Simplicius Simplicissimus [Changed to "The Immigrant" at http://immigrant9.wordpress.com/]

#76: Logic, Morals, and Mosques

2010-08-22T08:50:00.000-07:00

Leftists love to “reason” morally. If you say or do something that Leftists don’t like, they proceed to “argue” with you, accusing you of logical “inconsistency.” Their patter is simple:

You’re doing X, but X is bad. It’s bad because doing X implies not-Y and, as you’ll be the first to admit, not-Y is very bad indeed. Since you believe that Y, the opposite of not-Y, is good, and X is incompatible with Y, just stop doing X. If you don’t, then you’re being inconsistent. Yada yada yada, blah.

First, as I’ve argued more than once before, morals are a matter of preference and there is no such thing as inconsistency or incompatibility between preferences. Liking both sweet deserts and sour ones is not a logical inconsistency; and neither is liking one batch of humans and not another; killing one batch, but not another; helping one batch and not another. Turning all of these preferences into exercises in logic is a strategy to compel people to do things they prefer not to do. There are two ways of responding to such a campaign.

The first is simply to deny the generalization being used by the moral “reasoner” to argue for inconsistency. When he argues that you must be against all kinds of killing of people because you are against the killing of your family members, you just repeat that you are not against the first, but definitely against the second. Just refuse to generalize your preferences beyond your chosen range. Point out to him that since you are firmly not against the former and firmly in favor of the latter, there must be something wrong with his generalization. In this response, you do not give any reason for denying the generalization other than that it leads to an unacceptable conclusion: whatever leads to inconsistency must be false.

The second is to challenge the forming of the generalization as a non-sequitur. That is, to point out to the moral “reasoner” that his generalization is the result of an unwarranted inference for the sole dishonest purpose of creating a straw man in not-Y, the bad implication of your action. A so-called straw man is a weak position that one’s opponent does not hold, but which we attempt to pass off as his position in order to demolish it. The current controversy over the Ground Zero mosque presents an excellent example.

I have just heard a representative of some evangelical group arguing in favor of the mosque. His argument was that we must draw a distinction between the evil 9/11 Muslims and the “good” American Muslims. Denying the mosque, he says, would be, in effect, to paint the good Muslims with the same brush as the bad ones.

Hence, the argument goes: You’re resisting the mosque being built (X), but this is bad. It is bad because resisting the mosque (X) implies treating the whole of American Muslims as terrorists (not-Y) and, as you’ll be the first to admit, that is very bad indeed. Since you believe we should never blame a whole group for what a small number have done (Y) is good, and resisting the mosque (X) is incompatible with that (Y), just stop resisting the mosque.

The problem lies in the move from X, resisting the mosque, to not-Y, treating all American Muslims as terrorists.

The “you’re painting all Muslims as terrorists” argument is an instance of a straw man argument. The person who objects to the building of a mosque at Ground Zero has in fact made no claim at all about “all American Muslims.” At the most, he may have made a claim about the Muslims who are backing the building of the mosque. Thus, the claim that one is violating the principle that one should not blame everyone in a group for the actions of a few is a prime example here of a straw man. The claim that anyone who resists the building of the mosque is violating a “basic moral principle,” (that one should not blame everyone in a population for what a few do), is simply false and just one more instance of pretentious Leftist specious “reasoning.”

The “you’re painting all Muslims as terrorists” is not the only straw man being erected by the Left on the mosque issue.

President Obama recently inserted himself ambiguously in the mosque debate. First, he seemed to be arguing in favor of the mosque on the grounds that resisting it would be inconsistent with the U.S. constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion; later, as is his habit, he told us that he hadn’t. First he voted for it, then he voted against it. It’s all about consistency for the Left, isn’t it.

In any case, others have also argued that the issue at hand is that of freedom of religion.

It’s informative to look at freedom of religion as addressed in the Bill of Rights. The relevant text is the first amendment and it reads as follows:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

“Congress shall make no law”? Well, gee, who’s been talking about passing a law, anyway? Appealing to the Constitution would seem seriously besides the point.

But even if we pass over this, there doesn’t seem to be anyone who has suggested that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to worship as they please. Hey, this isn’t Iran or Saudi Arabia, is it? So, if there is a constitutional issue here it can’t be freedom of religion or the first Amendment. Maybe it’s that lesser known Amendment, the one that guarantees “freedom of location.” Oh, wait, there is no such Amendment.

There are thus two things we want to say to a moral “reasoner.”

1) There is no disputing about tastes (de gustibus non est disputandum); and

2) If you are going to insist on reasoning about moral matters, don’t cheat.

After you shake hands with a Leftist, count your fingers! (and wash your hands)

#75: Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies” Reconsidered

2010-08-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

After a hiatus of some five decades, I’ve been revisiting Popper’s remarkable two-volume study entitled The Open Society and its Enemies (1945). I remembered that I was impressed by the work way back then, but little else of its detailed argumentation. Reading it now, I’m fairly certain that I didn’t appreciate then just what an important work it really is. It is important not only for the light that Popper sheds on matters of older history, but for the light that Popper’s own presuppositions shed on our own very recent history.

This post will not be a review of the work in any sense, it will be focused just on making a few historical points. However, for those not familiar with the book, let me only say that it is concerned with identifying the two main intellectual sources of totalitarian ideology. Volume I is devoted to revising the then current “liberal” reading of Plato, whom Popper identifies as the “open society’s” first enemy. Volume II is devoted to Hegel and Marx, both of whom together count as its second enemy. All things considered, v. I is the more important, since seeing Marx, the main subject of v. II, as an enemy of individual freedom was scarcely ground shaking news. But calling Plato, the darling of academic leftists everywhere, a totalitarian, now that was indeed news. Because the effect of v. I was far larger than that of v. II, I will concentrate on it in this discussion.

Now, under the influence of Edmund Wilson I have generally traced modern socialism and communism back to the French revolution. On my own bat, I have extended this natural history back into the 17^th c, where the Enlightenment began and evolved into the worship of science and reason. But Popper had a larger view and found the roots of modern totalitarianism in a period as early as the third century b.c., in the thinking of one of philosophy’s most revered founding fathers, Aristocles, son of Aristides, better known to you as Plato.

Popper charges that Plato, contrary to popular belief, was a totalitarian in his theory and in his practical objectives, and that he was a propagandist for the creation of a totalitarian state. So far, so good. But, as one reads Popper from a 21^st c. point of view, one is constantly puzzled by his remarks. He is clearly against totalitarianism, but the contemporary reader has difficulty, I think, in identifying what he is for. The reason is this: the fact that he attacks Platonic as well has Marxist totalitarianism suggests that he must be for something like Classical Free Market Liberalism.

This guess falls afoul, however, of the fact that he also argues for social engineering (he tells us that the best statesman will approach his task like an engineer); that he is clearly hostile to religion (he considers it a primitive hold-over); and that he is committed to “social justice” (though it is admittedly unclear exactly what he means by this). All of this and more in Popper is incompatible with Free Market Liberalism. In addition, he believes in progress from less civilized societies to more, with “tribalism” specified as the low end of the continuum. Now, while tribalism usually implies loyalty to a person, rather than to codified laws, it also implies nationalism, the bogey of mid-century progressives. Thus, he is hostile to nationalism. In fact, as I’ve argued before, the post WW II progressives were united in blaming the war on Germany’s nationalism, rather than its Socialism. These are all marks of what we think of today as “Liberalism” or “Progressivism”, which is quite the opposite of Free Market Liberalism, and, finally, he explicitly identifies himself as a “Progressive”.

There is therefore a puzzle here. He likes neither Plato nor Marx, but his likes seem to exclude the only obvious alternative, namely Classical Free Market Liberalism. What is Popper for?

Popper obviously does not mean by “Progressive” what we mean by it today. Precisely what he means by “Progressive” becomes clearer when we look at the other word he uses to describe Plato and his philosophy, the word “Collectivist.”

The precise character of Plato’s philosophy that Popper objects to is that in it, the individual exists for the sake of the state, while in his “Progressivism,” the state exists for the sake of the individual!

We have become so accustomed to our current Progressivism that we assume quite automatically that any “Progressivism” will make the individual subordinate to the state, but this is clearly an unwarranted assumption. What Popper’s discussion suggests is that there is no necessary incompatibility between respecting the individual and having progressive objectives like the ones I listed earlier. It also suggests that there were actually two progressive streams in competition until at least the end of World War II, one of which accepted progressive values but rejected Collectivism, and one which accepted progressive values (ostensibly) and accepted Collectivism. Popper clearly rejected the latter stream in both its Nazi-style and its Stalinist incarnations. What Popper represented was an offshoot of Enlightenment Rationalism that is rarely seen today, an offshoot that used to be called “Humanism.” What he wanted, for the sake of a more informative name, was an “Individualist Progressivism” (or “Individualism,” for short).

This calls for a couple of critical remarks.

First, and perhaps less important, when Popper describes the difference between Collectivism and Individualist Progressivism, he invokes the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. He says that Collectivism does not respect the individual, but that Kant’s ethics does. His choice, however, is an interesting one, since Kant can equally be blamed for the later successes of collectivism. After all, there would have been no Hegel without Kant, and there would have been no Marx without Hegel.

Popper focuses exclusively on one of the versions of Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Treat each man as an end in himself (not as a means to an end) as proof that Kant was an Individualist Progressive. The example often given of this principle is that of the life-boat conundrum: is it right to dump the person with the least hope of survival overboard so that the chances of those remaining be improved. The Kantian answer to this is clearly “no.” But this is really a bit of a red herring. If this is the whole meaning of this version of the Categorical Imperative, then Kant is certainly not giving the Individualist what he wants.

What the Individualist wants is that every man have his idiosyncratic needs and wants respected, regardless of how useful it might be to others to ignore them. Now, this would indeed be an Individualistic ethic. But can we derive this kind of ethic from the Categorical Imperative? I don’t know, but the answer becomes tediously uninteresting once we remember that Kant’s ethic is the ethic of a fictional individual, the “moral agent,” who does not exist and has never existed. This Kantian “moral agent” is supposedly purely rational and has no needs or wants. This creature’s ethic is supposed to be an expression of its rationality, which is its essence.

This means that emotions and physical wants and needs are not counted as “parts” of a moral agent, they are rather forces acting against the agent’s true self, they are actually enemies of his rationality. The implication of this is that if the world consisted only of Kantian moral agents, these agents would all be identical, they would be indistinguishable from each other, for one purely rational being is exactly the same as any other, just as any calculator will give identical results on identical sums. Thus, the “respect for individuality” that Popper discovers in the Categorical Imperative loses most, if not all, of its moral usefulness. For if we are really like Kant’s moral agents, then we don’t actually have any wants and needs, nor do we have an individuality to respect (other than purely numerical), and if we are not like them, then the principle applies only to beings who don’t exist.

I suppose it’s hard for Popper to admit this since he shares Kant’s and the Enlightenment’s blind confidence in the power of human reason.

