#83: Newsflash: Why Obama Fails so Often!

November 16, 2010

We thought we knew, but we didn’t! Now. Now, thank goodness, we know!

Since Obama took office, a large number of his initiatives have failed dramatically, ranging from his efforts to get the economy moving again to his flirting with the evil triplets, Iran, Korea, and Venezuela. Up until now, he has excused himself with the “Bush created a much bigger problem than we anticipated” mantra and his scribbling acolytes have toed the line on that.

Given the electorate’s short attention span and memory, that line has been growing increasingly thin lately; most of the voters no longer remember exactly who G.W. Bush actually was. Obama and his backers needed a new explanation, other than the true one, namely, that this clown was elected by a population in love with an idea, the idea of a brilliant and beautiful black-and-white hybrid who would redeem the country from its history with slavery.

As I’ve argued before, frustrated and frightened people tend to abandon reason and experience at precisely the point when they should be using them most. This was actually a Humean doctrine that Obama himself appealed to in explaining why people have not warmed to his policies. Unfortunately, he was confusing a case in which experience was present with one in which it wasn’t. Just as Hume suggested that the belief in miracles takes place at precisely the point at which experience fails us, voters elected an utterly unprepared neophyte strictly on the basis of his skin color and at precisely the time when the country really needed a firm and experienced hand on the tiller. This was indeed an instance of hope over brains, but rejecting his policies was not.

No matter that he wouldn’t release the details of his academic performance, no matter that he avoided voting on anything controversial, no matter that he was inserted into his senatorial spot by the Chicago dem machine, no matter that he only spoke from teleprompter, no matter his aggressive anti-American associations, no matter anything: he would be the redeemer.

But now, two years down the road, he doesn’t seem like so much of a redeemer. The population is quite ready for him to leave; in fact, it can’t wait for him to leave. The country can’t wait to turn his administration into a memory that fades as quickly and inexorably as a bad dream during a busy morning. Obama? Obama? What is that? Some imported North African colonic irrigation? Oh, wait, wasn’t he president of Uganda or something?

But there are two more years to go and the Blame-Bush mantra is getting oh-so tired, so the scribblers have to come up with a new idea, a new excuse for the Redeemer’s lurching from one failure to the next.

The scribblers have found their new narrative:

THE JOB IS TOO BIG FOR ANYONE!

Yes, it’s not that Obama is too small for the job, oh, no! And it’s not that the job is too BIG for Obama. Oh, no! The truth is that NO one could do this job, and, therefore, it can’t be done even by someone with the (almost) superhuman endowments of Barack Hussein Obama!

Everyone knows these universally accepted facts, namely that Obama is: 1) a really charming guy, 2) ridiculously smart, 3) a phenomenal “communicator” (“orator”, etc.), 4) concerned only with the welfare of the American people, and so forth.

But even with these extraordinary attributes, the JOB IS JUST TOO BIG. In a recent Newsweek piece, Daniel Stone authored a piece entitled “Is Presidency Too Big a Job for Obama?” His answer, bolstered by responses from several eminent presidential historians is, quelle surprise! Probably yes. What a shock! And from a publication whose even-handedness is legend. How remarkable that we had to wait for the office to be occupied by a self-in-love untrained and inexperienced naïf working from an inherited simplistic understanding of discredited European theories, before coming to the conclusion that the JOB IS JUST TOO BIG.

It was also too big, they say, for G.W. Bush. But was it too big for Truman? For Eisenhower?

I’ll grant them that it was too big for Jimmy Carter and for Kennedy, but that was because those two were too small for the office.

Maybe that’s it.

Maybe the job isn’t really too big. Maybe the man is just too small. Way too small.

 #82: Thanks, Obama, We Couldn’t Have Done It Without You.

