the Jacobins who set the pattern for the many subsequent bloody revolutions to follow.

The culture that developed from those beginnings thrived throughout the world in the bloody century that followed and is still among us in many superficially distinct variations. It is present in Russia, in China, in the EU, in South America, in Malaysia, and significantly in the U.S.A. and Canada.

From a strictly economic point of view, it’s defining ultimate objective is the eradication of ownership and of property; and its defining methodology is central state control over as much human functioning as it is possible to acquire. The conviction that underlies Socialism and from which everything else follows is that property is essentially and necessarily unjust. Thus, when people state that the objective of Socialism is the redistribution of wealth, they fail to see the ultimate objective. Redistribution of wealth is merely a stage in the progression towards the world in which there simply is no such thing as wealth at all, where there is no ownership. More on this below.

But there are additional culture defining beliefs of a non-economic kind that are not as familiar to us as those of economic Marxism. These are frequently specious, but are nonetheless held as strongly as religious articles of faith. They are also supported by politicians and their lackeys for their political utility.

I. One such is that “people are everywhere pretty much the same.”

This is intended to persuade people that cultural differences are nothing more serious than wearing different clothing. It is this thesis that was involved, for example, in the post WW II claim that the “vast majority” of Germans “knew nothing” of the atrocities being committed by only a few mad men at the top. And it is this thesis that was constantly expressed by G.W. Bush about the world’s Muslims. A closer look at the facts quickly reveals that the claim about the wartime Germans is patently false and that the claim about the world’s Muslims is equally so. Nonetheless, people of the Socialist persuasion cling to this belief even more than Conservatives cling to their guns and to their religion.

More important, however, is the utility of this belief in the ongoing effort to erase national boundaries. The nation-state, for the Socialist, is itself a form of ownership and is, therefore, inherently unfair. Having a boundary around your country indicates that the country is the property of the people who are citizens of that country and not the property of people who are not citizens. For the Socialist, this is prima facie unfair and unjust. Since “people are everywhere pretty much the same,” they have as much claim to any country as the ones who have fenced it off. Property is an unnatural limitation of access to goods, it is an arbitrary and artificial restriction, hence the current reluctance to secure America’s borders.

II. The second belief follows from the first. It is that there exists a single human “nature” and that we can know what it is.

According to the academics, men everywhere can be expected to 1) want the same things, and 2) to be rational in the ways they go about getting what they want. Economists seem to be particularly fond of this one. It is this kind of belief that underlies Obama’s foreign policy towards Iran: there is no problem that cannot be solved by sitting down with the other party and reasoning together. You tell me what you want, I tell you what I want, and we can cut a reasonable deal. We’ve been seeing how successful a foundation for a foreign policy this particular belief is.

III. A third one follows from the first two and is actually an inheritance from Socrates, that evil is only a matter of factual error, of ignorance and poor reasoning. This belief is quite important because it exists at the fault line between Enlightenment Humanism and its bastard child, Socialism.

The Humanist thinks that since we are all after the same things and reason demonstrates that being law abiding maximizes our chances of having those things, the person who does evil must be making a mistake, an error, either about what he really wants or how to get it. Thus evil is reduced to logic and epistemology.

This particular belief highlights just how distinct the Humanist culture is from the Judaeo-Christian one. For the latter, evil is real, for the former it is not real, it is a remediable error (or physiologically based insanity). For the new culture, there is no such thing as sanely and intentionally doing evil, but for the old there was and is.

As I said, this belief reveals one of the junctures of Enlightenment Humanism and Socialism. When an Enlightenment Humanist encountered disagreement, he responded “let us reason together” (giving the divine line an ironic new use). But when the Jacobin and his revolutionary successors encountered disagreement, they responded by saying “let me change your mind,” and they meant that quite literally. They would change your mind, for example, by killing you. Or, in a move pioneered by the Bolsheviks that has been copied by dictators ever since, they “re-educated” you by sending you to one of their special psychiatric institution. Once incarcerated there, they changed your mind through torture, through chemical means, or through systematic conditioning.