Second, while there may be no necessary incompatibility between Individualism and progressive objectives, there does seem to be a powerful, if not inexorable, inclination for any Progressivism to evolve in the direction of Collectivism. The U.S., for example, seems currently to be in an ambiguous posture vis a vis Collectivism, and its ongoing health care debate illustrates the kind of drift of which I speak. While the U.S. actually incorporates respect for the individual very strongly in its constitution, the existence of a nascent government controlled health care system has already evoked arguments in which the individual’s needs and wants are subordinated to that of “the community.” As soon as the community pays for services, the community acquires a dominant voice in the setting of policy. Thus, for example, if you, the individual, want to be a fat, lazy, smoker, then either your medical benefits will have to be adjusted down or you will have to be penalized with higher payments. After all, your decisions affect the community, and the community comes first! My point is that the only way that even Individualism can move towards its progressive goals is that of social engineering, that social engineering involves state intervention, and that state intervention inevitably makes the interests of the collective trump the interests of the individual.

So, the first point I have been interested in making is that there used to exist a distinct species of Progressivism that existed side by side with Collectivism and that differed from Collectivism by its commitment to a respect for the complete individual, needs, wants, and idiosyncrasies included. Interestingly, this species seems to have lost to Collectivism in the evolutionary competition of political doctrines. The only representative I can still find of Individualistic Progressivism is the writer Christopher Hitchens, an ex-Socialist. One suspects that his rejection of Socialism might well have been based on his recognition that Collectivism does not respect the individual.

This is a form of Progressivism with which one could agree to disagree, a member, as it were, of a loyal opposition; a loyal opposition that is naïve, but well intentioned. Collectivism, on the other hand, is an attack on values that are so fundamental that its advocates can only be seen as hostile to the state, and they must be fought with any means available.

The second point involved the two criticisms that seemed to me might aid a reader in coming to terms with Popper’s text.

One can only speculate why it is that Collectivism has emerged the victor in this fatal struggle between Individualism and Collectivism, but the most obvious reason might also very well be the right one. Collectivism might be better in the survival game precisely because it does not respect the individual, for this means that there are no limits to what it can do in order to win. Respect for the individual may be something that we in Western democracies value, but in the street brawl of “isms” through the decades and centuries, it is nothing more than a handicap. As many a romantic and idealist has discovered, it is very easy to be “in the right” and yet wind up dead.

#74: Secretary General Obama

2010-08-01T15:24:00.000-07:00

Let me return again to the topic of Obama’s plans.

It is fascinating to watch the many different “explanations” of Obama’s various behaviours. What makes them interesting is that their proliferation indicates just how puzzling people are finding this president. Some come to the conclusion that he’s just completely out of his depth, others that he’s a radical, maniacal Marxist. I suspect there is truth in both of these views, they’re not incompatible. But, as I’ve written in a recent post, and it warrants repeating, I think there is a third factor at play: Obama want to be the next Secretary General of the UN! Clinton tried for it after his presidency, but failed. Tony Blain tried for it, and failed. Obama believes that what catapulted him into the presidency can also give him entrance to this holy grail of charlatans: he is half-black! All he has to do is convince the power brokers of the UN that he is black in the right way. This hypothesis is the only one that explains the erratic and careless behavior of this president.

I believe that at this point, that two things are clear: 1) he has given up any idea of running for another term, and 2) whatever his administration does is aimed not at the improvement of the U.S., but rather at establishing his bona fides for the electors of the Secretary Generalship.

His plan involves doing enough locally to convince the Dem party hacks that he’s still interested in getting them elected (which he is, but to a minimal extent) and keeping his cabinet persuaded that he’s actually trying to govern.

People have often commented that he seems to be campaigning most of the time, rather than governing; but they have failed to identify precisely what it is he is campaigning for. It is not another term as president of the U.S.; it is not to give the Democrat party another majority; it is not to improve the lot of the “African-American community”; it is not to redistribute the wealth of the U.S..

Or, rather, it is all of these things, but as instruments of achieving his post-presidential ambitions, not for their own sakes.

I am not saying that his sympathies don’t lie with these objectives, but, when the chips are down, what he’s after is more power, more wealth, and more influence, and on a larger stage.

What people refer to as his political “tone deafness”, his being “aloof”, his being “out of touch” with the American people all evidence, not a lack of ability, but merely that he has utterly ceased caring about re-election or anything political within the American framework. He vacations constantly, he vacations away from the Gulf at exactly the time when support from him would help, he pisses on Israel, he pisses on Arizona. All of this has to be understood as reflecting not political ignorance or ineptitude, but that they are aimed, to the degree that they are aimed at all, at a larger and external audience.

Like all politicians, Obama panders, but he’s no longer pandering to the American electorate: he’s pandering to the electorate that will make him the King of the U.N.!

Obama has stopped governing, if he ever did, he is now campaigning, and not campaigning in and for an office in the U.S.A..

#73: A Poem I Wrote in High School

2010-07-18T13:54:00.001-07:00

I found this while culling accumulated household debris, and thought that it showed that even in the 1950s, I was already showing signs of contempt for liberalism.

The Rotten and the Mad

Nothing stands to evil

as conscience stands to good;

the mad and rotten act,

and act together,

in the earliest brotherhood.

And while the mad and rotten act,

the good pursue The Good;

with conscience and with time,

they trace a trembling line

between the good and bad.

But while they mull,

The fine placing of that line,

The only ones who act,

in fact,

are the rotten and the mad.

#72: Maybe Nietzsche Was Right About Power, After All

2010-07-13T15:01:00.000-07:00

And yet another episode in my ongoing fascination with the inner workings of the Leftist mind. As always, I caution that most phenomena in nature are multiply caused, so whatever I say here, it is just another small aspect of this complex and stinky feature of the modern world.

It’s tempting, and many succumb to the temptation, to locate Leftism is what has been called “white guilt.” I’m skeptical. If there are white people who actually say their politics are determined by their feelings of guilt, I haven’t come across them. And if the claim is that they’re secretly or unconsciously dealing with their feelings of guilt, well, that doesn’t seem to be a falsifiable claim. And the whole “feelings of white guilt” thing is such a self-serving piece of manure anyway. “We’re just so morally sensitive that the evil in the world makes us just crazy!”

Christ, maybe, was motivated by something like “global guilt,” since, we are told, he took the world’s sins upon his own shoulders. Why would he have done this, if he didn’t think that in some way, he was really responsible for mankind’s sins. But, other than Christ and perhaps the Apostles and the saints, I’m inclined to think that people generally are motivated by things that please them, not things that make them feel bad..

A better story is that Lefties are motivated by sanctimony, the feeling of being holier-than-thou. It’s true that most Libs do feel holier than conservatives and that they seem to take pleasure in stimulating that feeling in themselves. But, it is also true that a lot of conservatives also feel much holier than their Leftie counterparts. So, I don’t think we can easily use sanctimony, as attractive as it is initially, to identify the mental state peculiar to the Leftie. But sanctimony is still a good clue.

Sanctimony is species of a genus, a genus which doesn’t have a name, but which I’ll dub for the moment, the feeling being “better-than-thou.” Being religiously more observant and sincere is certainly one way of being better than the next person, but it isn’t the only way. It’s also a way that isn’t available to the atheistic Lefties, so, if they want to feel better than the next guy, they have to find something other than being “religiously better.” And so they do.

The Lefties have two dimensions of “being better” than conservatives that complement each other. The first is that they are smarter than conservatives (their favorite insult is “stupid”), and the second is that they are morally better precisely because they are smarter. They have bought, hook, line, and sinker, into the Socratic linkage of morality and reason that has polluted philosophy since the third century BC.

Now, while the English idiom of “know-it-all” is available, it doesn’t quite capture the Leftie’s haughty attitude. The Germans, perhaps because their culture has produced the type for longer, has an expression that’s right on target: besserwisser. Because German is an agglutinative language, it has very many words that are simply constructions out of simpler words, and besserwisser is one of those. It is just a compostion of besser, “better,” and wisser, “knower.”

A know-it-all is just a person who is always lecturing others in an effort to display the amount she knows or thinks she knows. A besserwisser, on the other hand, is a person who is always making an effort to trump the knowledge or beliefs of another. The besserwisser wants to feel intellectually superior to the other. Thus, the besserwisser wants to feel smarter-than-thou.

As I”ve argued many times before, the Leftie’s historical orgins in the Enlightenment and its commitment to Reason (with a capital “R”, as you’ll notice) have quite naturally provided him with this avenue for feeling better than the other. In particular, the fact that science quite often produces theories (and apparent facts) that run counter to our common intuitions has encouraged the adoption of the scientific cloak for Leftie pronouncements. More specifically, reflections on man and society were transformed from being mere personal effulgences into “objective social scientific” theories. And who can argue with a “science,” eh?

So, what we’ve got in the Leftie is an Enlightenment descendant, usually quite ignorant of his own origins and of the physical sciences the apes, who attempts to feel good by producing counter-intuitive pronouncements to demonstrate his superiority over the common man.

Why does the Leftie do this?

Answering this risks descending to his level, which I am loath to do.

Ah, what the hell, I’ll indulge myself just this once.

Back before social science, when people opined about man’s “nature” rather than playing pseudo science psychology, they offered “large” hypotheses about man’s single motivational mainspring. Famously, Freud said the mainspring was sex, “libidinal energy,” and Nietzsche said it was the “will to power” (der Wille zur Macht). Freud, however, thought he was actually doing science, being a true child of the Enlightenment and a trained neurologist. He wasn’t.

While scarcely scientific, and a bit of a poseur, I think Nietzsche may have been right: it’s all about power. Powerful people exercise power because they enjoy it; inadequate people seek power because they want it. The whole thing is captured quite nicely in Swift’s nice poem:

"The Vermin only teaze and pinch

Their Foes superior by an Inch.

So Nat'ralists observe, a Flea Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,

And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em,

And so proceed ad infinitum."

He does it because he feels inadequate and inadequate people always attempt to feel better at someone else’s expense, the smaller fleas below him.

As I said at the beginning, things are really never this simple. Hume might have been right when he wrote:

"It is sufficient for our present purpose, if it be allowed, what surely, without the greatest absurdity cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent." (David Hume An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals)

Even given that, however, I suppose it is sufficient for our present purpose to allow that at least one powerful, dominant drive in human beings is to assuage their feelings of impotence and inadequacy by finding some basis for feeling contempt for some of their fellows, however frail that basis might be.

Lest I be accused of harboring such feelings of contempt for Lefties, let me say this. Would be so surprising if I did? If I am correct, then this is a feature of the human being, and am I not human as well? But, quite apart from this, it behooves us to distinguish despising a philosophy, a theory, or a manner of life, on the one hand, and despising individual people, on the other.

I confess that I have despised individual people, and am I not human? But I also confess that I do despise Leftism and everything associated with it, and do so, finally, without a trace of regret.

#71: Obama’s Undeclared War

2010-07-09T10:49:00.000-07:00

Recently, Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican party, opined that Afghanistan was a "war of Obama's choosing," and this has raised an acrimonious debate that spans the parties. If we go by Obama’s campaign rhetoric, there’s hardly any question – he said time and again that America should be fighting in Afghanistan. But there’s another Obama war-question that seems more important, all things considered:

Is Obama actually at war with the American people?