November 4, 2010

When I attended P.S. 28 on Anthony Ave. in the Bronx, way back in the very early 1950s, we had instruction in what they called “Social Studies.” Courses of this kind continued into what was then called “Junior High School.” The point of such courses was to create a politically informed citizenry in the belief that this is a free society’s only bulwark against the loss of its freedom from within. I have been sympathetic to this view most of my adult life and have even lamented the civic and historical ignorance of the vast majority of citizens.

However, on reflection, I must confess that those courses, starting with “Social Studies” in grade school and continuing on to university courses in political “science,” actually had little or no impact on me at the times when I was taking them. I confess with no little shame that I can’t remember a single thing from any of those courses. And, yet, I still do believe that an educated citizenry is the only thing that stands between us and the fate that befell Rome. This is a serious conundrum. If civics courses at every level of education cannot save us, what will? I’ll tell you what: Obama will!

Am I claiming that Obama’s tired, second-hand, naïve Socialism is what will save us from inexorable decline? Of course not. History has already shown us what both sophisticated and naïve Socialism begets: anomie and a low standard of living for everyone other than the ruling class – and, ultimately, burning tires in the streets.

Nonetheless, it with this conundrum in mind that I sincerely thank Obama and his minions, for they have accomplished something I had come to believe was impossible: they created a self-educating citizenry!

I have never in my lifetime seen so many so-called “ordinary folk” reading so much history and political theory. How many of our friends, prior to the coming of America’s first Affirmative Action Figure (oops! Sorry, “Pres-ident”), had ever read the “Federalist Papers” or knew the issues surrounding the Revolution of 1775? How many knew who Alexander Hamilton was or what his disagreements with Jefferson were? Who knew of John Adams?

But, even further, who knew what Socialism was, when it was invented, and how it fared in Western and Eastern Europe? Who knew how many were murdered in the name of progress, how many were killed by Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, how many by Mao, how many by Mussolini and by Hitler (for they were also Socialists)?

How many knew how many half-truths and outright lies had been sold to unwitting generations of students from 1900 to the present by the Leftist infiltrators standing at the lecterns of our universities?

Pretty much, nobody.

But Obama has changed all that. Obama has made political history and theory a topic of discussion at lunch tables, in coffee shops, in churches, on construction sites, and on blogs.

This was a wonderful gift, Obama, thank you. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Now do the classy thing and leave.

 #81: Misorsenokoithis/Homophobe — Tomayto/Tomaato?

September 14, 2010

Many people have commented on the political use of language to influence attitudes and to cover the realities of state misbehavior. Lenin, among others, was a master of the craft and his successors perfected the technique. Lesser known ones were Sukarno of Indonesia and Nasser of Egypt. The principle is simple: it doesn’t matter what the thing is, all that matters is what you call it.

We see this principle applied systematically by our relatively new grievance groups, the homosexuals and the Muslims. In both cases, there exist groups of people who object verbally to the demands of these groups, exercising their apparently guaranteed rights of free expression. The ones who object to the demands of homosexuals are immediately categorized by left-wing social “scientists” and “journalists” as “homophobes,” while the ones who object to Muslim misbehavior are dubbed “Islamophobes” by the same sources. More generally, those who dislike foreigners are called “xenophobes,” and so on.

It must be seen that these “technical” terms are not at all “scientifically neutral,” as their users attempt to pass them off as, but are actually terms that demean their targets. The particle “phobe” means “fear,” so the suggestion is that the objectors are objecting out of fear, since no other possible motivation is possible. The use the particle “fear” effectively assumes that the objector cannot have a legitimate ground for resisting, say, homosexual demands for marital rights.

The similar strategy is at work in the use of the new word “Islamophobe.” People who have issues with Muslims simply cannot have legitimate grounds for their attitudes, and therefore what they have to say can be dismissed without examination.

All of this is done by the mere use of a new “technical” term.

It wasn’t always this way.

There was a time when people could actually dislike a group without at the same time fearing it.

For example, people who hate Jews are even today called “anti-Semites.” Also, there was a time when men who disliked women were misogynists. Similarly, women who disliked men were called “misandrists.” Today, those same men would be called gynophobes.