Whether the current Socialist offers to “reason” with you or to “change your mind” depends on how totalitarian the Socialism is. Reasoning and belief-conditioning are two different things. Lenin and his criminal psychopath thugs perfected the techniques of belief and attitude control that were to be used by other totalitarian states throughout the 20^th century and are currently in use today. In our Socialist democracies, however, we have developed the habit in recent years of forcing people with attitudes we do not like to take “sensitivity training” of various kinds. I don’t mean to equate the degrees involved, but only the kinds of state remedy. These remedies are still the genuine Socialist remedies, albeit at the level of a not yet fully mature Socialism.

It is perhaps no accident that the life of Pavlov of conditioning fame spanned the revolutionary period in Russia, he died in 1936. I have no doubt that his theories and research influenced the underlying view of the Soviets on human nature. While the 18^th century led to the doctrine in Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) that the core of the self is a rigid pure reasoner, the Pavlovian view was that human nature is extremely plastic and susceptible of moulding. This was certainly a view consistent with Bolshevik methods and objectives.

CONCLUSION

The problem that this history presents us today is that the modern Socialist is conflicted in his view of human nature, he cannot decide whether he is a Humanist or a Bolshevik. We see this in his approaches to both penal and foreign policy.

For the Humanist, the criminal should not be punished, being either mistaken or insane. In either case, punishment is not the proper response. But reasoning with criminals has been proven empirically to be ineffective and treating all criminals as insane is equally unacceptable. Living in a moderate Socialism, the Humanist also cannot stomach the methods of the “mind changers” of Lubyanka Prison. Yet, the Humanist’s culture is such that he cannot accept the only other alternative, that criminals are evil people, of which the implication is the intuitively satisfying one that they should be punished.

The humanist cannot abandon his belief despite its history of inadequacy – this is a clear indication of a culture defining belief.

And where foreign policy is concerned, the implications of the modern Socialist’s inner conflict are even more dangerous.

His defining conviction is that all people are like himself, just looking for a good deal. He cannot accept the possibility that there might be both leaders and populations who simply do not care about the same things he cares about, who, for example, prefer glorious death to a pleasant evening at the pub. He cannot accept the possibility that human plasticity is so extreme that whole populations can be created who are not at all like himself, who do not want what he wants, and who are not rational in the Enlightenment sense.

Thus possibly his biggest mistake comes in failing to understand in foreign policy what his Socialist forebears understood for domestic policy: namely the almost unlimited plasticity of human beings. The Catholic church seemed to understand this as early as the 16^th century: St. Francis Xavier wrote “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” Lenin and his Bolsheviks knew even more techniques for assuring that they created true-believing little Bolshies (and, of course, the rest they killed or sent to the Gulag).

Our biggest foreign policy puzzle and problem lies in the assumption of “innocent” non-combatant casualties. The belief is that Kim Jong Il’s population consists of innocent people just like us, that the inhabitants of Gaza are innocent people just like us, that the citizens of Iran are just like us, and we’re loath to hurt people “just like us.” That is, the assumption that the enemy is “just like us” in effect turns the enemy into hostages by means of which our actions are constrained.

The problem is that, barring the Socialist culture defining beliefs, it is quite plain that the Japanese of WW II were not at all just like us, nor were the Germans. For that matter, the North Koreans are not, the Iranians are not, nor are the Gazans. And the reason they are not is that they have been moulded by their governments to degrees that a modern Socialist simply cannot accept.

What is so odd is that he accepts the plasticity of human beings often when he is excusing criminal behaviour, but not when he is facing deranged hostile hordes. In the latter case, he fantasizes that they are actually just like himself.

A culture that is based on non-adaptive defining beliefs is a culture we ought to lose as soon as the possibility presents itself.

#69: Hume, Miracles, and Obama

David Hume (Scottish, 1711-1776) found the fact that many people believe in miracles a problem for his theory of knowledge.

Hume was arguably the first modern cognitive psychologist in that he reduced what we call “inductive reasoning” to a species of trained or conditioned response. What we tend to think of as a prediction based on empirical evidence, he recast as an expectation or anticipation based on a series of reinforcing regular experiences. What this did was to make our “predicting,” say, who will win a race no different in kind from our ducking spontaneously when a ball is thrown at us.