He hasn’t actually said so, but there’s reason to think that he’s been fighting an undeclared war ever since he got into office. There was, of course, the economy- breaking health care plan that he crammed through congress in the face of popular majority resistance. In addition, there’s his “cap and tax” enviro-Nazi plan in the offing, another economy killer. And let us not forget the always attractive “card-check” union law, a device for further increasing the power of Chicago-style union gangsters.

But, more recently and more revealingly, he has launched law suits against two American states. He is suing Arizona over its new immigration law and he’s continuing legal action against the state of Louisiana over his failed attempt to place a moratorium on off-shore drilling.

What is fascinating in the first case is that he is willing to use the might of the federal government against the victim, Arizona, while he has made it clear that he will not only do nothing against the aggressors, Mexican illegals, he will actually block any efforts on the part of the victims to defend themselves. He appears, therefore, to be siding with an external enemy against the American people.

This should not be entirely surprising. Israel is in exactly the same situation as Arizona, with Arabs taking the places of Mexicans, and, characteristically, Obama is clearly more sympathetic to the aggressors than to the victims. When he tries to “make nice” with Netanyahu, it is transparently obvious that he is gritting his teeth and going through the charade for purely political reasons.

I suppose that his non-support of the Iranian freedom protestors might even be invoked here, though that was probably a mix of not knowing what to do, on the one hand, and passivity, on the other.

In the case of Louisiana, Obama and his administration have done everything in their power to make the catastrophe worse than it might have been. They dragged their heels for months about allowing foreign ships come in to help. Having already seen to it that the oil spill does as much damage as possible to the environment, to Louisiana’s already damaged economy, and to the U.S. economy as whole, he has gone on to try to block any possibility of recovery by banning offshore drilling.

It sure looks like he’s fighting a war against America.

But why?

I think it comes down to a couple of converging reasons.

1) He wants to cripple the American economy, and

2) He is using the office of the presidency to wage a campaign to become Secretary General of the U.N. after he leaves office.

He wants to cripple the U.S. economy because he is ideologically a “one-world” Marxist. He hates American power and he hates American wealth. It’s hard to tell whether he despises Israel simple because it has always been an American client-state or for the usual black Revrnd Wright and Farrakhan rabid anti-Semitism. Probably a mix of both.It is an axiom among Marxists that in order to take over a state, one must first cripple its economy. Thus, what many people see as inexplicably stupid policies, are actually policies well designed to accomplish their goal. To Obama and his toads, the more unemployment, the better, the higher the deficit, the better, the more misery among the little people, the better. And, among all of these, the more black and Hispanic rioting in the streets, the better. Economic despair and chaos in the streets leads straight to Marxist socialism. Just ask Saul Alinsky. These are the methods of Chicago “community organizer” (or “commie street agitator”).

But even he knows that presiding over the crippling of the U.S. economy will ensure his defeat, should he run for a second term. However, this is a problem only if his planning includes a second term. I suggest that he has no intention of even running for a second term, that, instead, his actions in the presidency are intended to serve the dual purpose of destroying the U.S. and displaying his bona fides to the U.N. king makers, the leaders of the ever-outraged “third world.” The more he “fails” as president of the U.S., the better he looks to the Euro-Lefties, the African dictators, and the Muslims. Win-win for the affirmative action president.

There are a little over three months to go till the November congressional elections. In the time that remains, expect a legislative suicide charge from the congressional Left as they attempt to do as much damage to the body politic and economic before they are shot down. If the country manages to take back congress, many of the teeth in this Manchurian Candidate’s mouth will be gone and there will once again be hope for the future.

#70: Humanism, Socialism, and Cultures

2010-06-16T16:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-11T07:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-08T15:38:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-08T06:44:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

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.

#64: What Does it Take to Change One's Mind?

2010-05-30T07:02:00.000-07:00

I recently sent a list of Obama’s failures in the 18 months he has been in office to a friend. Here’s the list I sent:

1) We are 13 trillion dollars in debt;

2) We have 9.7% unemployment;

3) The Iranians are gonna have a bomb and regularly tell Obama to get lost;

4) Obama asks the Russians to help with Iran and they regularly tell Obama to get lost;

5) The Brazilians and the Turks just recently made a nuclear deal with the Iranians and told Obama to get lost;

6) Obama asks the Chinese to help with Korea and they regularly tell Obama to get lost;

7) The Koreans are about to start WW III and regularly tell Obama to get lost;

8) The Europeans are about to collapse financially and regularly tell Obama to get lost;

9) We have a completely open border on the south through which illegals, drug smugglers, and Islamic scum come walzing through;

10)We have a gigantic oil spill in the gulf that continues every day to pollute the waters.

This list has been edited for safe family viewing. Even as I read it now, I realize that I could add more items to it, but that isn’t necessary. The point isn’t to compile a complete list, but only to show that the Affirmative Action Experimental President (AAEP) has, at this point, a catastrophically bad record. The only “achievement” he has had is that of pushing through the health care monstrosity over the objections of the majority of citizens. But even from the point of view of politics and power, it is hard to see how this accrues to his credit. First, the bill hardly resembles what he set out to pass, second, it barely passed even though he has a majority in both houses, and third, it may well be the cause of a Republican resurgence in November and his serving (thank God!) only one term. Some victory.

What remains interesting in this grisly spectacle of a once mighty nation being led into implosion by a feckless incompetent completely out of his depth is that the his polls have remained around 47% positive with a fair bit of stability. This indicates the existence of a large population that is immune to facts. Now we know that blacks voted for him virtually unanimously, but they are only 20% of the electorate. This means that there are still around 27% who are undeterred by his failures. How come?

I think it is helpful in trying to understand political phenomena to find parallel phenomena in non-political arenas. In this case, I am reminded of the decision issues that have faced people at times of scientific revolution and of W.V.O. Quine’s epistemic metaphor of the “web of belief.”

Quine likened our collected beliefs to a web. Each knot in the web counted as a single belief and the strings between the knots were the logical connections that tie our beliefs together. For simplicity’s sake, let us assume that when a belief (knot) is given up, all the beliefs from it to the periphery must also be given up. Therefore, on this metaphor, the beliefs that are closer to the web’s periphery are less essential to web’s integrity than those close to the center. This is clearly an overly simple model, but it serves the purpose of emphasizing the interconnectedness of beliefs and that it is rarely the case that a belief can be given up without giving up a lot of others.

This is the fact, for example, that underlies the standing objection to historical counterfactuals. People sometimes ask such questions as “What would have happened had Hitler not opened a second front on the East?”. The well trained historian will usually respond that this is an unanswerable question, though he will also often be unable to explain why. It is unanswerable because we do not, and cannot, know what other facts of Hitlerian and pre-Hitlerian history would also have to be changed by the assumption that he did not attack Russia. In order to answer this question, we would have to be able to construct a complete alternate world set of beliefs in which the past was such as to lead to an alternate Hitler who decided to not attack Russia. This we cannot do, except as in the form of fiction. But in an alternate possible world, there are no truths to be discovered, and thus there are no beliefs to be rationally forged.

Now when great thinkers propose revolutionary ideas to their established world, they are often resisted. The sages of Copernicus’ time resisted and denied the doctrine that the sun lies at the center of what we now call the solar system. It is easy to malign them as stupid reactionaries defending their turf, and while this contains an element of truth, it is also the case that everyone always must make a cost-benefit calculation when they face an assault on one of their beliefs.

The sages had the Aristotelian method of calculating the positions of the moving celestial bodies. It was as accurate as their instruments were capable of confirming. While there were advantages to going the Copernican route, there was also the huge disadvantage of having to relinquish an immense amount of their theological belief, if not the whole. And while we might scoff at this now, the actual people having to make this decision considered their theology as much a part of their knowledge system as their science. From a cost-benefit point of view, it could easily be argued that the rational person would have resisted the Copernican thesis. Exactly when to give up a belief is not as simple a question as one might think.

I think it is very much this kind of thing that underlies liberal progressive apparent immunity to fact. If the liberal is to give up the belief that the AAEP is the country’s savior, he must also question the AAEP’s platform of big government solutions, of re-distribution of income, of peace through appeasement, and of American capitalist badness. But when a person gives up this much in a single blow, he is left quite adrift and feeling helpless. He doesn't like this experience, shrinks from it, and searches for ways to avoid it.

The play of evidence and counter-evidence is always a fluid and complex matter in which many considerations play a part, and some of them purely pragmatic. When facing adverse evidence, a person always has choices. Denying the truth of the putative evidence; introducing an alternate hypothesis for the evidence; or denying that the evidence actually counts against the belief under attack.

Most of our opinions and our decisions have a trained, conditioned quality about them, and we rely on those conditioned responses not only forming our responses to new issues, but even in such matters as choosing our friends. Giving up a belief close to the center of our web of belief involves turning over our world, and no one does that lightly.

But these reflections must serve to increase our admiration of the various intellectuals who actually began as commie true believers and came to see the light. We can only hope that more and more of such intellectually courageous people begin to surface.

#63: What's So Wrong About Nationalism, Eh?

2010-05-22T21:05:00.000-07:00

In at least one earlier post, I mentioned a common error, though I don’t think I gave it a name then. The error is that of assuming that a phenomenon has only a single cause. This usually happens when two possible causes are being considered and an argument develops because people assume that the cause they favour is somehow threatened by also allowing the other. In nature, most phenomena actually have multiple converging causes. This error is common enough to warrant its own name, so, by the powers vested in me, I hereby baptize it the “single cause fallacy”.

Now, I’ve argued in the past that the Democrat resistance to controlling the national borders and booting the illegals out was due to the Democrat impulse to increase its own voting base. Hell, if the democrats could, they’d include the dead among the voting citizenry! Oh, wait, they did do that during the ill fated Obama election! Sigh. There's been quite a lot of interest in Zombie movies lately and even weird Zombie romantic novels, so I can see the time right for an Obama and the Zombies movie featuring waves of the Living Dead lumbering towards the voting booths. Whoops, too late again. Wasn't that what happened during the last election?

But, lest I commit the Single Cause Fallacy, let me admit here that there are more motives than one driving most Democrat Progressive stupidities. I add below, therefore, another motive to the increasing voter population one.

I’ve argued in many posts now that one of the things that Progressives hate more than their vegetables is nationalism. Yes, yes, I know that the Nazis were nationalists (gee whiz, it’s right there in their name), but that’s not why the Progs hate it. The fact that the Nazis were nationalists was just a very convenient talking point against the nationalism they had inveighed against since Woody Wilson promoted progressivism from seedy Harvard faculty common rooms to the international stage. But why? you ask anxiously. There is a reason that is rooted in the Progressive’s most fundamental conviction.

The Progressive begins with the doctrine known as “humanism.”

Arguably, this doctrine had its most powerful expression in the mistaken but hugely influential ethical theory of Immanuel Kant, specifically in the version of his “categorical imperative” that demands one treat each individual as an end in itself, never as a means. What this means is simply, never use a person like an instrument.

But, whatever its historical origin, the doctrine known as Humanism has at least this thesis implicit in it:

People are important in themselves, property is not. Where human rights come into conflict with property rights, the former automatically trump the latter.