Interestingly, the best that the brave new world can come up with for the female version is “man-haters,” there’s no move to introduce a new coinage of “androphobes.” I suspect that is just because our “social scientists” are 1) not literate enough to know that there is a perfectly good word already in existence, and 2) believe that there are really good reasons to hate men, and that “man-hate” is not just disguised man-fear, so a word like, say, androphobe is not necessary. Similarly, our progressive social “scientists” have not suggested that we start using a world like “semitophobe” in place of anti-Semite. The reason, again, is likely that they simply don’t believe that all anti-Jewish sentiment is based on a hidden fear – they actually think that most of it is legitimate real hostility.

The principle is simple enough. When the target population is one of the Left’s preferred victim groups, then all hostility towards that group is psychologized into being a sublimated secret fear and the phobia word is used. But when the target population is one that the Left itself hates, then no phobia word is coined and the hate/dislike word is retained.

Can you really imagine the New York Times or Time or Newsweek beginning to refer to Americaphobia in Europe or the Third World instead of Anti-Americanism?

Of course, the man called a gynophobe might meekly respond, “I don’t actually fear women, I just don’t like ‘em.” But such a man would be laughed down and ridiculed by our social-science educated politically current lemming population.  They have all learned from the post-Freudian pseudo-science of social psychology that all anger is nothing other than displaced fear (unless the anger is directed at men or Jews or White Americans).

There was a time when it was possible for a person to dislike people in general, and he was called a “misanthrope.” Today, it might be called “agoraphobia,” though there is some dispute as to what it actually entails.

The Greek root particle for dislike is “misos,” hence misogynist and misanthrope.

Following the left-wing social science disposition to coin new words, “neologisms,” I here propose a couple just for starters.

1)                          misorsenokoithis: “a dislike of homosexuals.” “Arsenokoith” is a Greek word with an honorable history, already to be found in the writings of St. Paul. It’s etymology is “arseno” (male) + “koithos” (sexual intercourse).

Now, don’t get me wrong, people who are actually afraid  of homosexuals should continue to refer to themselves as “homophobes.” But if they happen to just dislike them, then they should call themselves misorsenokoiths.

2)                         misoislamists: “a dislike of Muslims.” It is self-explanatory.

Whether you choose to add these neologisms to your vocabulary or not, the important thing is to become sensitive to the language used around you and its implications.

Do not go gently into that good night,

rage, rage against the dying of the word.

 

#80: Sometimes, the moral high ground makes the best target from the air

September 10, 2010

Western Liberals obsessively review and bemoan America’s sins. We had slaves, they cry, we interned the Japanese during WW II, we carpet bombed Dresden, we nuked Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and so on, and so on. There is something disturbed about the way in which they just keep going on and there are various possible diagnoses available.

First, they repeat their mantra the same way an obsessive compulsive washes his hands. Perhaps these are just cases of undiagnosed OCD.

On the other hand, there is also a touch of PTSD here, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Of course, they were not themselves present at these catastrophes, but they behave as if they were actual survivors in their endless preoccupation with the same terrible events.

But we must not forget that all-time favorite, the Stockholm Syndrome in which a hostage begins to identify with her captor and takes on “his point of view.” Arguably, our Liberals have felt hostages to the world’s hostility and have developed the Stockholm Syndrome as a psychological defense mechanism.

Another candidate is the familiar Religious Mania. Yes, I know that Liberals don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean they can’t suffer from Religious Mania. One part of such mania is a pre-occupation with one’s own sinfulness. Mea culpa, I am guilty, I am a sinful creature (as are all of my fellows!), blah, blah, blah.

There may be other candidates. Is simple stupidity a psychological disorder these days? I’m sure it is, for just about every state of human character has been identified in the disorder industry as some kind of defect. But while I have a healthy skepticism with regard to this industry, I do believe that there really are crazinesses, and that modern Liberalism is one of them. Therefore, we should add another diagnostic category: LGD, or Liberal Guilt Disorder.