The mechanism he posited can be described quite simply. Consider the pair A (antecedent event) and B (consequent event). Consider the number of times that B was experienced as preceded by A and subtract the number of times that it was not. The sum of that calculation will be the strength of the expectation that B will occur the next time A is perceived to occur.

Now, earthly miracles, such as a man walking on water, a man rising from the dead, a man turning water into wine, healing the blind, etc always take place in an earthly environment or context. If we apply the Humean account of the formation of belief, this context is the A, the miracle is the B. But, Hume asks, how many times have the believers in miracles actually perceived a miracle emerging from the kind of context described by the miracle purveyors? The answer is, of course, never. BUT, if people have never seen a miracle (B) emerge from an earthly normal context (A), and they nonetheless believe, and believe strongly, that miracles can occur, what does that say about Hume’s cognitive psychology? The belief in miracles appears to be a counter-example to the theory that our beliefs about events outside the scope of our immediate perceptions are fully determined in degree by our prior experiences of such events.

Here’s the problem in other words. According to Hume’s theory of belief, the strength of our belief about an unperceived event should vary with the net number of reinforcing experiences. I say the “net” number to indicate that we subtract the non-reinforcing experiences. This means that as the net number decreases, our belief (expectation or anticipation) should also diminish. Thus, the net number of reinforcers and the level of expectation should directly vary together. This principle seems to hold for the most part or, more precisely, it seems to hold until the point at which there is no reinforcement at all. For it is at precisely that point, that many people suddenly violate the Humean principle and not only believe in a miracle, but believe in it with the highest certainty, the certainty usually reserved for the best beliefs, e.g. laws of nature. Well! Ain’t this a revoltin’ development!

Hume introduces a qualification on his theory to accommodate the inconvenient fact of miracle-belief, and it is that there exist psychological “over-riders” that can take priority over conditioned response. The over-riders he identifies are the pleasure we take in the emotions of “surprise” and “wonder.” In his own words:

“The passion of surprize and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events, from which it is derived.”

I think that Hume’s account of the belief in miracles is plausible, but that there are more passions that can over-ride the effects of experience in belief formation.

I have always been struck by the cinematic hoary convention in which the hero says: “We’re in real trouble here, baby, but I’ve got an idea. It’s crazy, but it might just work!”

This hackneyed script device, while aesthetically reprehensible, is actually interesting and illuminating. I think it captures a psychological inclination that might have been intriguing to Hume.

Hume thought that just as reinforcing experience is exhausted, the passions of the love of surprise and wonder come flooding into the vacuum to command belief. But it seems to me that even more powerful emotional belief determinants can be readily discovered. Two such are 1) an infatuation with either a person (divine or mundane) or an idea, and 2) fear and desperation. All of these can help to explain why so many otherwise intelligent and educated people voted for Obama.

The first point to make is that voting for Obama to lead the U.S.A. was very similar to believing in a miracle. Just as in the case of miracles, there was nothing in Obama’s background to provide grounds for voting for him. He had virtually no experience relevant to the office, there was no “track record,” he was, for all intents and purposes, an experiential “tabula rasa.”

But, further, there was a real sense of desperation at the time of the vote, though nothing compared with what people feel today. Fear and desperation trumps evidence, I think, and it is captured in the phrase “clutching at straws.”

But it was not just a matter of clutching at straws, it was also the other factor of infatuation. For some, it was just celebrity worship along the lines of Diana worship, a definite kind of infatuation. But, for others, it was an infatuation with the “idea” of a white/black amalgam entering the white house, a real life instance of the idea made flesh. This is not the first time in history that such an infatuation has trumped experience.

Samuel Johnson coined the phrase, “the triumph of hope over experience,” but, as it turns out, hope is not the only victor. Hume found that a love of surprise and wonder often triumphs over experience. And I am suggesting that equally often, it can be love of a person, love of an idea, or fear and desperation.

Experience may be a far more fragile force in the competition for belief than Hume imagined.

The tragic thing about all this is that of all the itemized determinants of belief, the only one that yields a hope for success is that of prior experience. When the hero says, it’s a crazy idea, he should just stop there. If it’s a crazy idea, it will work only in a movie script, and it is only in a movie script that electing a “long shot” like Obama will lead to anything other than a spiralling descent into ever more depressing, debilitating, deteriorating economic and military chaos.

