#67: Retrospective Philosophical Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#66: Thanks, Helen Thomas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, Helen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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).