To be sure, feeling guilty is not of itself necessarily a form of craziness. However, it does become crazy when what one is feeling guilty about is something far remote from oneself. Slavery was repealed on Jan 1, 1863, roughly 150 years ago. I’ll guess that none of our guilty liberals have actually owned slaves, though a lot of them are happy to pay slave wages to Mexican nannies and gardeners.  Even crazier is the fact that many of these Liberals are actually immigrants to the country and did not even have dirty-handed ancestors involved in the slave trade.

And it is true that WW II was closer to us in time, and that some of the Allied combatants are still alive, but that brings us closer to another reason for the craziness.  Retaliating against an enemy who respects no Western notions of decent behavior is hardly a prima facie instance of evil. The insistence on being “better” than they are is a bullshit insanity for which we can thank Socrates, who imposed on Western history the notion that “preserving the goodness of our soul” is more important than staying alive. Once an antagonist has gotten one to believe this mushy tripe, he is in a strong position to win. Sometimes, the moral high ground makes the best target from the air. “We mustn’t sink to their level,” we hear from the Left. This mealy-mouthed pap is either disingenuous or the symptom of a serious mental disorder.

We know that we are dealing with a nut when he keeps repeating “Nagasaki, Hiroshima” and never mentions Pearl Harbor, The Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, the butcheries in Manchuria, the strafing of Shanghai, and so on, and so on.; when he keeps repeating “Internment Camps,” but never mentions German Concentration Camps. Self defense, for these wackos, is always “disproportionate.” Right now, we were told in a Newsweek  magazine article that the America “overreacted” to the twin-towers attack. And, no matter what the provocation, whatever Israel does in its defense is, by Western Liberal eyes, inevitably “disproportionate.”

We must recognize that modern Liberalism is not actually a political philosophy; it is a symptom of a mental disturbance.  It is characterized by idees fixe, by lack of proportionality, by irrational rages, and, most damaging of all, by an inability to recognize and appropriately react to aggression. Do Liberals have a narrative? Yes. Is it internally consistent? Barely. But both of these facts are true of schizophrenics as well.

What America and the West needs these days is a way of dealing therapeutically with an epidemic illness, a kind of mass psychosis.

We must learn to deal with LGD!

 

#79: Liberalism, Pseudo-Science, and the Master Plan

September 8, 2010

I.

I’ve argued that contemporary Liberals are the descendants of 18th C Rationalists (by way of the early 20th c Progressives); that like the Rationalists they define themselves by reference to reason and science; that this identification gives them a sense of superiority over the common man they could not otherwise hope to acquire; and that they embrace counter-intuitive doctrines eagerly, as evidence of their superiority.

All of this should be puzzling, since genuine science is not inherently biased towards the counter-intuitive. That scientific truth is counter-intuitive is a belief that was encouraged by some of the early popularisers of the physical sciences. I think, though, that the apparent plausibility­­ of the belief is most likely derived from the fact that genuine science often deals with facts that are not directly perceivable, such as  sub-molecular events and processes or field phenomena. This should not really count towards their being counter-intuitive, since most people really have no intuitions at all concerning them. It is true that when early researchers began to think about the microscopic world, they did imagine it to be very much like the macroscopic one, just smaller, but these were not the “intuitions” of the common man, just the first groping scientific hypotheses of a nascent science.­­­

Modern Liberalism is actually not “scientific” at all; it is, rather, “scientistic.” I may be responsible for coining this term, but, in any case, what I mean by it is “just mimicking science” as opposed to “satisfying the demands of scientific method.” Scientistic theories are characterised by having the trappings of science, but none of the substance. Some have argued that Freud’s theories are “scientistic” in just this sense. Most of what Universities have come to call the “social” sciences are “scientistic” rather than “scientific”; just calling something a science does not suffice to make it one. Calling the rituals of primitive tribes “the magic sciences” does not transform them from hopping, gibbering juju into genuine sciences anymore than adding statistical formulae to them does.