#68: The Left, The Right, and the Huge

The current American political debate has many threads, so many that it may seem impossible to discern the pattern on the cloth. I think that there is such a pattern and that perceiving it can be very illuminating.

It could be very easy to cast the debate as a simple conflict between “free enterprisers” and “centralized control statists.” There’s no doubt that representatives of both these views are contenders in the current political conflict, but I don’t believe that focusing on them reveals what is really going on.

The real issue, it seems to me, is in fact frequently mentioned, but 1) the arguments associated with it do not identify the reason it really is an issue and 2) it actually fuels both sides of the debate.

The frequently mentioned issue is size.

Conservatives complain constantly that government has grown too large and Unions have grown too large. Leftists complain constantly that corporations have grown too large. Yet others complain that media interests have grown too large. Interestingly, neither side has noticed the common element in their complaints, and each side’s visceral response to the giant institutions has come from another site of origin.

I once used an article entitled “There Are Two Sides to Every Question” in a tedious course on the media. The article argued in favour of this platitude, offering nothing interesting or new. What it should have done, is point out that in the sense that it is true, it is trivial, and in the sense that it is not trivial, it is false. On the one hand, yes, of course, any spin-doctor or shyster can formulate a case for any position. So what? On the other hand, after all the arguments pro and con have been stated, the individual’s vote will not have been caused by them, they will only have supplied him with verbal cover should he be challenged.

What should we take from the mass of arguments on each side? Do we actually wait with a kind of Cartesian suspension of belief until we have heard from all sides? And when we encounter one of the famous “undecideds” mentioned by every pollster and pundit these days, do we really think that his opinion will be better than those of the “decideds” for being “unbiased”?

For the most part, people come to these arguments with deeply rooted preferences and dispositions, and they shop among them for ones that will “support” what they already believe, the famous political “talking points.” So, rather than browsing and grazing among the arguments, it seems more fruitful to ask exactly what it is that is cranking people’s chains at this time.

Like always, there will be more than one thing that is agitating the public sub-conscious, but I do believe that there is one single thing that is dominating both sides of the spectrum, and in a different way on each side.

I’ve said that this thing is the enormous size of some key institutions. In my view, this has had an impact at a deep psychological level on people for most of modern times. Indeed, Chaplin’s movie of that name dealt precisely with the sense of the individual having become an insignificant fragment within the giant state machine, and that movie was made in 1936 (the middle of the depression decade!). Another example of this sensibility can be found in the writing of Franz Kafka, particularly his novel, The Trial (1925). These two examples can be multiplied, but the point I am making is not only that this has been an enduring theme in the West, but 1) that this impact of giant institutions has been steadily growing even as they have steadily grown, and 2) that this impact is characteristically greater when citizens feel more vulnerable.

Giant institutions make individual middle class people feel helpless to begin with. Think only of the frustrations people feel when dealing with endless telephone menus and unresponsive websites, both favoured by Big Government and Big Business. When those same people also begin to feel threatened by off-shore nuclear powers, by home-grown terrorists, by natural disasters, by unresponsive insurance companies, by their own giant unions, by unemployment, etc., they identify the enemy as THE LARGE INSTITUTION. And the reason that the large institution is the enemy is precisely because they experience that institution as inhuman, remote, uncaring, arrogant, not motivated by their interests, deceptive, untrustworthy, and, above all, unaccountable and unresponsive.

But one population expresses its fear and anger towards one set of giant institutions, while the other population chooses another set of institutions. The reason for this division may not be very subtle. It may be as simple as group identification. One population identifies with those who produce wealth, while the other identifies with those who consume wealth. But both of these populations make a mistake when they identify the other as their enemy.

The conservative and Leftist should be friends. They should recognize each other’s priorities and cut a deal. It is a general mistake, encouraged by the third player in this drama, to believe that they cannot reconcile their differences.

The third player, the eminence grise in this drama, the Iago in this soup, is the Big Institution, the amalgamation of Big Corporations, Media, Unions, and Government. This, the Big, has it in its interest to keep and maintain the citizenry preoccupied with a fantasy war: the War Between the Left and the Right.