But this very general conviction carries with it an implication that is even more far reaching, going from morals into very radical political theory. The reason is that the nation state is itself conceived by Humanists as no more than a kind of larger property. For the Humanist, national boundaries are indistinguishable from the boundaries of private property, and all property boundaries imply a restrictions on the needs of those who have no property at all.

Thus, Marxist Socialism simply supplies a large pseudo scientific narrative to the very visceral convictions of those who love humanity and therefore hate private property. That much is already obvious, but what I want to stress here is that the same Humanism that implies the hatred of private property ALSO implies a hatred of nationalism, since nationalism is nothing more to these people than an indecent and disgusting pleasure in a property one is immorally withholding from those who have none.

What is, however, equally disgusting is that many of those who have strong Humanist impulses in the abstract, tend to get quite aggressive when their own property borders are threatened. Streisand, for example, one of the more vulgar and obnoxious of the Progressives waged a legal battle over a photographer’s taking aerial photographs of the California coast where her large and expensive mansion sits. And the late, great Humanist Ted Kennedy fought an ongoing battle with the new wind farm industry that wished to put up their wind turbines in the distant waters visible from his Cape Cod “family compound.” Teddy lost the battle only after he passed on. And, oh, Al Gore has just purchased an 9 million dollar ocean-view villa in southern California. Now, none of these properties have open borders, they have "security perimeters" complete with armed guards and scary big dogs. But these progressive Humanists don't feel that their country should have the same security they insist on for themselves.

Many, therefore, of the Progressives blocking all efforts to stem the tide of illegals across the Arizona border are doing what they do because they see the national boundary as a kind of metaphysically indefensible “occupation” of humanity’s common land. The only ownership they respect is all of human kind’s (and, of course, their own ownership of their own lands!).

In their fevered imaginations, the U.S. insisting on its borders is very much like the cliché of the old western dramas of the rich landowner keeping all the water on his land for his own use. Damn that rich landowner! Who cares whether he bought it! Who cares whether he fought the Indians for it! Who cares whether he worked the land! We need it, we want it, and, goddam it, we have a right to it! Laws? We don’ need no stinkin’ laws! Laws are just artificial devices contrived by the rich and the powerful to keep the pretty orchards and the pretty buildings and the lovely barns to themselves. Well, that’s how the Mexicans feel about it, and that’s how their supporters among the enlightened Progressives feel about it.

But what must not be forgotten is that that is exactly how Attila and his boys felt when looking down on that pretty, pretty Rome before they descended, like Sennacherib, like wolves on the fold, to sack, to pillage, to rape, and to burn.

#62: From Mr. Smith to Rod Blagojevitch

2010-05-18T16:42:00.000-07:00

I want to introduce you to a new political principle, at least one that I’ve never come across in my reading. In order to do so, it’ll be convenient to begin with introducing a new technical term, the term “political unit,” defined as follows:

P is a “political unit” (“p.u.”) if and only if p is able to intentionally affect events in some social context.

This means that fire plugs and furniture are not p.u’s, while every individual is a p.u., but also every cohesive assembly of individuals. In particular, families can be p.u’s, cities, states, congregations, family businesses, nationally based businesses, multi-national corporations can be p.u’s, and so forth.

So, here’s the principle:

P.u’s only respect the interests of themselves and of other p.u’s capable of affecting their interests.

I think this principle is prima facie intuitively strong and may even seem so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning. After all, the schoolyard bully is very unlikely to take the complaints of his weaker schoolmates seriously, but she’ll certainly listen to anyone stronger than she is. This is hardly a shocking insight, but it has an interesting implication for representative democracy. The implication is this:

Individuals have little hope of having their interests qua individuals respected by either the individuals they elect or the institutions they create to serve them.

The reason is that as soon as a person becomes a representative of a group, she becomes by that token alone a p.u. of a higher order and will now respond only other p.u’s at her level or above. She will ignore, distract, lie to, or placate the individuals whose representative she is.

What this means, first, is that women are not represented in any genuine way by, say, NOW, the aged are not represented by AARP, workers not represented by their unions, the faithful not represented by their churches, citizens are not represented by their governments, and shareholders not represented by their boards. These p.u’s certainly have interests and they certainly negotiate for them, but the interests of their “flock,” as it were, are not their ultimate objectives. Their objectives are their own, and those objectives are the objectives always of their respective leaderships, the objectives of their own power.

What it means, second, is that the way in which modern politics is parsed is quite wrong. Popular political mythology casts the modern contest as one between “business,” on the one hand, and “individual workers,” on the other. This mythology is conveniently supported by the historical fact of worker exploitation during the industrial revolution. And in that setting of worker exploitation, the government played many ambiguous roles, though it has emerged in most western nations as the protector of the weak and powerless, a role it has actually chosen for itself.

Seeing politics through the lens of this one quite short phase in our historical development obscures the more fundamental conflict that should compel our attention. The threat to the individual is not essentially business per se; rather, the threat to the individual is in the large. The individual is threatened by any p.u. that is above him. This is a very big lesson to learn, and we can see just how big by considering the ease with which Hitler absorbed the German industries. While Hitler was indeed a Socialist of the nationalist stripe, he understood that it was politically far more effective to suborn big capital than to dismantle it. In effect, Hitler went into partnership with giant industries like Krupp, who put their massive productive power into the service of the state. And Hitler's willing corporate partners were not limited to Germany, see, for example, Edwin Black's study: IBM and the Holocaust.

Hitler’s insight has been well learned by subsequent Socialist wannabes, not least by Obama and his little Socialist rented brains.

It is in vain that ordinary Americans wait for big American business to stand up for capitalism against the gigantic power grab coming from Socialist Obama.

They do not understand that Big Business has more in common with Big Government than with the common man. Both Big Business and Big Government strive for total control, the former through monopoly, the latter through force and conditioned dependency. Until each believes that they can completely dominate, they will do exactly what criminal gangs have always done: they agree to divide the spoils.

The pattern for the relationship between big American business and the Obama administration has become quite clear, it is a two-step. Obama plays the rhetorical populist card, complete with Democrat congressional show trials, during which he demonizes the businesses and distracts public attention from congressional culpability that is largely at home in his party; at the same time, he forms enormous partnerships with the same businesses, suborning their leaderships with sweetheart deals that will benefit the same “miscreants” he publicly excoriates. He’s done this with the auto companies, the banks, and the pharmaceuticals. But he also did it with the A.M.A. and with AARP.

This is not new with Obama, it is just the scale on which he is doing it that staggers the imagination. One must only remember “the Great Society’s” investment in post-secondary education. Prior to Johnson, there were still many private independent universities in the U.S., now there are very few. The reason is very simple, government money. The universities’ were, to put it bluntly, simply bought by the government, and we see the result in the conversion of the Universities into Socialist madrassahs.

This modus operandi is so deeply embedded in the Socialist play-book on the take-over of nations that it trumps all other ideological considerations. One must remember that the only imperative that drives the Socialist ideologue is that of the acquisition of total political power. And this means that individual Socialist commandments are quite easily abandoned when an increase in power is at stake. What this means in practice, is that real apparatchiks will not even blink at the idea of sleeping with capitalists, if the end of total power is furthered by doing so.

Which leads me to the conclusion of this post. The Obama administration is currently implementing a policy of partnership with the American churches. The churches will work at furthering the Obama “green agenda” under the rubric of “ecological justice,” and, in exchange, the churches will receive government “grants” towards various “ecological” religious objectives.

The Socialists and Leftists everywhere have made it abundantly clear that they hate Christianity (no, not “religion,” because religion includes, for example, Islam, and Islam is too ethnic to be criticized). But, if the churches can be suborned, if they can be turned to the Socialist cause, well, then, even Christianity becomes tolerable.

Reagan was right: Government is not the solution, Government is the problem.

But I think his point is not quite general enough: the problem is any representative person or body whose misbehaviour is not immediately and severely punishable.

Sure, you can send Mr. Smith to Washington, but when he gets there, he’ll be reborn as Rod Blagojevitch.

#61: Reason, Progressives, and RINOs

2010-05-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

In recent times, I have frequently heard Conservatives maintaining that Socialism and Progressivism are identical. While there is a definite relationship, it is both a historical and a conceptual mistake to merge the two notions.

Progressivism is the broader and older approach to social, moral, and political issues. Progressivism is the child of the European Enlightenment, the 18^th c. that has been revealingly known as “the Age of Reason.” While the word “reason” has positive connotations today, this is because it is the modern habit to contrast “reason” with stupid irrationality in the general run of life. In the history of Western ideas, however, from the 18^th c. back, Reason (capitalized) was discussed always as the competitor of Faith. In pre-Enlightenment times, Faith generally emerged as the victor, with Reason being forced into a subordinate role. In both the realms of religion and a slowly growing empirical science, Reason was building up a head of steam under the Church repression, a head of steam that began to manifest itself visibly in the early 1600s. This was the time of Galileo, Deascartes, and Gassendi, but the stage had already been set by a large number of other thinkers and experimenters.

Thus, the direction of this historical stream was against Faith and in favour of Reason. The importance of this movement cannot be over-emphasized because it involved not only the rejection of judgment based on authority (rather than reason), but it rejected the value of tradition and culture. In effect, man’s reliance was shifted during this period from church and God to Man’s reason: man became increasingly self-reliant. No matter what the issue or the problem, the Enlightenment man said: I’ll figure it out for myself, thank you very much!

While I haven’t seen it represented in this way, one can plausibly argue that Descartes’ Discourse on Method, which is considered emblematic of our transition from Faith to Science, is also a model of our contemporary Progressive’s self-image. The revolutionary point of the Discourse is that human reason, when properly applied, is equal to the task of acquiring knowledge and using that knowledge for the betterment of human life. But, even more important, is the enormous methodological principle that each human being is responsible for validating his own beliefs. The individual human being is the final arbiter of his own beliefs, and not an external authority or tradition or culture. As they say these days, this was a very “empowering” doctrine. Yet it carried with it the assumption that a world based on its radical application would be a “better” world than the one that preceded, something that has not always proven to be the case, as terrible as the Middle Ages were at times.

Like the Cartesianism of the Discourse, Progressivism rejects tradition and rejects inherited culture; in place of these, it relies on pseudo-scientific social experimentation and social engineering. As a consequence, the history of progressivism is a grim historical case study in the Law of Unintended Consequences. To put it in figurative terms, the Progressive hates a city like Istanbul, with its small winding corridors and unsystematic sprawl, but he loves a borough like Manhattan, laid out, as it is, like a grid. Unfortunately for the Progressive, planned constructions have turned out most often like the ones built in the reign of Marshall Tito, giant, ugly, block-shaped human warehouses built in rows, rather than like Manhattan. The Progressive distrusts and dislikes natural development, and he trusts and loves a “rational” plan.

But the Progressive is not necessarily a Socialist. Socialism has been the preferred plan for Progressives because Socialism also, for distinct reasons of its own, has always rejected the traditions and culture of the country in which it created a revolution. Further, Socialism has always represented itself as a “scientific” plan for the betterment of mankind. These factors have made Socialism an obvious and ready-to-wear choice for the Progressive on the go. Yet, I can think of at least one contender for Progressive clientele who had some modest success in the past and may yet resurface.