In fact, scientific method is governed precisely by the intuitive, for which another more common name is “the probable.” The medical diagnostic aphorism, “When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don’t think zebras (think horses),” is an expression of just this scientific commitment: begin with the most probable. In general, science has embraced all the many variants of the philosopher’s principle known as “Ockham’s Razor,” named after its originator, William of Ockham (ca.1288-1348). The original principle was that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,” which meant that when one is trying to explain phenomena, one should only assume the smallest number of unseen entities necessary for the explanation. In more recent times, people have interpreted the principle to mean: use the simplest explanation. I don’t want to suggest that what is meant by “simple” is itself a simple matter, but only that science is, in general, methodologically biased in the direction of the simple, however we might wind up defining that. But, further, that one of the strongest candidates for simplest is most probable.

The new science of the 18th century was extremely optimistic. The philosophes, the French intellectual dilettantes of the time were convinced that human reason in the form of science could, and would, resolve all human problems. Science was the new authority, capturing the educated public’s confidence and loyalty in the way in which Christianity once had it, but was increasingly losing. What this meant, in practice, was that science became the new marketing ploy; casting your product in a “scientific” or scientistic light vastly improved its chances of success. This inclination is nowhere more visible than in the later 19th c when Karl Marx sought to cast his new communism” as a scientific theory. But it was not “scientific,” it was “scientistic.”

Thus, I have to refine the thesis that modern Liberals are the biological children of the Enlightenment; they are rather the adoptive children. Modern physical and life-scientists are the biological children, while the “social” scientists are the adoptive ones. I admit that the analogy suffers mildly from the fact that in this case, it is the children who adopted the parents, rather than the other way around.  Nonetheless, those children have chosen to mimic their parents and given themselves a superficial resemblance to their non-biological forebears.

In general, I’m not given to quoting people for whom I have contempt, but it seems impossible here not to paraphrase Obama. Speaking of the adoptive children of the Enlightenment, one could say that they thought that Christianity had failed them in many ways “and it’s not surprising, then, they got bitter, and now they still cling to big government or pseudo-science or antipathy to ‘common’ people who aren’t like them or anti-nationalist sentiment or anti-free-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” And make no mistake about it: Liberals are now an embattled population under siege, their God has now failed them and they are almost literally clinging to the failed axioms of their faith.

There are two defining characteristics of scientistic Liberalism. The first is  the form of its discourse, which is that of either professional or popular science. In particular, it loves to couch its theories and doctrines in the language of statistics. Liberals love to cite numbers just as Mediaeval Bishops loved to intone Latin.

The second defining feature is the compulsion towards the counter-intuitive. Liberals shun the obvious with the same horror as the French shun soap. While genuine science may embrace the counter-intuitive where data and method demands it (in quantum physics, for example), it only does so where the situation forces the embrace. The Liberal embraces any counter-intuitive creed, as long as it is scientistically couched. But why does he do this?

I suspect that it is because embracing the counter-intuitive is his demonstration of his superiority. Each time the Liberal espouses an unpopular view, he demonstrates that he, unlike the majority, is not fooled by the obvious; he, the Liberal, has superior intelligence and insight that enables him to penetrate beneath the misleading surface veneer to the remarkable counter-intuitive truth beneath.

The Liberal fancies himself a seer, a Gnostic, one of the intellectually and morally advanced people of the earth who have a special gift and a special responsibility of tending to the welfare of the ignorant unwashed masses (and I don’t mean only the French!).

II

The old fashioned heartland American, with his Christian faith, his patriotism, his self-reliance, his literal reading of the Constitution, and his guns may not have the verbal skills with which to defend his world-view, but that doesn’t matter to him because he doesn’t feel the need to defend it. His views are not vulnerable simply because they are an expression of his culture, of who he is. This makes the modern Liberal crazy and contemptuous because he himself has no similar foundation. He experiences the heartland American with a mixture of fear and secret envy. The rage, contempt, and insult that comes from him is nothing other than fear and envy.