Clearly, what both sides of the political dispute should realize is that they have a common enemy in giant institutions and that even the giant institutions they favour are not their friends.

For the conservatives, please note that Big Business is not your friend. For one thing, Big Business is always in bed with your bête noir, Big Government. For another, whenever your interests will come into conflict with Big Business, your interests will be ignored and you will not be able to afford the kind of litigation that your opponent can.

For those on the Left, please note that Big Government is not your friend. For one thing, Big Government is always dependent on Big Business. In fact, the two are so intimate, it would probably kill them both if they were to be surgically separated. Please note, further, that the same is true of Big Unions and Big Government.

Let me end with a salutary tale I once told to my faculty, which did not find it nearly as wryly amusing as I did.

******************************************************

Once upon a time in Victorian England, late in a very cold fall, a little bird succumbed to the chill and fell unconscious to the cobble stone street.

A dignified, well dressed gentleman of middle age noticed the bird in passing and, moved by an unfamiliar impulse of compassion, picked it up, hoping to revive it. He quickly realized that the little bird, while still alive, would not come back to consciousness unless it was warmed. Since he was on his way to a serious nooner he had been looking forward to all week, he was not inclined to tarry for the sake of a little bird, so he did the best he could and went upon his way.

The best he could was to insert the little bird up to its neck in a steaming pile of recently deposited hot horse manure. The manure soon did its job, and the little bird recovered its awareness. The moment it was fully conscious, it realized where it was, imprisoned up to its neck in horse manure. It struggled and struggled, but could not free itself. In outrage, it began to peep and peep, ever more loudly.

A nearby prowling tomcat heard the peeping, investigated, and shortly there was no more little bird.

Now here are the morals of this story.

If you’re in shit up to your neck, the one who put you there isn’t necessarily your enemy.

If you’re in shit up to your neck, the one who gets you out isn’t necessarily your friend.

And, finally, if you’re in shit up to your neck, for God’s sake, don’t squawk!

#67: Retrospective Philosophical Thoughts

I taught philosophy from roughly 1965 to 2006, some 41 years. I didn’t know very much to teach at the outset, but, all things considered, I think I slowly improved through the years. After I retired, I didn’t consciously attend very much to philosophy, but apparently there was some processing going on below the surface. I shared one conclusion from that sub-conscious churning in the first few posts on this blog. I want now to discuss some others.

I taught mainly the “theory of knowledge,” a bit of metaphysics, and the early modern period of the history of philosophy. These three areas were luckily complementary. The “theory of knowledge,” also called “epistemology,” deals with basic questions concerning our knowledge. Most central to this study, of course, is the question of what knowledge actually is and how we know when we have it; a corollary question that immediately arises is what belief is, and how belief is related to knowledge. Necessarily involved in all of these discussions are questions concerning the nature of justification and evidence.

Metaphysics, on the other hand, is a subject best described by W.V.O. Quine’s felicitous phrase: “what there is.” This is not a study of what individual sorts of things there are; a metaphysician doesn’t occupy himself with questions like “are there any more passenger pigeons?” or “is there an Abominable Snowman?”. The metaphysician wants to identify the sorts of things that have absolutely nothing in common with each other. Thus, when Descartes tells us that the universe contains both Mind and Matter, he is doing metaphysics, and mind has nothing material about it, nor matter anything mental. When Berkeley tells us that it contains only Mind, he is doing metaphysics. When Marx tells us that the universe contains only matter, ditto. Of course, the full metaphysics in each case involves much more than that, since it also includes their reasons.

What should be clear is that answering metaphysical questions is dependent on first having answered epistemological questions. No matter what metaphysical position one takes, one will face the inevitable question: How do you know that there are xs or ys or zs? And, before one can answer the “How do you know?” question, one must be able to say what is to count as knowledge.

And this leads to the central epistemological puzzle, first posed by Roderick Chisholm:

In order for us to discover when we know, we must examine some clear cases where we know; but we can’t examine any clear cases of where we know, unless we already know when we know.