The early 20^th c Eugenics movement attracted a substantial following. Eugenics is unquestionably a Progressive movement, even though most contemporary Progressives would reject it. The contemporary Progressive associates Eugenics with the practices of Hitler’s Third Reich, and thus immediately rejects it for that reason alone. While Progressives make a mantra of Reason (“Science,” today), they actually do not think very much; ironically, they actually make judgments the same way that the Medievals did, the way that Descartes rejected, by appeal to authority. What has changed is the identity of the authority. While the Medieval appealed to what the Priests said, the Progressives appeal to what the Academics say.

And while the modern Progressive rejects Eugenics with revulsion, no less an eminent Socialist like Bernard Shaw was an enthusiastic exponent of the doctrine. And notice this: while Eugenics can co-exist harmoniously with Socialism, it doesn’t have to; a person could well argue that Socialism is actually not necessary if a thoroughgoing Eugenics policy is applied. A Eugenicist can well argue that if we breed carefully for the needed abilities and at the highest levels, the issues of distributive justice would simply never arise.

I mention the Eugenics movement simply to reinforce the point that Progressivism does not entail Socialism.

Finally, while I have argued that Progressivism is the child of the Enlightenment faith in Reason, it must be remembered, as I suggest above, that 1) a faith in reason is not necessarily the same as being rational, and 2) that children do not always inherit the abilities or dispositions of their parents.

While the French thinkers of the 18^th c called the philosophes thought of themselves as the apostles of Reason, they were neither always as rational or as scientific as they thought. And while our current Progressives like to think of themselves as “so very rational,” they are not as self-reliant in their thinking as Descartes would have had them be, they have become “RINOs” (Rationalists In Name Only).

#60: Why the Constitution Can't Stop the Dog's Eating

2010-05-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

My good friend A.G., prosperous attorney and man about town during the day, is also the caped superhero, Scourge of Left, by night. As soon as the sun sets each day, he quickly finds a Tim Horton’s men’s room and swaps his Armani knock-off for his Conservative superhero costume modeled on Washington’s outfit in the famous full length portrait. Assuring himself that his powdered wig is on straight, he ventures out to do battle with the evil forces of the Left, embodied (yes, embodied) in the lissom bodies of errant young lawyettes who have strayed into socialist fields by listening to the siren songs of socialist Svengalis. We owe him much for his tireless efforts on the behalf of Western civilization!

Ok, enough of that.

It was fascinating to me, A.G., that in your comment on my last post, you drew attention to the U.S. Constitution. The reason is that that post had commenced life as a reflection on the Federalist Papers, a reflection which addressed the very point you make!

Yes, as we both agree, there exists no natural monitor or governor on popular greed or governmental appeasement of that greed. I see this as a terminal problem, but you believe that the U.S. Constitution provides an artificial governor on that appeasement.

My first response to your point is that if there does exist such a monitor, the evidence suggests that it is utterly ineffective, since Obama has jacked up the U.S. national debt to over 10 trillion dollars in feeding the entitlement appetite.

But on a more historical note, I believe that you do have a point. Conservatives who are interested in using the Founding Fathers for political conversions do not usually mention that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were as suspicious of masses as they were of monarchs, and they argued that the Constitution was as designed to defend us against a dictatorship of the mob as it was of a would-be monarch. Of course, the Conservatives inveigh against the East Coast snooty-poos and the Leftoids inveigh against the “right wing extrmists,” but the Founding Fathers were actually worried about both, as well as about leaving the important matters of state to individual citizens.

Which is why the U.S. is a republic and not a direct democracy.

The famous “checks and balances” were supposed to be a bulwark not only against one part of government becoming tyrannical, but also against “the people” becoming tyrannical. And it worked, for a time. What changed?

I think a number of things changed within the electorate that made an end-run around the artificial checks and balances possible.

The electorate of post revolution times consisted of farmers, small merchants, and artisans. All of these were independent minded people quite suspicious of government. That they were also shrewd is evidenced by the way the Federalist Papers appeal to them. The articles are all carefully argued, carefully reasoned efforts to rationally persuade the electorate that their own interests are best served by a unification of the states under a single constitution. This bunch of people would have snorted and spit if someone tried to sell them the snake-oil of “social justice,” and that was because they made their livings with their hands and backs and were not likely to give their money away lightly for a song and a story.

By way of contrast, the U.S. electorate today includes 47% who are parasites, who pay no taxes. If we add to that the percentage of people who work for government and the non-governmental union members, we begin to realize that even if the productive portion of the country still has the values of independence that controlled government vote-buying, that portion is massively outvoted by the remainder that is glued to the government teat.

What this means is that the Constitution can no longer be relied on to control populist appeasement spending.

The rot began with Wilson, was hugely increased under Roosevelt, and the final nail was put in the coffin by L.B.J..

The Founding Fathers never anticipated the electorate we face today, and even as we speak, the Democrat majority is in the process of increasing this dependent underclass by another ten million in a single shot by granting amnesty to the illegals.

The motto of the Democrat party is this: if the poor, illiterate, and stupid don’t exist, we have to either create them or import them or both. They create them by crashing the economy and they import them with a skewed immigration policy that focuses on increasing welfare recipients. Any improvement in the national standard of living is a political problem for the Democrat Party, not a cause of rejoicing.

#59: Damn, This Dog Just Won't Stop Eating!

2010-05-09T08:40:00.000-07:00

Let’s talk about “Populism.”

Populism must be distinguished from Socialism, though the two are closely related. Socialism is nothing other than populism with a pseudo-scientific mask. Both are efforts to harness the power of simple greed and envy. But people, particularly people of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are uncomfortable with their own greed and envy, and so the clever politicians invented a narrative in which their greed and envy resurfaced in the guise of fairness and justice. This narrative capitalized (no irony intended) on the powerful Enlightenment trend of science and pseudo-science from the 18^th c on, this narrative was the Socialism of Marx and Engels. What Marx decided was “let’s give Populism a popular 18^th c Materialist cloak and a trendy scientific ‘look’. Yeah! That’s the ticket, we’ll turn Populism into a ‘science’ which ‘proves’ that greed and envy are really fairness and justice!”

“I love it!” he said to Engels, “Ain’t bullshit great when you serve it on a plate?” (loosely translated from the German)

That was the brilliant first step. The brilliant next step came from Lenin, who said to himself, “the pseudo science thing is good, but it can’t hurt to make it a secular religion, too! Yeah! That’s the ticket, we don’ need no God to make a good religion!” Stalin, of course, took that thought and ran with it.

The point is that if we focus on Socialism, we are not looking at the root phenomenon. Socialism is not the name of a societal impulse, it is the name of a marketing strategy, a sales story or narrative.

Populism has been around for quite a long time, it’s an answer to the question that has vexed rulers for as far back as rulers have existed. I suppose the question came into existence just around the time that people left behind that mythical condition that Hobbes called “the state of nature” that preceded any society at all. The question is: How do you control all those people?

Most of the time the answer was simply threat and killing. Those who respond to threat, you keep and enslave, those who don’t, you kill. But, eventually it dawned on rulers that there was another consideration, namely that of national productivity. The problem with the primitive repression method was twofold, 1) it was always risky for the rulers, and 2) that the wealth required to maintain a state did not seem to be generated under primitive repression. There’s always an overhead to running a state, even a slave state. You have to pay your army, and pay it well, and you have to feed the slaves, so as to produce the wealth with which you pay your army. The rulers in such a state are only safe as long as they can keep their army satisfied. This problem is exemplified in the state of North Korea today, and it is trying to solve it by blackmailing the outside world with nuclear weaponry. Primitive repression, as it turned out, was not a very good system, not even for the rulers.

The Romans had a better idea: Populism at home, primitive repression in the empire. The rulers of Rome were safer than their primitive repression antecedents. Of course, there were ongoing assassinations, but these were often prompted more by the insanity of the rulers than by the nature of the system. The empire could be sucked dry of its wealth for the maintenance of the army, but, more important, that wealth made it possible for the rulers to buy the passivity of their citizens. The Romans, bless them, invented (drum roll!) … ENTITLEMENTS!

The Romans gave their citizens “bread and circuses” (panem et circenses). Of course, that was still a far cry from free health care, free education, welfare, working for the government, etc. etc. etc., but it was one of Rome’s most lasting inventions (right up there with roads and aqueducts!).

But people are naturally greedy and ungrateful. What have you done for me lately? they ask. And they’re fickle. Once the Pandora’s Box of entitlements was opened, the only way of acquiring power was by trumping an opponent’s offers. That’s how we went from panem et circenses to free enrolment at the Sorbonne and welfare in the Bronx.

Once we left primitive repression behind and the people’s voice (the vox populi) got a say in who got to milk the national cow, the mechanism for acquiring power automatically became Populism or the distribution of new entitlements.

Now, one could argue, as many have done, that this is a great system because the power acquisition mechanism for the greedy would-be rulers mechanically assures the distribution of national wealth to the citizenry. And there is truth to this, since the unwashed masses (I’m not speaking specifically of the French here), the hoi polloi, have done much better under this system than any preceding one. However, the system suffers from an intrinsic and fatal flaw. The system forces the rulers to offer benefits that the national wealth cannot pay for. To put the system’s internal problem as succinctly as possible: the modern democratic system lacks a natural internal governor on entitlement spending.

What I mean is this: the impulse to acquire political power is psychologically natural; the greed and envy of the electorate is psychologically natural; but there exists no psychologically natural impulse to curtail the desire for power or greed and envy.

I’ve been told, don’t know if it’s true, that dogs have no internal monitor on their eating, that, unless stopped by their owner, they will eat until they die. The problem of the democratic state is that it is like a dog in this respect.

Thus, the financial problem for the rulers is always the same: how do we pay for the panem et circenses? There have always been only two possible sources of money: outside the nation and inside the nation. These days, nations are finding that their options have dramatically shrunk.

Originally, they took the path of least resistance, they solved the problem by looting enslaved colonies. But the cost-benefit equation increasingly turned against this strategy until the imperialist nations found that their colonies were actually costing more to control than they were yielding in wealth. The imperialists left their colonies, most often in expensive, protracted, stupid, and bloody conflicts. They still had to pay the costs of ever increasing panem et circenses. So, they turned to the inside, to taxation.

But while the unwashed masses, a.k.a. the electorate, quite naturally psychologically loves having its greed and envy satisfied, it equally naturally psychologically hates the opposite of that, namely being taxed. And so the government, the rulers, did the clever and inevitable thing, they taxed the few in order to provide the panem et circenses of the many.

And here we arrive at the inevitable, the inexorable consequence of democracy: Populism, the attempt to control a large mass of people by harnessing the greed and envy of the majority against a productive minority.

But even the most extreme taxation on the productive minority has failed to yield the requisite amount of money, so they now they turn once again to the outside, only this time in the form of borrowing.

This dog just won’t stop eating! It’s gonna die.