The Liberal needs “reason” and pseudo-science for the defense of his positions precisely because his positions are not foundational, because his positions do not emerge from who he is. And the fear and envy result from his secret recognition of the inability of his “reasoning” and pseudo-science to accomplish what the heartland American has simply by his birthright. The modern Liberal suffers from what some sociologists have called anomie, the state of “normlessness” or being without values or a culture.

Now, the word “ethnic” has been appropriated for application only to so-called “minority” or immigrant populations, but all it originally meant was “pertaining to culture.” Since the heartland American most definitely has a specific, definable culture, I think it fair that we introduce a new technical term, something that Liberals love to do, the term “ethnophobe.” Liberals really are ethnophobes. Of course, they are not generally ethnophobes, since they compulsively collect ethnic populations they can patronize and use politically. Liberals are only ethnophobic with respect to autonomous and independent ethnic populations. But what is important to see here is that their ethonophobia is a direct consequence of their anomie.

One can have one’s culture taken from one or one can come to lose it. Perhaps the best example of the former is that of the Canadian aboriginals who were taken from their parents and placed into the residential schools. Finding an example of the second is both more difficult and more interesting. I suggest that the Western loss of a cultural foundation was a result of the European Enlightenment, when the Judeo-Christian values were replaced by science, which was not a set of values, but only a method.

A literate population expresses its discomfort with anomie differently than a pre-literate one. We know the awful consequences for the residential school children, they have been well documented. The literate Europeans expressed their malaise with anomie in the writings of the atheistic Existentialists. Nothing more is meant by Nietzsche, when he writes that “God is dead,” than that the automatic authority of Judeo-Christian morality has ceased to exist. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov says at roughly the same time, “If there is no God, then anything is permitted.” But all that is meant by “there is a God,” here, is that people uncritically and automatically operate on the basis of Judeo-Christian values.

One way of looking at what is happening today is as a “clash of civilizations.” Many have objected to this way of putting it on purely political grounds: “This implies that we are at war with the whole of Islam.” Of course, it doesn’t, but I would avoid this phrase simply because I suspect that it doesn’t penetrate to the root of the matter.

What is going in, I think, is rather a war between those groups with strongly internalized cultural identities and those with none. On the one hand, you find Evangelical Christians, devout Muslims, and Orthodox Jews. The fact that these often hate and attack each other on doctrinal grounds does not neutralize the fact that they are on the same side.

On the other hand, you find socialists of various stripes desperately attempting to defend their policies by appeal to specious “reasonings” and pseudo-science.

The “big” war, then, is between those who have an internalized value system that lies beyond “reasoning,” on the one hand, and those who suffer from an anomie that expresses itself as an ethnophobia directed at the first population, on the other.

Liberalism is a war directed against all populations that have a cultural identity and seek to preserve it. Do not be fooled by Liberalism’s embrace of “multi-culturalism,” this is no more than a transitional step, no more to be trusted than Lenin’s coziness with the Kaiser’s Germany, no more than Stalin’s wooing of Western “intellectuals.” The embrace of immigrant ethnic groups in the U.S.A. and Europe is no more than one more tactic in bringing the native ethnics to their knees.

 

#78: Statesmanship

August 29, 2010

There is a simplistic political theory lurking just below the surface of our current Left-wing punditry, and it goes something like this …

The most fundamental and powerful human drive is greed. Yes, there may well be, as Hume argued, “… 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,” but even if there is, it is vastly overmatched by greed. And it is greed that equally fuels the passions of the two contending political poles of Left and Free Enterprise. On the Left, it is greed for the wealth of others, and on the Free Enterprise, it is greed for the retention and acquisition of personal wealth. It may be argued that one or the other is morally more defensible, but the bottom line is that of getting and retaining wealth, either others’ or one’s own.