It would seem that in the face of this problem, we simply can’t know anything. But drawing that conclusion seems premature because it ignores the fact that some of our beliefs seem absolutely certain and thus do appear to provide an example of knowledge. Descartes famously held that each of us was absolutely certain of his own existence whenever he questions it.

Which brings me to my retrospective rumination. All of the above was no more than courteous foreplay. Now, I mix in the history.

The last three hundred years or so have been so dominated by science and scientistic thinkers that truth and knowledge have been associated exclusively with the word “objective.” A common way of dismissing someone’s opinion these days is to characterize it as “merely subjective.” If, on the other hand, one wants to praise an opinion, one describes it as “thoroughly objective.”

The objective point of view is one that does not belong to any one in particular; it is “no one’s” point of view. This is one of the reasons that, for a long time, scientific writing manuals favored the “passive voice”: “the experiment was conducted,” “fires were lit,” and so forth. But, by whom? Well, by someone, but no one in particular; an anonymous someone. It should be clear that the “objective point of view” is a fiction; a methodologically useful fiction, but nonetheless a fiction for all of that.

The reason for all of this in scientific method is quite clear: the idea is to eliminate bias, and bias is something associated with people. The method, therefore, is designed, not to eliminate people from the experimental environment, but at least to pretend that they have been eliminated. If we didn’t already know that the elimination of bias from science is a sham, we need only reflect on the behaviour of the scientists in the current global warming ponzi scheme being imposed on a credulous citizenry.

But clearly the objective of reducing bias in science is a very worthy one, and if using the passive voice in research articles helps to accomplish this, well, that’s little enough to pay for progress.

At the same time, we don’t want a useful methodological fiction to lure us into metaphysical commitments that we can’t defend. Remember, the question is “What can we know?” And the arguments of the various sceptics make it pretty clear that we can’t know anything about an “objective” world that exists independently of our (subjective) selves. Maybe it’s also true that we can’t know much about our selves, but we certainly can’t know anything about the “objective” world. This is not just the view of cloud-cuckoo-land out-dated philosophers, it was the view of a nearly current pragmatist like W.V.O. Quine. For Quine, the objective world is a “construction” that is kept for as long, and only as long, as it produces accurate predictions. The only reality with which we are in any sense “directly in touch” is that of our own “inner” states; the “outer” reality is no more than a convenient conjecture.

The conclusion we are forced to draw is that if there is anything that can be known, it can only be the knowing subject himself. And this is the turn that the philosophers known as “phenomenologists” have taken. These philosophers include Edmund Husserl and the Nazi, Martin Heidegger, but, as I’ve suggested above, the line of thought that leads to the phenomenologist's “subjective world” began as early as Rene Descartes. This is, of course, why Husserl’s fine introduction to his philosophy was entitled “Cartesian Meditations.”

Descartes began with the very Protestant intuition that each thinker had necessarily to certify his own beliefs in the communal project of science. He did this because the methods for acquiring knowledge that he had been given by the Jesuits of la Fleche disappointed him. Being unable to trust authority for knowledge, he had no recourse but to try to find it for himself. He therefore produced what was arguably the world’s first systematic scientific method. It’s not the scientific method we now use, but he must be credited with the astonishing achievement of recognizing the need for such a thing. And this was a method that began the search for knowledge within the knowing subject himself.

But, Descartes did believe in an objective, enduring material reality and he tarried not long in his exploration of the inner life of the subject; just long enough to satisfy himself that he could achieve certainty in his researches into objective reality. As it happens, he was very likely wrong that he had found certainty in his belief in a material world. This was understood by his successor, Leibniz, who made the objective external material world a “construction” of the subjective mind. Kant followed on that line of thought and made of the material world no more than a possibility. Husserl was certain that Descartes was in far too much of a hurry to leave the exploration of the subjective world behind. He made it his life’s work to make up for this deficit and developed a method for exploring the inner world, a method that included the description of the inner world’s perception of an outer world. Heidegger followed on Husserl’s work, further applying the “phenomenological method.”