Marx thought there was a “logic” to history, a natural, inevitable progression in which capitalism was just a stage on the way to the ultimate classless society. It may be that he was half-right, that there is natural mechanical progression in the affairs of men, but that he was wrong where it would end and how. History has seemed to take us from primitive repression states to increasingly democratic ones. But the democratic ones seem to suffer from an internal defect that will not lead them to the so-called workers’ paradise, the “classless society,” but rather to an inevitable collapse, from which will arise, most likely, societies once more of primitive repression.

#58: The BIG Oil Spill: Conspiracy or Coincidence?

2010-05-04T15:09:00.000-07:00

I love a good conspiracy theory.

I would probably be a conspiracy believer if I weren’t so convinced of the incompetence of conspirators and the inevitability of unintended consequences. But, if I can’t get in on the fun by believing some conspiracies, I can, at the very least, participate by occasionally contributing one. Here’s one I haven’t seen anywhere yet.

Just a short time ago, an off-shore drilling rig exploded, killing some of the workers and creating an enormous and continuing oil spill off the southern U.S. coast.

A short time before the explosion, the Commander in Chief of the U.S. announced that he would be allowing the development of further off-shore drilling.

Now, the drilling announcement was met, on the one hand, with surprise and relief by millions of American who thought it no less than common sense to develop America’s own resources when it was being blackmailed and sucked dry by the Arabs; it was met predictably, on the other hand, with shock, dismay, and a sense of betrayal by what is generally considered Obama’s “base,” the ultra-left screaming wackos. How could he? they screamed, Why would he?

Well, the answer to both of those questions seems pretty obvious. There are mid-term elections coming down the pike, drawing rapidly ever nearer, and the democrat chances are looking pretty grim. Perhaps, said the Bamster to himself, I can bleed off a few of the “independents” by doing what Clinton did, namely “move towards the center.” All I need to do, he said to himself, is something that will allow them to think what they really want to think anyway, namely that I’m really just a “pragmatic” guy, not an extreme leftie ideologue, and giving out a few new drilling licenses will convince them that I’m really not in the pocket of the eco-nazis, that I’m also “independent,” just like them, and that I can be depended on to do the common sense thing. Yeah, he said to himself, that's the ticket!

Of course, the problem with his reasoning would have been immediately apparent to any one of the brains he keeps around him. It would have seemed to them that while such a move might gain some independents, it would equally likely lose some loyalists. At best, it would only have a very small net gain, at worst, a large net loss, most likely no net change at all. Unless… unless … unless …

Unless, one of them thought, we could add a little complication that could turn his move into a bonanza for the left generally, and for the eco-freaks particularly.

What if, they said to themselves, what if, if after a bit of time following the granting of the licenses, there were to be a major ecological disaster?

Well, how would that help us? asked Obama (not being the sharpest knife in the drawer).

Well, answered the brain, if there were an oil disaster, then you could immediately put a halt on all of those new licenses (which has just been done) and you would still have gained your new Independents while retaining your loyalists. The independents would say, He's an ok guy, he can't help stopping the new drilling, it'sot his fault. The leftoid crazies would say, He's an ok guy, he stopped the drilling, he was on our side all along.

But, even better than that, the brain went on, this disaster would make any future off-shore drilling application a sure-fire d.o.a.. And, in addition, he said, it would further depress the American economy (which always makes a population turn to bigger government).

From a leftoid’s point of view, he said, this could be the gift that keeps on giving.

So, the question one has to ask oneself is this: Did the Bamster or one of his brains have anything to do with the causing of this accident? Here are some reflections.

The last big spill was the Exxon Valdez (why do they always pronounce it “Valdeez” on the news?) way back in Mar of 1989. Is it just a coincidence that, after 21 years of off-shore drilling without incident all around the world, that there should be a major oil spill just shortly after the granting of new licenses by a president who is in the pocket of the eco-nazi movement? I, for one, find that a bit too much of a coincidence.

There seems to have been absolutely no investigation of exactly what caused the explosion. Isn’t that strange? Could it have been, for example, just one of those shoulder fired mini-missiles so common in the U.S. armory?

Admit it, it could have gone down exactly like this:

The pressure is getting to the Bamster, it looks like November is going to be democrat Armageddon. He needs to do something, he calls in, say, some like mindeds from the Pentagon, and they send out a couple of reliable agents. The agents get themselves all wet-suited, go out on a raft, take a bead on the rig, and Bob’s your uncle, the whole thing is done.

Too crazy for you? How about this?

I just heard on the news that there was an actual emergency plan specifically targeted on the exact kind of spill that just occurred. Mysteriously, it was not activated, even though the locals were aware of it and were just waiting for the orders to begin.

All of this, a coincidence? I think not, I’m afraid, I think not.

#57: Determinism & Neo-Determinism; Freedom-Handicaps; and Liberalism

2010-04-25T09:14:00.000-07:00

I’m talking about the philosophical theory called “Determinism,” a doctrine that is as at home in the European Enlightenment as Socialism is. The notion usually shows up as one half of a problem, 0ne of the most popular and enduring philosophical chestnuts with which to entertain and puzzle undergraduates: the free-will/determinism conflict.

The Determinism in question is usually called “Causal Determinism” because it emerges from reflections on nature and the way it is governed by causal laws. Once people became aware of science as an accumulation of related laws, they also drew the conclusion that there exist no exceptions to law-governed behavior. The underlying faith of science is that all natural change is law governed, whether we happen at any point in time to know which laws are actually in play or not. A further implication of this faith, some have thought, is that human behavior, no less than that of the planets, is itself fully law-governed and therefore fully determined. It would seem that this line of reflection inexorably leads to the conclusion that there is no free will.

The reason lies in the strong, if cryptic, intuition that “being free” means “being able to have done otherwise.” Was I free when I chose my Caramel Macchiato at Starbucks? On this intuition, I was free only if it’s true that I could have done other than I did, by buying, let’s say, a Cafe Americano. But, argues the causal determinist, since each of us is a machine and thereby governed by immutable causal laws, we could no more refrain from the Caramel Macchiato than a ball rolling down a hill can arbitrarily choose to stop or a clock arbitrarily change the time it is showing.

I think that I’m not going too far in saying that, all things considered, Causal Determinism has not taken any damage in this 400 year conflict. It has a very strong case. At least a part of the reason for this is that the increasingly powerful secular-scientific lobby has successfully pushing the view that Causal Determinism implies some very specific moral, social, and political positions. Among these are the following two BIG ones:

1) The law should only be an instrument of protection and rehabilitation, not punishment or justice. The law should protect all of its citizens, law-breakers included, from each other. Law breakers are not to be punished, since punishment presumes that the criminal had choice, which enlightened people understand is not the case. Law breakers are broken or maladjusted machines, to be repaired or readjusted, not made to suffer.

2) Since people could not have done otherwise, they are never free, and, since never free, never responsible for what they do.

Now, the move from Causal Determinism to the moral, social, and political policies is, I think, completely unwarranted. The former can be true, which I think it is, and the latter still be bad policies. This is not a new idea, it was already argued very well near the end of the 17^th c by John Locke. The view is called “Compatibilism” because it holds that freedom and Causal Determinism are compatible.

A Compatibilist maintains that people can in fact be free. They are free, he says, whenever they could do other than they do, given that they want to do the other thing. Being free, he argues, is simply nothing standing in your way of doing what you want to do. He doesn’t care why you want what you want, just that nothing is stopping you from going after it. When that is the case, he says that you’re free. The causal determinist does care about why you want what you want, and he doesn’t care whether it’s true that nothing is stopping you from going after it. All he cares about is that your past and your body are determining what it is that you want.

I think that Locke is in the right on this, but Hume, some 75 years later, elaborates and clarifies his point. We never ask whether a ball rolling down a hill is free or not. And, more specifically, we never complain that a ball lacks freedom because it is incapable of suspending or violating the laws of motion. That is, where an inanimate object is concerned, we don’t think that the object’s leaving the control of the laws of nature would constitute “freedom” for it.

The reason is that balls rolling down hills don’t have goals or objectives. The ball is not, as Aristotle thought, “trying to get to it’s home” (his explanation of gravity). We do, however, speak of “setting an animal free” and of animals being in “captivity.” Perhaps this is no more than anthropomorphization, perhaps not, but it indicates that we apply the notion of freedom only where we believe there exist wants, desires, goals, or objectives. “Freedom,” thus is a very limited notion, applying only to one’s ability to satisfy one’s wants or achieve one’s goals. As Hume puts it, freedom is either this or it is nothing (meaningless). It is true that our wants and goals are the causal results of our personal histories, our genetic endowments, and our others physical inheritances, but to say that we are “free” is nothing other than to say that nothing stands in the way of our satisfying those wants and achieving those goals.

But Locke and Hume don’t have to be right on this question, since I’m quite willing to grant Causal Determinism to the Enlightenment’s Liberal descendants for the moment because what puzzles me is not their being Causal Determinists or even their extending this theory to moral, social, and political doctrines, but rather their apparent inconsistency.

Conservatives are constantly disturbed and offended by what they perceive to be “double-standards” being applied by liberals. What is a “double-standard”? It is applying one set of expectations for, say, moral behavior or rationality to one population, while applying another lesser one to another. Here are some obvious examples:

1) The rich and the poor. Characteristically, rich criminals are excoriated with the entire vocabulary of blame, while the poor are exempted from any responsibility.

2) The white and the black (or Hispanic or gay; strangely, Asians do not seem to benefit from this application of the double-standard as the former).

3) The male and the female.

4) Israel and the so-called “Palestinians.”

5) And, lately, we have noticed the same phenomenon occurring with respect to the Tea Party and the vocal Left.

Not least, it is very apparent in 6) the different treatment being accorded to Bush and Obama.

One half of this double standard is perfectly understandable in terms of the Enlightenment legacy of Causal Determinism. People who are the causal products of their histories are not responsible for what they do. Blaming these people would simply be unfair. One could see these positions already explicitly stated in Julien de la Mettrie’s The Man Machine, as well in as in his other writings. Nothing new, nothing unexpected.

But the other side of the double standard is really difficult for these descendants of la Mettrie to defend. Are not the rich, the white, the male, the Israelis, the members of the Tea Party, and, of course, Bush, not equally products of their histories?

The existence of this difference in treatment is so dramatic that it would seem that even the most ideologically brain-damaged Liberal would find herself suffering some cognitive dissonance, but this does not seem to be happening. How can this be? I have a modest answer here.

I think it is because Liberals are not traditional Causal Determinists at all, they are what we might call Neo-Determinists. But, you say, if this is true, why have they not come out and published their new doctrine, the philosophy of Neo-Determinism? The reason, I think, is that while this new doctrine does have some significant political advantages, it also has serious disadvantages that would become quite obvious once the doctrine was brought to the surface. More on this below.

Now, I do believe that Liberals hold, along with everyone else, that responsibility varies directly with degree of freedom; but I think that Liberals also harbor an unspoken commitment to the view that personal freedom and responsibility together actually vary with membership in certain select populations. This barely visible theory, if it can even be called that, is that freedom (and responsibility) varies directly with 1) money, 2) race, 3) sex, 4) education, 5) intelligence, and 6) political affiliation. This means that people with more money are more responsible for what they do, white people more than “people of color”, the better educated more than the less, the smarter more than the stupid, and Conservatives more than Liberals. The precise size of the responsibility discount being applied for each category will vary with the Liberal involved, and these degrees are never very precisely identified, but they are definitely there. And lest you think that “being more responsible” is a “good” thing, for the Liberal mind it is not, it only means “being more hateable and blamable.”