This natural drive, together with innate inclinations to tribalism and the incitement of the mass media, inevitably polarize populations into positions more extreme and rigid than well serve the public good. Clearly, radical Socialism is a bust, but, equally, utterly unregulated Free Enterprise also leads to socially undesirable consequences. This poses an inevitable and unavoidable problem for the statesman.

A sincere statesman is motivated by the desire to improve the condition of his country. Yet, to the extent that this objective requires moderating the expectations of both populations in the electorate, it would seem that he must inevitably lose the support of the citizenry in general. In effect, the statesman who wants to do a good job is forced to alienate both of the contending populations under him.

The conclusion drawn from this story is that a president who fails to satisfy both of the factions in his country, does so only because he is attempting to act in the best interests of his country.

This is a false inference for at least two reasons.

The first one is this. While a president might well alienate both factions of the citizenry by selecting only what is best from both of their positions, rejecting what is bad, he equally might alienate them by selecting only what is worst in both of their positions, rejecting what is best.

A less consistent bad president might even rather randomly mix the bad with the good from both factions, revealing absolutely no clear objective to anyone and thereby still alienating the mass of voters.

The second one is this. The theory sketched above takes no account of the leadership expected of a president.

Of course, a president may have to take steps unpopular on one side or the other. This is a given. But the successful statesman is able to use the force of his personality and the force of his office to persuade his citizenry of the rightness of his actions. The ability of president to bring his citizenry along on his plans is the actual test of the statesman, not solely his ability to formulate a practical and prudent plan for his people.

The current president of the U.S. fails on both of the above counts. His unpopularity, contrary to the spin of liberal pundits, is not due to his having taken the best of both sides and rejected the worst. His unpopularity is rather due to his having been the “less consistent bad president,” the one who “randomly mixes the bad with the good from both factions, revealing absolutely no clear objective to anyone.”

But, in addition, he has also failed on the count of leadership. Having initiated policies and actions unpopular to both the fronts within the country, he has proven almost stunningly incompetent at persuading any contingent within the country that he is doing the right thing. The people are rapidly becoming convinced now that their situation is worse than they had imagined. They initially thought that they were badly led.

They are becoming convinced that they are not being led at all.

 

#77: Falsifiability and Historical Counter-factuals

August 26, 2010

All the pundits agree that high unemployment is the single most serious obstacle to the Democrat Party in the upcoming November elections. The standard scripted spin on this from the Democrat side is the argument that “things would have been immeasurably worse” had the Obama regime not spent the astronomically large amounts of money that it did. This claim is what philosophers call a “historical counter-factual” and the regime’s making it provides us with what Obama would call a “teachable moment.”

Students of history are regularly warned against these “historical counter-factuals” which are a species of “contrary-to-fact conditionals.” Karl Popper is at least as famous for his “Falsifiability Principle” as he is for taking on Plato and Marx. Popper’s principle states that a proposition is scientifically acceptable if and only if it is susceptible to empirical falsification. In intuitively simpler terms, it holds that we must be able to imagine real-world circumstances which would make a proposition false, if and if only that proposition is to be admitted to scientific inquiry. Please note: the principle only requires that we know what circumstances would make a proposition false, not that it be false. Since the problem with historical counter-factuals is that they are in principle unfalsifiable, they fall afoul of Popper’s Principle.

All of this must be looked at in the context of the early 20th c. philosophy called “Logical Positivism” and its “criterion of empirical verifiability.” These philosophers, using science as their foundation, were aggressively bent on erasing traditional philosophies as meaningless bafflegab. In order to do this, they needed a test for the meaningfulness of a proposition or sentence. Their candidate for such a test was empirical verifiability. That is, they argued that a given proposition has meaning if and only if it is capable of being empirically verified. But, unfortunately, this was a test that no proposition could pass. “Verification” means being shown to be true. But no amount of confirming observation can show a proposition to be true, the best that it can do is increase the probability that the proposition is true. The reason for this is that as long as the number of observations falls short of the infinite, there always remains the possibility that observations not yet made will go against the proposition. But even if we change the test to confirmation as opposed to verification, there will be questionable propositions that will pass the test. And, in addition, the claim that “unverifiable” propositions are “meaningless” is a hard sell. On the one hand, consider the following example:

Steel surfaces are not hard at all, they only become hard in direct proportion to how hard we press on them.