What is important about this phenomenological turn is not what it has to contribute to science, but what, if it is true, it can contribute to undoing the influence of the scientific world-view in places where it has exceeded its applicability. Those places include the subject matters of religion, of humor, of aesthetics, of politics, and possibly of psychology itself. It is not a small thing, if it can be made plausible that the scientific approach to all of these important domains brings it own bias to those subjects.

The point, then, of the phenomenologists is that the method whose inner imperative is to exclude bias, actually constitutes a bias when applied beyond the physical sciences to human affairs.

For just a few examples, let’s consider the inventory of human experiences and emotions. Various scientific or, some would call them “pseudo-scientific,” accounts of aesthetic experience would attempt to assimilate them to, perhaps, biologically rooted “drives.” Thus, perhaps, the pleasure in art would attempt to be reduced or assimilated to sexual drives. The phenomenologist, on the other hand, would attempt, successfully or not, to approach the experiences in question from a “presuppositionless” prespective, developing a description that is driven only “by the phenomenon itself.” The original phenomenology, then, has all the characteristics of a taxonomic discipline, identifying and describing distinct human experiences, without bring any theoretical or scientific assumptions to the process. It is possible, therefore, that we discover here that human life has more variety and nuance in its inner life than post-Enlightenment thinking has allowed. Religious experience, for another important example, may turn out to be a unique human affect, not reducible to any other, any more than the experience of “funnyness” is reducible to any other. Thus, there could be a sense of the divine in the same sense that there is a sense of humour. The fact that not everyone enjoys religious experiences could be no more surprising than that there are people with little or no sense of humor. And just as there are different senses of humour, there may well be, as James entitled his book, Varieties Of Religious Experience.

It is true that phenomenologists have, as a rule, been guilty of appalling bafflegab, most of which was unnecessary and self-indulgent. I’m convinced that Sartre, for one, actually enjoyed the verbal tricks he played on his readers with a sadistic delight. That said, I do suspect that there is a core of content in this line of thought that deserves to be taken seriously, if not too seriously.

#66: Thanks, Helen Thomas

Thank you, Helen Thomas, if you didn’t exist, we would have had to invent you.

I don’t mean to say that you aren’t the loathsome anti-Semitic Creepy Crone of the Left that you are, just that you serve a worthy purpose.

At a time when the international Left and all rabid-Arab sympathizers have been encouraged by the passivity and ideologically driven incompetence of the Obama government, Israel and the Jews world-wide badly need public relations victories. One small such came in the form of the Israeli choir’s performance on You-tube of “We Con The World.”

Much more impressive, however, was Helen Thomas’ performance of the spittle-flecked crazed ignorant anti-Semite. There’s no two ways about it: Helen was BRILLIANT in the part, and the casting could not have been improved. She will forever own this part.

Those of you old enough to remember, will recall the anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews put out by the Nazis. They were very effective. Supporters of Israel have never been as effective in manufacturing symbols and icons of the racists of the Left and of the Right. But where this creativity was lacking, God intervened and supplied what was needed in the form of the perfect Helen Thomas.

Helen’s performance was very timely, it helped to shift the focus from the Turkish public relations coup to the nature of the impulse behind it.

Do you want to see into the secret heart of the U.N.? Do you want to know what inspires the dogs of Europe to bark? Do you want to know what the pundits of our Ivy League universities think? What the “journalists” of the White House Press Corps think? Helen is your answer. See her in vivid color and sound on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aeqb8h0I-Bg):

Helen Thomas is, and now will always be, the poster girl of the anti-Semitic Left. And, even better, she is no caricature, she is the very real thing.

Thanks, Helen.

#65:The Turkish Hate Flotilla, American Liberal Jews, & Obama

In at least one earlier post, I offered comments on that endlessly puzzling theme: what makes Jews liberal. Recent events have raised that question once again in my mind, and I now have three more explanations. As before, I offer these as not exclusive of all others. There is no reason that there has to be one single Liberal-Jew explanation; there can be many, and any number of them can operate together and at once.

After the Turkey’s Hate Flotilla incident, all the dogs of Europe barked, which was to be expected. Obama and his dogs grudgingly resisted joining the Europeans; indeed, they phrased their position in such a way as to make sure the vermin, both Middle Eastern and European knew full well the meaning of their sub-text. Their careful refusal to offer a full condemnation of Israel was meant to be read by the vermin as a full condemnation. Nudge nudge, wink wink, they signalled to the vermin: we just refrain from unambiguous condemnation for the stupid American Jews, but we’re with you brothers! But this was, I suppose, also to be expected.