Liberals must keep this doctrine unspoken since it has very unflattering implications for themselves and their supporters. While, on the one hand, the protected groups have the benefit of being able to misbehave with impunity (they cannot help what they do), they only gain this benefit at the cost of being identified as handicapped by either their poverty, their race, their sex, etc, etc, etc. Hence, the cost of being a “protected” group is being, in effect, Freedom-Handicapped.

Thus, Neo-Determinism brings with it the embarrassing implication of Freedom-Handicappedness. But the important point to be noticed here is that Freedom-Handicappedness is a price that Liberals are happy to pay for the privilege of being able to hate and excoriate other populations. If the liberals just remained traditional Causal Determinists, then freedom would become simply impossible for everyone equally. But, on the doctrine of Neo-Determinism, freedom becomes apparently once again possible and available, though it happens to be the case that a large portion of humanity does not have access to it.

That most liberals actually do hold to Neo-Determinism is, I think, indirectly confirmed by the remarkable contempt they display towards even their own side. Of course they show contempt for their own: their own are un-free puppets to be manipulated. This follows from their doctrine.

So much for Liberals. As far as traditional Causal Determinism is concerned, here are a few more remarks.

De la Mettrie hit the nail right on the head with his image of the “man-machine,” for it is this image that underlies traditional CD. It is because man is no more than a machine that he is not free, is fully determined in everything he does and thinks. Some philosophers of the time took the most obvious course by simply denying the CD premise, that man is “no more” than a machine. They granted that a significant part of every person is “material” and thus subject to the laws of nature, but, then proceeded to insist, each person also contains a mind or soul or spirit that is exempt from those laws. Our freedom, they insist, lies precisely in our being a “mental” as well as “material” being.

This is, however, a very risky move to make just for the sake of free will. There might, of course, be other reasons for making it as well, but buying free will at the expense of incurring all the risks and problems associated with a commitment to “mind” seems imprudent.

For one thing, in order for “mind” to actually be capable of supplying freedom, it must be assumed to be exempt from the control of causal laws. But what this means is that more exists than just the natural world. Applying Hamlet’s line, according to the “mind” supporter, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” We can easily imagine Immanuel Kant making this claim, since he believes that he has been able to leave room for the possibilities of God’s existence, human freedom, and the immortality of the soul. But Kant doesn’t think that Horatio (or any of us) can ever know that these possibilities are or are not realized. The “mind” supporter does think that he knows that mind is real and is the source of human freedom. The mind supporter thus buys human freedom at the cost of expanding the universe into one that is both natural and non-natural, law governed and non-law governed. This is a hell of a price to pay for a freedom we might well be able to get pretty much for free. And it is for this reason that Compatibilism seems such a bargain: human freedom made possible without the overhead expense of maintaining a soul! What a deal!

#56: American Jews: Lookin’ For Love in all The Wrong Places

2010-04-15T08:20:00.000-07:00

Hatikvah is Israel’s national anthem, but since the ethos of the Israelis and American Jews is so different, it might be appropriate to find a separate one for the latter. My own candidate for a new Jewish-American anthem is Lookin’ For Love in All the Wrong Places (sung by Johnny Lee in Urban Cowboy).

A lot of people, most of them reflective Jews, have been puzzled by the twentieth century Jewish infatuation with the Left. The excellent periodical Commentary, for example, ran an entire symposium on the theme Why Are Jews Liberal? and there were as many answers, all of them plausible, as there were contributors. We don’t want to get trapped into the “single-cause” assumption, so I suspect that the truth is that all of those proffered explanations are involved in the phenomenon to varying degrees and among different sub-populations. There is, though, one pervasive factor that seemed to have been missed in that symposium, which is what leads me to dip my own oar in the water on this question.

The Jews have lived with the consciousness of being hated and despised wherever they have gone for more than two thousand years. And this hatred crystallized into very specific libels and stereotypes of evil. In particular, Jews were hated for being greedy and money grubbing, for being insular and clannish, and, in general, for being just plain bad. You’ve got to admit, tough or not, this is bound to get you down eventually. Sooner or later, you’re bound to develop neurotic reactions to this treatment. Some of them seem pretty obvious.

The most obvious one, it seems to me, is that Jews would become neurotically preoccupied with persuading people that they were not at all bad, that they were, in fact, good.

As it turned out, since their behaviour was neurotically determined, not determined by a rational assessment of the situation, their efforts at persuasion have always been doomed. Since they were not hated because of the characteristics they were alleged to have, getting rid of those characteristics did not serve to reverse the situation. People hadn’t hated Jews because they were bad; they hated them, and, because of that, believed them to be bad. More specifically, the fact that the hate came first, the rationale second, was given a theoretical foundation during the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. While previously the Church and others allowed for a Jewish “redemption” through conversion, this ended with the doctrine of racial, as opposed to religious, anti-Semitism. This was a crucial moment in history, since it set the stage narrative-wise for Hitler’s “Final Solution.” The Jews had to be exterminated because, according to the new doctrine, their evil was not remediable. Since one can change one’s religion, a person who is bad because of their religion can become good by simply changing it. But, as the Nazis maintained, if a person is bad because of what they are (metaphysically), they can never be made good. And the only remaining remedy is to exterminate them.

And since people continued hating them (or they believed that people were still hating them), they continued to work even harder at being publicly and conspicuously GOOD. My point is that Jewish liberalism must be, among other things, a psychological reaction to the situation of Jews in history.

Here are a few elaborations on this theme.

First, this strategy was not going to work with the dominant Protestant population. As Max Weber famously argued, the Protestants developed the acquisition of wealth as a theologically based God-given holy task necessary for the doing of good works. There was no way that these money-grubbing Protestants would not see the Jewish acquisitiveness and efforts at philanthropy as anything other than an attempt to ingratiate themselves (which, on my hypothesis, they largely were).

But not all Jews had philanthropy or good works available to them for proving that their hatred was undeserved. Certainly the Jews of pre-revolution tsarist Russia did not. Therefore, these Jews sought the only other option available, they sought to make common cause with the other sub-groups being mistreated, thinking to persuade at least them that Jews are not evil, but actually good.

But they were looking for love in all the wrong places.

The Russian upper classes despised them; but so did the Russian peasantry; and so, to their shock and horror, did the Russian revolutionary class. They tried the same thing later in Germany, with much the same result. The German socialists used the Jews when they were useful, and murdered them when they were not.

As in the case of all compulsions, the American Jews have never learned from their own history. They have continued to seek the love and approbation of their non-Jewish environment through philanthropy and good works. It hasn’t worked.

They desperately tried to make common cause with American blacks during the civil rights movement. They contributed their money, they contributed their brains, they contributed their influence, and sometimes they even contributed their lives. And, of course, predictably, anti-Semitism is nowhere more entrenched than among American blacks. The blacks used (and use) the Jews when they are useful, and reject them when they are not. Think Jesse Jackson and the Rev'rnd Wright.

But, in addition, a habit born of psychological compulsion does not cease to work when either the causes of the compulsion or even the compulsion itself ceases to exist. What was once a mere compulsion can acquire all the trappings of a moral-philosophical mantra, it can become an auto-biographical narrative, and this has certainly happened in the case of the American Jews.

Just as native Americans have become the environment-loving, spiritual, noble victims of European aggression and vice, and American blacks the poor victims of white racism, so the American Jews have become the modern warriors for right and good. Where self-identification is involved, the game du jour is Let's Pretend.

A further point that is consistent with this thesis is that American Jews have seen fit to reject the affection of possibly the ONLY population in history for whom the Jews have been flavour of the month: the American Evangelicals. This should be no surprise, from a psychological point of view.

The mechanism that underlies the Jewish search for love necessarily involves the conversion of hate into love. Freely offered love is worthless; only a love that has been dearly earned through suffering is satisfying. And so the American Jews keep snuffling around the American black population, and keep being harassed and assaulted, and, at the same time, turn up their noses at friendly overtures from the Evangelicals.

Groucho Marx captures the American Jewish neurosis perfectly in his clever quip:

Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.

I end this discussion with this.

The American Jews voted by a vast majority for Obama despite everything that was known about him that should have warned them, including what he explicitly stated. To them I say: How’s that been working for ya?

I doubt that Johnny Lee is Jewish, but any American Jew could sing:

I was lookin' for love

In all the wrong places

Lookin' for love in too many faces

Searchin' their eyes, lookin' for traces

Of what I'm dreamin' of

Hopin' to find a friend and a lover

I'll bless the day I discover

Another heart lookin' for love.

Voting for what is clearly and transparently against your own interests is only explainable in terms of mental pathology.

#55: Obama: Copernicus or Sitchin?

2010-04-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

Way back when I was still teaching, I used to tell students that all enduring philosophical questions have the same form: a really powerful intuition that things are ONE way meets an equally powerful theoretical reason why it CAN’T be that way. For example, most people feel totally free in their decision-making, but, yet, the conclusion of an excellent argument (the causal determinist argument) holds that they are not. Most enduring paradoxes belong precisely to this pattern.

Now, in this collision between our strongest convictions and equally powerful contrary arguments we see a conflict that is rarely resolvable by reason. What actually happens is that the positions taken by people on these puzzles is almost always decided by their psychological dispositions. Thus, some people are more disposed to trust their instincts, others to trust arguments, while yet others are most comfortable suspending judgment altogether.

For example, Malebranche took the Cartesian doctrine of the beast-machine so seriously that, according to anecdote, he drop-kicked a little pregnant dog (of whom he was very fond) across the courtyard in the firm theory-determined belief that animals felt no pain (no more than did clocks). Even as there is no way of theoretically determining whether animals, like humans, feel pain or not, most people’s spontaneous inclinations are to believe that they do. But Malebranche was so much the philosopher that reason trumped inclination in his case.

On the other hand, while Hume was convinced that Berkeley’s skeptical arguments concerning the existence of an independently existing material world were irrefutable, he also thought that they couldn’t possibly overrule our dispositions to believe the contrary. He writes:

But that all his arguments, though otherwise intended, are, in reality, merely sceptical, appears from this, that they admit of no answer and produce no conviction. Their only effect is to cause that momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion, which is the result of scepticism.

Moore took the same line in his famous The Refutation of Idealism, in which he made the point, albeit indirectly, that at the end of an argument with an undesirable conclusion, we always have a choice: we can accept the conclusion, or we can reject it on the grounds that its negation is incontestably true. If the proponent of the argument objects that we have not shown how the argument fails, we can respond since we know the conclusion to be false, we also know the argument to be flawed. Precisely how it is flawed is not our problem.

Lest it be thought that this is only an issue in abstruse philosophical controversies, please note that exactly the same issue arises in science. Carl Hempel pointed out (in a book whose title I no longer remember) that when a researcher encounters an unacceptable result (he just doesn’t like it), he can always (in theory) choose to reject the theory underlying some key part of his experimental apparatus. Of course, this can be extremely expensive in that it inevitably also brings into question everything else in science that relied on that theory. Yet, some times people are fully prepared to do just that. And that’s often when we get scientific revolutions.