Now it should be clear that every experiment we conduct will turn out to confirm this proposition. But, at the same time, it should be equally clear that there is something wrong with it that is not caught by the requirement of empirical confirmability.

On the other hand, both verifiability and confirmability equally would toss out such statements as “There are no supernatural entities” as meaningless, not to mention all statements attributing values to acts, men, or objects. But, in addition, note that it also makes meaningless such sentences as:

Had Hitler not chosen to open the eastern front, he would have won the war.

This is an example of a historical counter-factual. What sort of empirical evidence could be adduced to verify or confirm it? Is it really true, though, that this sentence is meaningless? Do we not understand it? This is not a desirable outcome.

Popper avoids such problems by dropping the challenge to meaningfulness (shifting to scientific acceptability) and by making the test Falsifiability rather than either verifiability or confirmability.

The huge benefit of the latter move is that it only takes a single contrary observation to falsify a proposition, while it takes an infinite number to verify one and a very large number to confirm one. Further, any proposition that is falsifiable is also by that token confirmable.

Now historical counter-factuals are easy to identify structurally. They are always conditionals (if…then statements) and they are always in the subjunctive mood (would, had). These sentences make claims about outcomes or results in other worlds than the real one; they change something about the real world, and then propose to tell you what the consequence of that change is in their fictitious world. Thus, change the real history in which Hitler did attack Russia to a fictitious history in which he did not; the narrative immediately stops being a history at all and becomes instead a historical novel. But in a novel anything is possible and what happens is determined not by facts but rather by the virtually unlimited imagination of the author.

Once we give up our commitment to working only with facts by even a single exception, we have left the domain of Falsifiability. Since we are no longer submitting ourselves to the control of reality, how can there be anything at all like evidence any more? Evidence comes from observations of the real world and applies only to the real world. Once we have left the real world, observations no longer have authority.

You might wish to argue that, after all, you are only interested in making a single little change in the gigantic set of facts that makes up world history, but is it really possible to make only a single change? When we assume, contrary to fact, that Hitler did not attack Russia, we are no longer assuming the real Hitler. We are assuming a different Hitler entirely. But who, exactly, is this new Hitler? What is altered in his mind, in his personality, to make him avoid an Eastern Front? Were there perhaps contrary-to-fact events you want to assume that changed his mind? In which case you have gone beyond a single little fact. But even if you are going to put it all down to just a different Hitler, surely there still had to be different facts in your history that led to the existence of this different Hitler. And, further, once your Hitler decided to not attack Russia, how do you know that he would have won the war?

Once you change a fact in history, you put yourself into the position of any person today who is trying to predict the future. How successful are we today in predicting the outcomes of wars, of economic changes, of climatic changes, of cultural changes, of technological changes? We are very unsuccessful, and we are unsuccessful because of the innumerable interacting causes, impossible to even specify, much less to monitor. The counter-factual Hitler claim is as good or as bad as any claim today about the outcome of the Afghanistan war, neither claim is susceptible of either falsification or confirmation.

“Things would have been immeasurably worse had we not spent the money” is a historical counter-factual. It cannot be confirmed, it cannot be falsified, it should never enter the field of political discourse. It is, further, a strategically bad talking point for the Democrats, since it opens the door for historical counter-factuals on the other side.

I just heard Steve Forbes being interviewed on the television. His criticism of the Obama regime was interesting. He said, “had Obama not implemented his various policies and spent all that money, the economy would now be booming.”

What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Once we open the Pandora’s box of counter-factuals, they flood out into the world, and while they are none of them capable of falsification or confirmation, right now the ones coming from the free-market spinners are far more likely to be believed and to be influential.