What continues to shock me, though it probably should not, is the number of liberal Jews who viciously excoriate Israel in this transparent provocation and assault. Think Noam Chomsky foaming at the mouth against Israel on socialist websites. I’m always surprised that he’s not in a straitjacket when I see him interviewed. This kind of logic-twisting, spinning, and hate-spitting is nothing short of mental illness on an epidemic scale and needs some kind of explanation. As I said, many have already been given; most, by others, and a few by myself. Here are three more.

There are two sub-populations among the Jews whose Israel hating and conservative hating have identifiable causes. These are causes that operate among non-Jews also, and sometimes with different targets. Nonetheless, they do operate among the Jews.

The two sub-groups are the very poor and the very rich; each of these groups has its own reason to hate.

There’s a population of failed Jews who are very poor. They generally had origins no worse than many others, but for various reasons, they failed to flourish. They hate Israel and they hate conservatives because they see those two groups or entities as representative of the values and the world-view in which they are failures. They need a way of warding off their self-contempt and the contempt they think they see in the eyes of others; instead of hating themselves, they turn their hate towards others. Which others? The others who succeeded, despite the fact that they faced obstacles equal to or greater than the ones they faced themselves. I’ve always thought that black anti-Semitism has its roots in a similar psychological mechanism.

But, you ask, why should the rich Jews also often attack Israel? People like George Soros. For reasons similar to those which prompt so many rich to become “social justice” enthusiasts. It is very easy for those who do not labour on a daily basis at some task to improve their lives and the lives of their families to preach the gospel of redistribution of wealth. These people grandly despise those who “have” and do not “share” with those who do not. But not everyone who “has”, has as much as they do, has enough so as to not notice the amounts that are “shared.”

Israel is, in many ways, the poster child for free enterprise, for being smart and self-reliant and, consequently, successful. But this poster child is not so successful that it doesn’t have to worry about its next shekel. And it is not secure in the way that rich American Jews are. For these wealthy, the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews is reduced to a conflict between haves and have-nots, despite the fact that the Arabs have exponentially more wealth than little Israel. Which leads me to the element of Israel hatred I’ve mentioned in an earlier post.

Many rich American Jews can quite literally afford to distance themselves from grubby little Israel as they pretend to have become assimilated to the American Protestant liberal left. I’ve got news for you, bubbele, do you really think Jimmy Carter really loves you, even if you piss on Israel?

Which leads me to third cause, one which, again, applies to non-Jews as well, and one which occurs across all levels of success and income.

This is the desire to be morally superior, to be “better” than those people who only think in terms of the welfare of their own. They want to show that they are better than those people who only think of themselves, their families, their families and friends, etc. These are the “humanists,” the “one-world” people, the people who despise all those other people who do not share their love of humanity.

Now, it is clear to me that people motivated by the first two causes are very likely motivated also by the third.

Many of the causes of Israel hatred also work to create America hatred. The main difference betgween America and Israel is that America is, perhaps, large and powerful enough to weather the rage beating upon it from all sides.

But even America may succumb to it when it is weakened and undermined by it own leadership.

Right now, we are seeing a quite horrible irony in political action.

Just as some American Jews hope to curry favour in their Liberal Protestant anti-Semitic environments by abandoning Israel (thinking, like the German Jews of the early 30s that their assimilation would be accepted by their gentile neighbors), Obama is now trying to curry favour in the muslim world by the same expedient. The Jews of Germany famously failed, the American Jews fail, and Obama is failing even as I write.

Obama, America’s first Affirmative Action President, is offering up Israel to its enemies in the hope of receiving something in return. He is getting something in return. The contempt and ridicule of the muslim world.

He may be able to destroy Israel with the help of America’s coalition of anti-Semites and useful Jewish Israel bashing fools, but he may also in the unfolding of his ideology and incompetence shatter America into a poor grotesque caricature of its earlier greatness.