When the researcher’s bet pans out, we’re clearly happy with him. When it does not, we think he was an idiot for challenging so much of the existing system of beliefs. We still get all giddy about Copernicus, but about Zecharia Sitchin, not so much. Sitchin has been arguing for some time now that we are the engineered products of highly advanced extraterrestrials who came to earth roughly 450,000 years ago. This theory has not done terribly well within the astro-physics community.

What all this indicates is that there is no simple, easy answer as to when or why to opt either for intuition (or the mass of evidence or the mass of acquired belief), on one hand, or for theory-derived conclusions.

The reason I bring up this theme is that I had not noticed before that this paradigm extends even beyond the pale of philosophy and science; it extends to politics as well.

In particular, I noticed this extension when reflecting on the apparent immunity of leftist ideologues to the lessons of 20^th c history.

If there is one thing that seems apparent beyond argument, it is that socialism simply does not improve the lives of the people who live under it. We know this most dramatically from the failure of the Soviet Union, from the fact that Cuba has been a welfare client since its revolution, and we also notice that China is leaving classical communism behind. At the same time we notice that India is booming as a free enterprise economy. All around the world, we see the socialist states creating horrible living environments for their people and capitalist states doing significantly better. And this is as true of Europe, with its social democracies, as well as out and out commie states.

Yet, the true believers, those who live under the aegis of a “great theory”, they proceed as if none of this had ever happened.

As in the cases I discussed earlier, these true believers must do something in order to hold on to their privileged theories. In effect, they must reject 20^th c history or its apparent lessons in some way.

One way, of course, is to deny that those things ever happened. This is a tough one, since the U.S.S.R. is visibly absent, if something can be visibly absent (Sartre thinks it can!).

Another thing is to admit that they happened, but it’s not because the system sucks, but because a) the system was never fairly applied, or b) it was applied, but it was undermined by the evil capitalists.

The true believers are making a BIG bet, just as Copernicus made a BIG bet and Zecharia Sitchin made a BIG bet.

Copernicus’ bet paid off. Sitchin’s has not.

Time will tell whether Obama’s goes the way of Copernicus’ or the way of Sitchin’s.

My money is on the Sitchin way.

#54: So What’s Gonna Happen Next, Eh?

2010-02-09T06:30:00.000-08:00

The “remarkable” Barack Hussein Obama appears to be lumbering unsteadily from blunder to debacle. In particular, he seems to have no plan for dealing with either of the cosmic issues facing the U.S. and the world today: a steadily sinking economy and a deranged, intransigent Iran. Could it be that there are actually NO plans?

From what I’ve seen of the Bamster and his doughty cronies, I suspect that really is the case.

But there does exist a far more terrifying and sinister possibility, a possibility that might actually be probable.

We do know that the U.S. economy is sinking ever further into unemployment and debt beyond measure.

We have heard intimations recently that Europe is on the brink of economic disaster.

If Europe really does fall, I think that will break the camel’s back and we will see an unprecedented cascade of nations into insolvency and world-wide depression.

And here’s what will happen then, I suggest: Obama and the West will formally declare war on Iran.

I know, I know, it sounds crazy. Would anyone be so calculating as to use a war in order to repair a depression? Would they? You have got to be kidding! It's not as if no one has done it before. It's completely consistent with the way in which the Dr. Strangelove types advising this president think. This is exactly up Rahm Emanuel's alley: Iran's nuclear posturing is too good a crisis to waste.

And the beauty of it from incompetent Obama's point of view is that the idiot Mullahs continue to provide him and Europe with provocations and political cover.

The talking heads keep pointing out that the Mullahs have severe internal problems. Arguably, therefore, they increasingly need an external enemy or even a (containable) war (say with Israel).

What is forgotten is that the West could equally make good use of a war, particularly a winnable war and a war that was externally provoked (remember Pearl Harbor? Tojo's Big Mistake?).

A successful war has been a very effective way of inducing prosperity for the winners in the past and of finding a place in history for the president who fights it. At the present moment, the Bamster is set to replace Jimmy Carter as history's worst U.S. president. A war with Iran could save his arse and give him a second term. Can the Bammy resist this?

Can a West versus Iran war solve both of our problems in a single nuclear catastrophe?

The next war will be a doozy, I hope we’re around afterwards to enjoy the prosperity without glowing green in the night.

#53: Why Did The American Revolution Not Lead to a Dictatorship?

2010-02-07T10:16:00.000-08:00

With only one exception, every revolution since 1776 has led either directly or indirectly to a dictatorship. The sole exception, of course, is the first one, the American Revolution. And it is not as if there have not been a fair number of revolutions since then. This prompts (NOT “begs”!!!) two questions: 1) why is it that revolutions lead to dictatorships?, and 2) why was the American Revolution an exception to this rule? I’ll take these two questions in order.

That revolutions should regularly lead to dictatorships is prima facie counter-intuitive. After all, revolutions are by definition “mass” actions and one might reasonably expect that masses who are reacting against oppression would not easily submit to further oppression. It seems odd, therefore, on the face of it, that revolutions should ever, much less regularly, lead to dictatorships. So, why have they led to dictatorships? I look for an answer to this puzzle in the notion of “anomie,” whose concept and whose term was first introduced into the intellectual lexicon by Emile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917).

We find societal anomie whenever existing norms are suddenly and violently rejected. Durkheim introduced the idea when dealing with the phenomenon of individual suicide, but I want here to extend it so as to apply also to whole populations who suddenly reject their entire cultures. For that is what revolution leading to dictatorship has always involved; not merely the rejection of a system of power relations, but a rejection of the entire culture that was host to those power relations.

The French 18^th C, for example, began its rejection of its own Christian theological past in the 17^th C, in the work of Rene Descartes, but also arguably earlier in the work of Galileo Galilei. But the real fruit of these rejectionist impulses was not to be fully ripe until the 18^{th c}, the “high” Enlightenment. And it is only in the late 18^th C in France, of course, that we find the bloody, deranged societal paroxysm called the French Revolution (1787), whose character was totally determined by the new faith of “reason,” whose role it was to quite literally replace Christianity in France. Christopher Hitchens mentions that there was a move afoot to make an actual divinity of Reason and that it was to be worshipped as such under the new regime (though he doesn’t give a reference). The revolutionary French hoped to found a “brave new world” on the foundation of a new state religion of “reason.”

What the post revolutionary French actually found was anomie, a kind of norm vacuum into which flooded every previously repressed murderous, sadistic, atavistic, savage human impulse. Marx told the workers of the world that they had nothing to lose but their chains – he didn’t mention that those chains also kept their most anti-social cravings under control. The ancien culture being rejected in the French Revolution was actually the internalized superego of which Freud was to write over a hundred years later. When cultural norms (the superego) are rejected, the individual is left only with two resources: a mass of unfiltered impulses, on the one hand, and reason, on the other. Unfortunately, reason is hardly competent against the power of impulse, since reason as such contains no values with which to keep the excesses of impulse at bay. What is required is an internalized system of civilizing intuitions that are carried forward from generation to generation. In other words, a civilizing culture. Contrary to Kant (and later to Rawls), Reason alone is always conditional, never categorical, and cannot yield any guidance whatsoever. Relying only on Reason, without the guidance of civilizing social norms, the French revolution led to bloody chaos, which, in turn, led to Napoleon’s dictatorship.

The same thing happened after the Russian revolution of 1917, which led to the replacement of Tsarist Russia with the new workers’ paradise. It happened after the German revolution of 1918, which led in the short term to the democratic Weimar Republic, but ultimately to Hitler. And it happened after Mao’s takeover of China, which led to the Cultural Revolution in the late sixties. Examples can be multiplied from smaller states, most notably from North Korea and Iran, among others. All of these are or were or became dictatorships.

It’s no accident that all of these revolutions led to dictatorships. Populations relying only on “reason” are easy prey for opportunistic “rational” theories. The reason is that people robbed of their social norms have no intuitions that raise alarms against charismatic leaders spinning “large” and wonderful theories. Sometimes, the revolutions lead directly to dictatorship, sometimes indirectly. Weimar probably had the longest interval of democracy, lasting 15 years (1918–1933), but one could argue that the Russian revolution also had an interlude of democracy, albeit a very short one. There was the “first” revolution of Feb 1917, which was a democratic workers’ revolution, but ultimately also a third one on the following October. The October revolution was emphatically not a “workers’” revolution, it was a classic putsch in which the Bolsheviks assumed absolute power. And with the Bolsheviks came the Cheka and its reign of terror under Felix Dzerzhinsky, the viciously insane Pole of Lubyanka Prison.

And so why did not America follow this same pattern? Why did not America lapse into dictatorship? I believe it is because the American revolutionaries were unique in not rejecting the culture of their oppressors. The American revolutionaries had an issue with taxation, not initially with the British monarchy per se, nor with British traditions. A very large number of the American revolutionaries went only very reluctantly into revolution, forced there by very ham-handed, arrogant, and stupid foreign policy coming from the reign of King George III. The intellectuals who were to be the creators of the new nation acquired their backgrounds and their theories from the accumulated wisdom of Britain and the continent, they were not rejecting all the values and traditions holus bolus of the old world: only monarchy. There was thus no anomie after the revolution, no value vacuum into which a dictatorship could flow. I think it’s as simple as that.

Some very impressive people have been fans of the Enlightenment, the so-called “Age of Reason”. One notable example is Peter Gay, a polymath of a writer with a major biography of Freud to his credit as well as numerous books on the Enlightenment as well as on the Weimar Republic. Though his interests are broad, they are actually instructively linked. He is, whether he knows it or not, an enthusiast of anomie, the state of “normlessness.”

While Durkheim thought of anomie as a kind of social-psychological “illness,” there are those who actually admire the condition without recognizing precisely what it is. I think that Gay and the multitude of Enlightenment admirers are exactly like this. They admire the Enlightenment for its many achievements, but fail to recognize the price that was paid for them and continues to be paid.

Writers like Gay appreciate the artistic and intellectual flourishing that sometimes occurs when anomie is (briefly) married to democracy. Normlessness is indeed a kind of freeing and thus does encourage creativity. My friend T.L. brought it to my attention that Thomas Kuhn's thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolution is precisely that scientific revolutions occur when there exists a norm vacuum of the kind I have been describing. It is, perhaps, anomie that torments Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov and what he means when he asserts that if there is no God, then virtue does not exist (attributed to him by Smerdyakov). I think there is some truth in this, though not a literal one.

It isn’t the death of God that is freeing, it is the death of a system of authoritative norms in which God was understood to have a place. But, as Sartre tiresomely insisted, this freedom comes at a price: it is a “dreadful” freedom. The reason is not really that if there is no God, then everything is permitted, it is rather that if the belief in God has died, then there is no limit to what people will allow themselves to do.

But, most important, what is also means is that a freedom acquired at the price of a civilizing culture is most of all a vulnerability to specious theoretical populist narratives that lead directly or indirectly into the murderous maw of dictatorship. Thus, the freedom acquired from revolution is indeed a dreadful, terrible freedom that carries an appalling cost.